(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Conference on Media & Mass Communication Osaka, Japan
calendar, provides a socio-cultural context to the spiritual life of the members of the
Mirpuri community, who largely live in clusters in and around the Forest Fields area
of Nottingham. The study examines how people can fight social exclusion by drawing
support from their cultural practices and experiences, looking specifically at their
efforts to address the issues emanating from the inequalities in health which
characterise the life in many deprived areas of the post industrialized cities in the UK.
The study specifically chronicles a month-long health education campaign engaging
the social aspects of life with the spiritual to develop a unique health promotion
programme. The Health Education Awareness Project (HEAP) run on Radio Ramzan
is delivered within a religious ethos to make the messages culturally sensitive and
socially relevant to the listeners of this radio station. The members of the Muslim
communities enter into debates and discussions about their position and situation to
develop initiatives for empowerment through critical reflection and collective action.
The HEAP project develops a dynamic partnership between the statutory and
community organisations within a familiar environment on the one hand, and on the
other uses local resources and voices to bring proximity and legitimacy to the health
promotion programmes. In this process, the legitimization of subjectivity becomes
epistemologically and methodologically critical, as marginalized voices and
experiences enter into the research.
This approach of ‘privileging’ the experiences, raising awareness and conceptualising
multiplicity of subject positions through ‘creolised insights’, is influenced by a
number of critical, emancipatory and liberation theology perspectives (Harding, 1998,
Hill, 2000; Brah, 1992; Davis 1993; Freire, 1972). Such a framework also share
epistemological plurality with many contemporary social and political movements
like women’s, environment, ‘Third World’, human rights, anti-racism, anti-capitalism
and anti-war campaigns which emphasize emancipation from all levels of oppression
and inequalities.
The complex relationship between the social condition, geographic location and the
ethnic and racial background is well established (Townsend, 1979; Power and Wilson,
2000; Hardill et al., 2001; Wilkinson, 1996; Macpherson, 1999). The situation is
further complicated by the essentialized and unproblematic conceptualization of the
community that suppresses the diversity of human life and brackets people together
into fixed categories (Eade, 1989; Shaw, 1988, Shah, 1998). So an important part of
the process of restoring people’s knowledge and experience is to challenge the fixed
notion of community, and to develop a sustained critique of Western knowledge and
institutions for dismissing the worldviews of the victims of the process of
modernisation.
The paper draws parallels between the discourses of developmentalism and social
exclusions to illustrate the influence of Western knowledge and its socio-scientific
principles, especially that of modernisation as a process and ideology in constructing
the ‘Third World’ and the inner city. The assumed link between the ‘beneficiaries’ of
aid in the East and the welfare benefits in the West brings the concept of ‘Third
World’ closer to the construct of the inner city where generations of immigrant
communities are caught up in a vicious circle of disadvantage and discrimination. The
study examines how power can shift from institutions and structures to ‘individuals
and communities’ (Wang and Dissanayake, 1984a; Melkote and Steeves 2001).
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