ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the culture-centered approach in the light of the dominant public health communication paradigm. The culture-centered approach highlights the participation and voices of community members in the construction of health meanings. It centralizes organic participation and highlights the recognition and respect for subaltern agency. Drawing from Subaltern Studies, the culture-centered approach articulates the ways in which subaltern groups resist structural constraints and challenge existing cultural and contextual frames. The culture-centered approach constructs resistance as a continually transformative communicative process that emerges and evolves in relationship to structure. Resistance is constituted in the remembering of public health communication efforts that have been framed in dominant discourses as instruments of modernity. Discourses of modernity and the success of top-down interventions are interrupted by the voices of the subaltern, re-reading the scripts of public health interventions in inverse.
