Empowering Voice Poor Through Participatory Rural Communication Appraisal (PRCA): Analyzing Situation and Promoting Infant Feeding Health Literacy

Communicative inequality and voice poverty constitute and reinforce health disparities. This research aims to invert the erasure of Bhuiyan and Paswan, the marginalized communities of northern India (that have been erased from the mainstream communicative spaces), by co-creating platforms of listening. Drawing from the Culture Centered Approach (CCA), this study explores the community's articulation of IYCF (Infant and Young Child feeding) health literacy to highlight the interplay between the structure, culture, and agency in creating the dominant discursive spaces and finding avenues for marginalized voices to acquire autonomy. We have adopted Participatory Rural Communication Appraisal (PRCA) as our research methodology to explore the differences in dominant and communities' perceptions of IYCF health literacy and investigate how the marginalized communities empower themselves when their voices are restored through congenial dialogic-democratic spaces. For this purpose, a preliminary assessment was carried out by analyzing the secondary sources and interviewing officials- government and NGO (pre-PRCA) followed by participatory sessions with the villagers, in-depth interviews with the key respondents, and a baseline survey of key interaction groups (during PRCA) in the Siadih village, Gaya, India. A participatory group, with members of the marginalized communities, was formed for discussion, intervention, and evaluation (post-PRCA). The findings revealed that the communities' perceptions of IYCF health literacy widely differ from dominant perspectives. The current study extends CCA to develop a community-driven, context-specific communication intervention for IYCF within marginalized communities in the global south.