Marginalized Voices, Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Community Media: A Complexity Framework for Community-Engaged Research in Contentious Times

Amid rising authoritarianism, the criminalization of dissent, and the erasure of indigenous expertise from policy discourse, this paper examines community-engaged research as critical public scholarship through the Deccan Development Society’s (DDS) four-decade-plus collaboration with approximately 5000 Dalit and indigenous women farmers in Telangana, India. Against a backdrop of shrinking civic space and technocratic development agendas that delegitimize marginalized knowledge, DDS women’s sanghams have consolidated village-level assemblies into organs of local governance that claim autonomy over land, seed, food, and knowledge—positioning marginalized women as producers of evidence and theory rather than mere data sources. Drawing on complexity theory and participatory action research (PAR), this paper theorizes a community-based inquiry model where marginalized women operate as co-researchers, knowledge producers, and media creators within an emergent system characterized by distributed agency and non-hierarchical information flows. The paper interrogates key methodological, ethical, and political dynamics of critical community-based inquiry for justice and animates the concept of “autonomy as counter-policy” as a contribution to engaged scholarship and epistemic justice.