Borderlands: Culture, health and resistance

"Borderlands are folded over and crossed again, and recrossed. The membranes of the border are of varying porosities, closures and openings, subversions and states of exception, checkpoints and circumventions, surveillances and (in)securities, orders and disorders, fears and displacements, with the Real gazing back from holes in the defences." (Fischer, 2008). This could be a snapshot from a war zone or from an emergency room of the Home hospital. Borderlands are also the places where resistance is enacted.

Dutta (2008) posits that resistance is intrinsically communicative as it communicates certain meaning about social structure. It could be an organizational structure too as Granzow and Theberge (2009) find in their investigation of workers experienced meaningful participation in the participatory project and some of the main barriers to worker participation. Dutta-Bergman (2004a, 2004b), defines resistance as a process of enacting agency in opposition to the structures that constrain the access to basic resources of life, including the fundamental resources of healthcare. As we have seen from the readings and also as Dutta articulates, "resistance is practiced both at the micro-level, through the day-to-day practices of the cultural participants as they engage with various avenues of health care delivery and at the macro level, through the questioning of the broader structures that limit the basic access to resources." Basu and Dutta (2009) investigate and document this ability of the Commercial sex workers of Calcutta to resist the dominant social structures. They raise an important question too in their limitations section of the importance of looking for subaltern resistance within the subalterns!!

Resistance again is visible in Mallory's (2000) study on survival sex. Mallory noted that survival sex exposed women to violence, drug use, sexually transmitted infections, and HIV. She through her thematic analysis posited that mitigating these risks is a process of awakening in which women reconstruct risk and survival and make changes in their behavior. Mallory does not mention resistance but her account foregrounds it and is located in the resistive acts of her participants. The resistive acts were much more articulated in Wheatley's (2005) study of the patients at the cardiac rehabilitation clinic. Wheatley's account shows how clients adhere to but also challenge agendas of rehabilitation. The patients by, transgressing, complaining about, and clowning despite the rules and regimens of the clinic, actively create and negotiate the social world of the clinic. Martyn and Hustchinson (2001) foregrounded the resistive acts of the low income African American adolescents who were the recipients of negative social-psychological scripts and which put them at risk for poverty and early childbearing. As the authors write, "the “tough girls” struggled to rewrite these scripts by recognizing their negativity, being disenchanted with the scripts, determining to be different, and creating better lives." Their resistance could lead them to a better place, a better life.

As Dutta (2008) writes, forms of resistance are introduced by the stakeholders from within the culture with the goal of altering the cultural practices and the impetus of change comes from within through the articulation of alternative possibilities by unsatisfied members of the communities. Culture serves both as a site of resistance and as a target of resistive strategies. There is a need of more scholarship looking at how resistance leads to social change.

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems with w...

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor On the architecture of the Aotearoa culture-war machine, and the danger it poses to a democracy heading into 2026 There is a particular cadence to the afternoon on which the career of a senior Māori journalist at TVNZ is finished. It is unhurried. It begins with a tweet — in this case, a single image of a typed statement, posted by Maiki Sherman, the now-former political editor of TVNZ, on the afternoon of Friday, 8 May 2026, announcing that she had parted ways with the broadcaster. The post was terse, dignified, and final. As RNZ later reported , Sherman wrote that the scrutiny of the previous week had placed enormous pressure on her and rendered her role "untenable." The first wahine Māori to lead a major broadcaster's political team was gone. The story that finished her had not, ten days earlier, existed in any newspaper, on any wire, on any website you would consider mai...

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