Skip to main content

Emancipatory Ideal of CCA and Feminism


In this blog I want to draw parallels in the ethnographic inquiry as a methodology used in feminist research and that used for CCA research.

Women’s Studies programs in the academes emerged from women’s movements outside of academe. ‘Feminism’ itself was and is, first and foremost, activism, and then an academic enterprise. Starting with the movements for voting rights for women, and moving to ‘sisterhood’ and collectivity, and sexual rights over own bodies, to the ‘third wave’ feminism that seems to emphasize women as individuals rather than as a unified group, feminism and feminist scholarship has moved hand-in-hand. Feminism as an academic enterprise began with questioning the ‘objective’ inquiries often undertaken by male sociologists in the working sites that employed men. Feminist scholarship took women scholars to the field sites that were populated by women, such as domestic spaces. They foregrounded the knowledges that women possessed, and attempted to give what was understood as ‘mundane’ and the ‘everyday’, the ‘ordinary’, the status of valid knowledge.     

CCA also believes in the same principles in its inquiry. Its goal is to foreground the voices that are excluded and erased from the dominant discourses. It aims to give new insights into the phenomena it studies by listening to the powerless. In the process, it hopes to not only contribute to academic knowledge that often misses out on the deep insights of the marginalized populations, but also enacts an oppositional politics within the academe by doing so. It challenges some of the taken-for-granted ways of knowing within the academe. It professes bodily involvement in the field; speaking to the people on the margins, and being reflexive about the power relations at all phases of research, not only at the level of analysis but also at the level of entering the field as a researcher conducting inquiry into the lives of the researched. Finally CCA is primarily an activist methodology that seeks to lay bare the unjust relations of power.   

From this short reflection on the feminist and CCA methodologies of doing Social Science research, I am prompted to draw a rather obvious parallel that both the methodologies are rooted in Marxism. For both, the research inquiry is emancipatory. In the present times, the enemies for both, CCA and feminism, are the same – neoliberal, right-wing ideologies that impose and maintain oppressive structures over the populations that each of the methodologies works for. I would like to close this blogpost with one question then. Since CCA professes ethnographic approach to research, how do we differentiate ethnographic inquiry for a CCA project and ethnographic inquiry for a feminist project?


Popular posts from this blog

Zionist hate mongering, the race/terror trope, and the Free Speech Union: Part 1

March 15, 2019. It was a day of terror. Unleashed by a white supremacist far-right terrorist. Driven by hate for brown people. Driven by Islamophobic hate. Earlier in the day, I had come across a hate-based hit piece targeting me, alongside other academics, the University of Auckland academic Professor Nicholas Rowe , Professor Richard Jackson at Otago University, Professor Kevin P Clements at Otago University, Dr. Rose Martin from University of Auckland and Dr. Nigel Parsons at Massey University.  Titled, "More extremists in New Zealand Universities," the article threw in the labels "terror sympathisers" and "extremist views." Written by one David Cumin and hosted on the website of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, the article sought to create outrage that academics critical of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid are actually employed by universities in New Zealand. Figure 1: The web post written by David Cumin on the site of Israel Institute
Read more

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 wit
Read more

Disinformation, Zionist propaganda, and free speech: Far right cancel culture

Thursday October 12, 2023. The settler colonial occupation had unleashed its infrastructure of violence over the Palestinian people over a period of five days. Gaza was being indiscriminately bombarded, with mass civilian casualties that Amnesty International noted " must be investigated as war crimes ." At 3:32 p.m., my office phone rang. I was occupied and the call went to the voicemail. "Dutta, you are a murderous, f***ing, racist c***. Go back to where you belong...I will see to your termination in New Zealand." A couple of hours before that, an email had gone out from the Zionist Dane Giraud to the email listserv of the Free Speech Union, performed as a supposed apology for attacking my academic freedom. In the email, Giraud referred to my earlier b log post on the interlinkages between far-right Zionism, attacks on academic freedom, and the free speech union, noting how he had been enraged by the following statement on my blog: "I was therefore not surpri
Read more