Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

CARE community researchers and organizers co-creating a food distribution system amidst COVID-19 The culture-centered approach (CCA) lives in, breathes from, struggles through the skin.  We have to be willing to see and name our complicities with the structures, as well as struggle through in dismantling these structures if we care about transformation.  Without this willingness to see one's complicity and the commitment to work to dismantle it, our critical articulations reproduce the colonizing logics of the structures. Any theorizing of the CCA therefore has to work by grappling with what it is to work of/from/with/in/through the skin.  To work of/from/with/in/through the skin is to have the politics of one's skin embedded within the struggle for structural transformation. To work of/from/with/in/through the skin is to commit to ameliorating the tragedies of life that are inflected daily on the margins. Without the "skin in the transformation," the theorizing work

  One of the most powerful tropes of neoliberal governmentality is happiness.  Individualizing the anxiety, anguish, and deep sense of insecurity that are the byproducts of five decades of relentless neoliberal transformations, the owners of transnational capital and the enabling structures of the state proselytize us into happy subjects who see inequality, poverty, precarity, and struggles as personal failures. The prescription then is to turn these personal failures into successes in the competitive neoliberal order.  To succeed in the marketplace, one must first and foremost be happy. One must learn to find joy and be joyful. One must be self-fulfilled so he/she can find fulfillment in the mechanisms of the market. Any failure to attain happiness, joyfulness, and a state of self-fulfillment is a personal failure.  An entire industry of self-help, pop psychology, meditation, and new age spiritualism has propped up to hold us up to this state of happiness. This cluster of positive emo