Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Authoritarian capitalism, the collection of authoritarian techniques of consolidating power and control in the hands of the ruling class in order to serve the hegemonic interests of capital, is in its basic character bad for human health and wellbeing (one certainly does not need a pandemic to support this claim empirically, more on this in a later blog post). Paradoxically, authoritarian capitalism is often sold by the ruling global capitalist class as the epitome of efficient and clean governance. Transnational media, driven by the ideology of profiteering and owned by the transnational capitalists heavily invested in the ongoing expansion of the reach of global capital, hold up authoritarian capital as the mecca of good governance. Transnational organizations such as the various arms of the United Nations (UN, from World Bank to World Health Organization), having been thoroughly co-opted into the infrastructures of global capital over the last three decades, prop up exemplars of au

The Jallianwala bagh masaacre The racist effects of White supremacy we witness across the globe today is supported by the ideology of Whiteness that takes as normative White constructions of organizing societies that are historically intertwined with the processes of othering, the active production of the other as the margins. The universality of norms propped up by Whiteness is tied to the ongoing erasure and marginalization of colonized peoples, slaves, and communities of colour exhumed from their spaces of livelihood by White colonizing processes. Whiteness and its normative ideals are therefore inherently racist. Consider for instance White notions of justice. The appearance of these notions of justice on the colonial register takes place alongside the gruesome excesses of colonization. Consider for instance the colonial atrocities witnessed in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, also referred to as the Amritsar massacre in 1919. A crowd of unarmed Indians had gathered at the Jallianw

The COVID-19 Pandemic and Outbreak Inequalities: Migrants in the Margins Special Issue: American Behavioral Scientist Edited by: Satveer Kaur-Gill and Mohan J. Dutta ( Mohan Dutta ) Dear colleagues, American Behavioral Scientist is hosting a special issue on the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on migrants in the margins. We are calling for abstracts by authors studying outbreak inequalities among precarious migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic. For this journal issue, we are seeking data specific articles theorizing outbreak inequalities studied by migration scholars, health communication scholars, political communication scholars, and medical anthropologists from across the globe. Migrant struggles at the margins during the COVID-19 pandemic amid global lockdowns rendered visible the amplified migrant health disparities. Precarious migrants were/are afflicted disproportionately during the COVID-19 crisis in countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia, India, China,

Raksha Mahtani Raksha Mahtani is currently a teaching assistant in Communications and New Media. Before this, she served as a Research Assistant at the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) and at the Asia Research Institute (ARI). Raksha’s work on academic-activist collaborations explores the ways in which social impact can be theorized, measured, and evaluated. 1.       Please share with us your CNM journey. You know, I first came to CNM in 2008, during my sabbatical from Purdue University. This was a way for Debalina and I to be together for the first time as a family in the same space because of the US immigration laws that meant that she had to wait before migrating to the US. Then head Milagros Rivera was building a department that was truly inter-disciplinary, bringing together computing scientists, interactive media designers, artists, social scientists and humanities scholars to generate a creative space for conversati