The Pedagogy of Pujarini On Babasaheb's birthday, a note on the only literacy that matters: the literacy of our own investment in caste. A Savarna influencer's "media literacy" reels against a rural Bengali creator, read step by step, turn out to be an unintentional master class in caste, gatekeeping, and the feudalism at the heart of Internet 5.0 in India. I made myself watch every single one of Aishwarya Subramanyam's Instagram reels on Pujarini Pradhan. All of them. Twice, in some cases, because I wanted to be sure I was not being uncharitable. I was not. What Aishwarya — who posts as @otherwarya and has built a tidy following as an "internet-appointed truth speaker," to borrow a phrase from a glossy profile of her — calls "media literacy" is not media literacy. It is the sound of Savarna anxiety dressed in the borrowed vocabulary of critical theory, performed for an audience that has been trained to mistake vocabulary for analysis. ...
This blog offers Mohan Dutta's reflections on the theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach, examining the interplays among culture, communication and marginalisation. It also explores resistance, the ways in which communities at the margins challenge structures. Writings on the blog are updated to reflect the organic analysis of structure and agency. These analyses are offered on a personal capacity and do not reflect the views of Prof. Dutta's employer.