Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

We weren't told on the itinerary of the field trip beforehand. Prof Mohan gave us more detail on it en route to Willing Hearts. Upon hearing a more in-depth summary of the day's activities, quite honestly my initial thoughts were this "I didn't take time off work to do some community service. Since when did I volunteer my services? Just what can I learn from this field trip? Seriously?" My skepticism was of course proven wrong, but I will touch more on that later. Upon reaching the site, we first helped in loading many food packets into the delivery van. There was an NUS alumni there to facilitate the planning and logistics. We somehow managed to cram all the food packets into the van. After that, we were brought up to Willing Heart's Soup Kitchen. I was quite stunned that they were actually quite organised there. The space was allocated accordingly to facilitate the kitchen operations. Right at the entrance, there was a packing station whereby volunteer

Before I start on my reflection, I believe its nice to give a disclaimer since my views have mostly been "unconventional" in nature, due to my childhood. Firstly, we were brought to CIDECO Industrial complex. #04-06 where Willing Hearts food pantry is situated at. I'm not going to mention about any form of "heart-warming scenes" for I felt none. To me, its seems like another nightmare of under-resourced / under-manpower-ed organisation trying to do its best (such as MINDS). Volunteers seen that day were plentiful indeed. However the key personnel that drives the operations are mostly middle-aged volunteers. (Like the one we managed to interviewed) The rest could be come-and-go volunteers with vested interest. Students MAY be CIP hours, where adults MAY be to make them feel better by giving back to society. Its an issue of personal resource allocation ( will touch on it in the conclusion ) Any operations have to be funded. To me, one large concern was the ren

The day at Willing Hearts started with a trip first down to the kitchens where we had a behind-the-scenes look at the preparation of food. It was a spectacular sight as we get to observe exactly how huge the operations are just so that beneficiaries will not go starving. The number of volunteers that are present is huge and it was heart-warming to know that students were also there to help out in the cause. As we talked to a few of the volunteers at Willing Hearts, we got to know more about the beneficiaries and the amount of help that they receive from others to continue their operations. With the new understanding in how the day-to-day operations are like, we helped to load up the packed food and headed out to help distribute the food. At each and every stop that we went to, it was hard to identify the people that required the food had it not been pointed out to us. These elderly were just every single one of us. There was nothing on them that identified them as those needing help.

It started with a visit to the kitchens, where the food is prepared, was done after the loading of the packed food. Volunteers aplenty, scent of freshly cooked food in the air. Mainly from school nearby, but a surprising number of CJC students. Walking into the kitchen, there is separation of the raw food preparation section and the cooking section, which was to be expected. The cooking section begins with the rice station followed by the cooking area for the rest of the dishes; vegetables, meat and fish. The packing station is the first thing seen when entering the food preparation area. Boarding the van after loading of the food and the visit to the kitchens, we headed to the first destination of food drop-off, Sims Drive, followed by 2 other drop-offs at Aljunied Crescent and Geylang Bahru. At the final stop a drop off 15 packets of food was made, getting down we started to distribute the food packets. Many of those that were receiving the food were elderly and the disabled; many

So I am not an Indian if I am critical of Modi and his version  of Hindutva as a form of governance. I am told I have too long been a subject to the propaganda machinery of the West. It must be all the years of US brainwashing and all the US media I have consumed. My familiarity with India, my Indian roots, and my connections with these roots I so deeply cherish easily become subjects of questioning when I express my anxieties about the discursive space in India that is in creasingly becoming constrained by the Hindutva camp.  The West is framed as being in opposition to the imaginations of a bold India that is set to launch on a bold trajectory of Modi growth, led by the bold leadership of Mr. Narendra Modi. There is limited or no room for critique.  Critique is seen as being reflective of a desire for the West (I am assuming as opposed to some Hinduized fetish of India). This framing of theWest versus India, although pretty powerful in its appeal to the decolonizing tr

My passport is an US passport. And I am an Indian. When in a taxi or in a gathering, I proudly share my identity as an Indian when asked about my roots. The part of my roots I am quietly proud of is the openness, syncretism, and vastness with which India accepts many worldviews, fosters spaces of differences, and thrives in the contradictions that are nurtured by these differences. These very contradictions of life, of worldviews, of ways of being come together to form the foundations of a space that is in every being committed to the ideals of diversity. This diversity of many ways of being that harmoniously live together is the spirit of secularism that is reflective of the India I love, remember, and cherish. I remember when in the US in the 1990s for my graduate education, and faced with the prospect of being proselytized by evangelicals, the ways in which my conversations would confuse the evangelicals. When I would tell them I believed every bit in the story of Jesus Chr

I am struck by the observation shared by one of our CARE team members while doing fieldwork. He shares his observation of a popular activist blogger talking to a migrant worker. The blogger, let's call him Ben, talks condescendingly to the worker, hurriedly collecting his story, recording it, and making notes to put up the story on his blog. The worker story fits nicely into the critique that he wants to offer of the violations of worker rights. He hardly spends ten minutes in jotting down the story before moving on to the next injured worker with the next story. Ben's attitude toward the migrant worker is a top-down attitude, one that reflects his colonial mentality. He has already predetermined what he wants to find. He has a conceptual map that he wants to lay on the life of the worker. He therefore picks and choses specific stories that fit within this predetermined framework. The worker becomes the story.  His body becomes the narrative account that fits into the

Global Media Journal  CALL FOR PAPERS Theme of Fall 2014 Issue Financialization, Communication, and New Imperialism Guest Editors: Mohan J. Dutta, National University of Singapore Mahuya Pal, University of South Florida The global financial crisis marks on one hand the ruptures in the universalized logic of neoliberal capitalism as a framework of global development, and on the other hand, narrates the story of the increasing consolidation of power in the hands of the global elite achieved through the language of the free market. As we have argued in our earlier work on globalization and communication, meanings constitute the center of global financialization, consolidation of wealth in the hands of the global elite, and the deployment of technocratic efficiency as the solution to development narrowly conceived as economic growth (Dutta, 2011; Pal & Dutta, 2008). Even as these shifts in global power depict the new networks of power that operate globall

The increasing patterns of global inequalities that have been brought about by the global organizing of politics and economics on the basis of the ideology of the free market are empirically witnessed across global spaces. In a number of academic as well as think pieces (including pieces on this site), I have been writing about the evidence that documents the patterns of these inequalities, and the relationships of these inequalities with entrenched patterns of political and economic policies that have blindly favored deregulation, minimal state intervention, and the weakening of the public sector. The University along with powerful think tanks has been a key site in the achievements of the neoliberal revolution. A brand of elite academics at elite academic institutions have played central roles as the mouthpieces of capitalism, offering philosophical frames, political theories, and economic ideas for the shaping of the world in the free market logic. In short, the academe has playe

In most of my own writing as well as in the writings of scholars seeking to understand the financial crisis, the trope of neoliberal governance offers a lens into the workings of the "free market" logic that played out in the financialization of global political economy, in the large scale inequalities across the globe, and in the dissolution of regulatory mechanisms to keep in check the behaviours of financial firms. This macro-level analysis offers a big picture, an understanding of the absence of government structures and processes that would keep in check the behaviours of financial organisations. However, what this analysis does not do is offer an insight into the everyday workings of the people that inhabited  these transnational organisations, the values they embody, the goals in life they aspire toward and the meanings they make of their professions. The macro analysis also does not offer insights into the frames of reference through which the actors working in and

Each time I am in the field, conversing with disenfranchised communities about projects of social change and finding entry points to collaboration, I hear a consistent narrative. This narrative is utterly sceptical of NGOs and the work done by NGOs. Consistent in this narrative across geographic spaces of marginalization is a consistent suspicion of the middle class NGO worker or the elite foreigner who comes in for occasional visits, may be once a year or once every two years. Like one community member shared, "NGOs are bastards." She noted how NGOs come and go, with their own donor goals and absorbing most of the donor monies to support their own goals and agendas. In the voice of another community participant in a disenfranchised Santali community, "The NGOs will do whatever they can to help themselves. So the fancy car, the fancy trips with foreigners, and the fancy life. You ask, how much of this money actually helps us?" In these narratives, communi

What should be the commitment of the humanities and social sciences in Asia in covering concepts and ideas rooted in Asia? How should these commitments play out in the composition of research and teaching faculty in Departments located in Asia? How is the project of de-Westernization to be accomplished when the majority of the teachers and researchers that inundate the Asian academe happen to be from the West or are trained in the West? How is the project of de-Westernization to be accomplished if the majority of the decision-makers who offer leadership are from the West? In other words, How does the question of representation play out in the composition of Departments and Faculties of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences located in Asia, and in the composition of leadership roles and structures within Departments, Colleges, and Universities?  What is the desirable composition of a Department of say Communication located in Asia? And what are the implications of

A number of my friends have shared with me their wonder at our decision to move to Singapore. They have shared their surprise as well as their inspirations. I had a pretty solid appointment at Purdue in a leadership role and Debalina had promises of a tenure track career at one of the leading communication departments that also has a lot of history in the discipline. Moving to Singapore and to NUS had a number of underlying reasons, a lot of them personal, and some really important ones that were professional. One of the most salient reasons for the move was what I thought was a truly transformative opportunity for putting my commitments to de-Westernizing communication to action. Of course, one could make the argument that the process of de-westernization needs to happen at the very heart of Empire. Through deconstructing and critique, the workings of power can be carefully examined within spaces of belonging in the Western academe. I had been doing that, sometimes successful