Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Further building on our earlier discussions, I want to point toward the notion of "presence" in the field which has occupied a key position in CCA research. The co-constructive moment of CCA calls for the researcher to be "present" in the field, at the moment of the interaction where knowledge is co-constructed. For my own research, this has meant that I spend substantive amounts of time in the field and on the road. For example, with the heart health disparities project with African American communities in Lake and Marion counties, I personally often spend between 6 to 10/12 hours in the field. Our CCA research team as a collective spends between 20-60 hours in the field collectively, in addition to our community organizers and community partners who are present at the field sites. Although all this presence in the field takes up both a lot of time as well as lot of energy, the fundamental tenets of CCA rely on these different forms of investment in order to crea

One of the most fundamental tenets of CCA is I believe the authenticity of the researcher in his/her relationship with the field site, which is tied to the fundamental premise that one needs to spend extensive amounts of time in the field, getting to know the field and making herself/himself vulnerable to participants and their stories, interacting with participants with an openness to listening to their stories, and co-creating theoretical and pragmatic entry points with cultural participants through their stories. For us as CCA researchers to co-script stories of change with participants, we need to be extensively devoted to our field sites, taking up the challenges of intense field work and sometimes when needed, placing our selves at risk so that entry points to change can be co-created with cultural participants at the margins (granted our taking up of these risks are minuscule when compared to the everydayness of the risks and threats that communities at the margins live under).

So here you go. I have often been puzzled as to what it is about CCA that threatens your typical academic. Why is it that when presented with the idea of CCA that your "typical" Comm scholar often has a gut response of defensiveness? (Of course, I am using the label "typical" to refer to a specific representation of the average, the middle, the central tendency that occupies the status quo; and of course, there have been a number of Communication scholars who have opened up, encouraged, and nurtured some of the basic premises of CCA). For this blog though, I am going to refer to that central tendency or the mediocre average that responds from various positions of feeling defensive, articulating this response in various froms of pettiness and petty politics (Marx is so right on target when he refers to the bourgeoisie as "petty"). Yesterday, during our Hunger Coalition meeting, one of our community members who has herself experienced hunger summarized her

Last evening, Debalina and I had a wonderful time having dinner with our friends Shaunak and Zhuo. At the end of the evening (which usually rolls into late nights as conversations get more and more interesting), as I was getting ready for bed, I felt very grateful for our friendships and for the privilege that academe offers us to do the work we choose to do, to converse about this work, and perhaps to have the opportunity to continually evaluate the value of this work. You see, Shaunak and Zhuo are also my students and advisees, and they just returned from India and China respectively after having spent their summer doing CCA fieldwork for their dissertations. Shaunak spent time in India amidst conversations with truck drivers along truck routes around the issue of HIV/AIDS, and Zhuo spent her time in China conversing with workers on factory floors and living in a local church that housed the workers, conversing about issues of worker's rights in the backdrop of globalization po

Today we had one of our Hunger Coalition meetings in Tippecanoe county. The meeting went extremely well, much along the lines of how one might expect a community-grounded CCA process to unfold. The food insecure participants who experience hunger in their everyday lives came together today to lay out the steps of the coalition as well as the objectives of the coalition. I was incredibly impressed by how fast this project seems to be moving toward accomplishing multiple tangible goals. But I am going to spend my blog today about an event that happened toward the end of the meeting. As we were wrapping up the meeting and I started packing my bag, Sara (we will use her pseudonym here) walked up to me in trepidation and stood by me as other community members were leaving the room. I felt she needed to share something with me. When I looked at her, she walked up somewhat nervously and asked me if I would not be offended to accept a Bible written in Arabic (now I can't really read Arab

Reading Carol Warren’s chapter on Qualitative Research brought back to mind a comment a senior colleague once made to me when I was a journalist in California. Speaking about feature stories – personality profiles, in particular – he pointed out how interviews often revealed that people rarely overcame their roots, their childhood experiences, their pasts, no matter how far they went in life. I recall, we agreed unanimously that people’s roots indeed had the greatest influence on their worldview and their philosophy in life. At that time, though, it never crossed my mind, to what extent my own roots could be coloring what I heard in the numerous interviews I did throughout the day as a reporter. Being the “objective” journalist – that I presumed I was – I was oblivious of the fact that the discursive space of an interview was an arena where both my interviewee and I were engaging actively and simultaneously in the act of meaning-making; and that I, as the interviewer, was participating

In preparing for my Communication Theory undergraduate course that I will teach this coming Fall, I am struck by the the whiteness of the theories presented in the text I am using in class and by the limitations in seeking to offer alternative worldviews that open up the spaces of pedagogy to imaginations of communication from elsewhere. What is most important to note here is that irrespective of the paradigm of the theories one picks from, the theories are essentially white in terms of where they have been picked from, which theorists talk about them and cite them, the political agendas of these theorists, the ideologies written into the theories, and most fundamentally, the location of the theories within the neo-colonial sites of knowledge production that reestablish the hegemony of whiteness. Inherent in the articulation of the theories in the pages of the texts is an assumption about the superiority of whiteness as the legitimate producer of knowledge. Simultaneously, written into

I have increasingly thought about the number of times that I have heard Indian parents talk about the success of their kids, planning for a good career, and finding the right kind of enabler/ladder so that the child would adequately climb to the established measures of success. This quest for the child's success among parents on one hand is understandable. Every parent wants their child to do well, to have a secure future, and to have the resources they need to live a comfortable life. The desires, on the other hand, often singlehandedly play out in a linear narrative, and this is the part that needs to be deconstructed critically...the career path to success seems to be utterly narrow and well laid out: get an engineering degree, and after you get an engineering degree, get an MBA. This to most Indian parents seems like the easiest route for their child to be successful. Education, thus narrowly defined, is initially loaded up with the emphasis on the sciences, followed by the eng

Shifting my focus from policy-related books, I’ve devoted my attention this week towards absorbing information in the academic literature related to experiences of food insecurity. Broadly, I’ve learned that the experience of food insecurity is collectively shared. While I dislike making generalizations across geographic locations and communities, it is easy to see that those facing hunger in the rural communities of Oregon and Appalachia are quite similar in their perceptions of the experience to those we’ve interviewed as part of our Voices of Hunger project. In De Marco, Thornburn, and Kue’s (2009) analysis of the experiences of the food insecure in rural Oregon, similar contributors to food insecurity were noted, including a lack of health insurance and foregrounded requirements to pay for bills and rent, as well as the administrative hurdles potential recipients face in determining their eligibility for national safety-net programs. I was particularly intrigued by their discussion

In moving forward with my food policy readings, I’ve spent the last few days absorbing “Sweet charity: Emergency food and the end of entitlement” by Janet Poppendieck. While she hasn’t been as straightforward in declaring her positionality on the food insecurity issue as was Winne, I have really appreciated her writing style as a member of academia, a sociologist specifically, who is consistently able to blend her scholarly understanding with practical sensibilities. She spends a brief portion of her introduction detailing her methodology, which included participant observation, interviews, and archival analysis at food pantries, food banks, food rescue programs, and soup kitchens in nine different states across the span of 7 years. From the start, I was drawn into the book per my sharing of Poppendieck’s most notable fear: we are becoming attached to our charitable food programs and increasingly unable to envision a society that wouldn’t need them. As she suggests, we are so busy buil

This week, in addition to reading Winne’s “Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty,” I had an opportunity to visit another mobile food pantry offered by Food Finders in West Lafayette. While my primary purpose wasn’t to serve as a volunteer for Food Finders (instead distributing and helping participants complete the community needs assessment from the health department that I’ve worked on for some time), it was difficult not to once again share in the experiences and listen to the voices of those visiting for free food. First, I was pleasantly surprised to run into 5 of our participants from the “Voices of Hunger” project. Seeing them there was a reassurance that they are all surviving amidst their hardship, and brief conversations with them spawned two interesting thoughts in relation to my food policy readings. First, I chatted with one of our former participants (of the most engaged in the project) about a conversation she had with a Senator a few weeks prior