Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

For the last several years of my academic life, I have been drawn to leadership roles. But what does leadership mean in academia? What do we expect from our academic leaders? What roles do academic leaders play and what are the benchmarks through which we judge them? Is the only option in being a leader to sell your backbone to the dominant players of society? When I consider my own journey in leadership, I wonder: What is the type of leader I want to be? How does my leadership role work within the context of my role as an academic interested in issues of social justice and social change? How does the desire to be a leader fit within the broader realm of my academic identity as  a scholar studying social injustices and seeking to work toward spaces of solidarity with those at the margins in order to address these injustices through scholarship? Do I get co-opted into a system that carries out the interests of the top 1% by chosing to participate in a leadership role in university

Whiteness, academe, silence Doing good, openness, equal opportunity Diversity, equity, justice Talk, all talk Talk that sounds good And gives me the reassurance that academe is somehow opening up To difference. And yet The talk is far from the truth Whiteness carries out in the actions of the benevolent White man and woman Who believes she has taught the world The logics of empowerment And takes it on herself To save the downtrodden and the oppressed From the Third. Whiteness and its specters Couched as doing good Couched as altruism and progress Telling me that I am backward That I have to refer back to the games of Whiteness In order to qualify as a participant. Whiteness and its specters Telling me That the knowledge of my culture is primitive So she is going to send her missionaries and mercenaries and democracy promoters and war mongers and public health professionals To teach me to behave To pick up the language So I could be empowered under her Imperial guises.

"Humans are inherently selfish creatures. So if we help ourselves, we inherently help others by taking care of ourselves." This logic of individual selfishness lies at the heart of neoliberalism. What is interesting about this logic is that I have heard it reiterated among the middle class elites in India in my years of growing up. During many of these debates, when I pointed to anecdotal examples of people that I knew who dedicated their lives to the service of others, the logic came back with the response "helping others is also a self-driven endeavour. When we help others, we do so because we feel fulfilled." Such logics then point to the self-actualization needs of humans as suggested by Maslow to note that helping others help us fulfill our self-actualization needs, which are also selfish in nature. Ultimately then, this is how the neoliberal logic justifies the individualistic greed of neoliberal subjects: You are being honest and being true to what is your fu

The irony of the current American university system probably becomes evident to anyone that cares to carefully observe the current trends within these universities. It was not that long back that University leaders and faculty members felt very comfortable talking openly about Chinese GRE scores, TOEFL scores etc., using these rationale to turn down competent students from China with stellar scores. It was not that long back that references to the English capabilities of the Chinese was somehow considered to be PC in a climate where most forms of talk are otherwise monitored by the PC-Police. It was not that long back that it was OK for faculty to discuss in meetings openly about the English capabilities of a student from China or Korea. The ability to speak English was used as the marker to strip students from elsewhere of their dignity. The pressures from undergraduate students and their parents was used as an excuse to carry out this act of stripping, with the logic that the instr

I have been posting on my FB site about the recent story of the US pressing charges on Mr. Rajat Gupta for his involvement in insider trading. This story comes across as the striking story of neoliberal greed that has inundated India, particularly so because Mr. Gupta has been the poster child of success in the Indian landscape, depicting the markers of success along the lines that middle class parents desire for their children to model into. These markers of success are carried out in India by the trajectory of the IITs and IIMs, ultimately ending up with the ultimate job of an investment banker on Wall Street. The value of the investment banker for his parents lies in the markers of materialism he has achieved. This story furthermore gets gendered as we move ahead to complete the story: the parents of Indian girls in the marriage market desiring for their daughters to marry a hot-shot investment banker with all the material resources. This is of course then framed within the framewor

One of the everyday aspects of doing culture-centered work is the engagement with the language of marginalization. The slippery slope however in working with the margins is when we come to identify the label of the margins with our own journeys, and even more so, utilize this label to justify our own mediocrity, lack of work ethic, or our sheer laziness. For any of us that occupy positions within academe through which we gain access to the tools and languages for making knowledge claims, being marginalized typically does not mean the same thing as it does for the sectors of the population we typically work with, people who have been rendered invisible through those very knowledge structures that we inhabit. Therefore, to do CCA, one has to really step out of the comfort zone and work hard at figuring out the openings for engagement. So although I am deeply aware of the experiences of being "othered" that some within academe have to work through (because of a variety of th

In my book "Communicating Social Change: Structure, Culture, and Agency," I begin with the premise that how we define, operationalize, and measure social change essentially needs to be re-conceptualized in order to articulate an entry point for transformative politics in te backdrop of neoliberalism. I base this argument on the notion that traditional conceptualizations of social change perpetuate the status quo through their emphasis on individual behavior change in target populations and systematically ignoring the necessity for structural transformations. This is particularly true of social change as configured within capitalist formations, where the basic premise of social change has been co-opted within the frameworks of capitalism to keep intact the positions of oppression among the owners of capital, extracting profits through the exploitation of labor. Therefore, for a transformative moment to be re-captured witin the context of contemporary neoliberal phenomena w

As we interact in different capacity in the Culture Centering Approach, one interesting dynamic that continue to play out is the dichotomy between deep and shallow participation. Some group members are deeply engaged and are very clear about the objectives in each phase of the project, and the processes. They are very innovative and always offer unique perspectives for achieving results. On the other hand, some group members seem not to fully grasp the CCA process on the surface, or unclear about necessary steps in each phase of the of the project. But the interesting thing is that while they may seem unsure about the process or may not be creative like the deeply engaged group, there is a sense of ownership and commitment to the project goals. You can decipher their deep commitment to the project through their non-verbal actions e.g. facial expressions, their enthusiasm and interest in the CCA processes during group interactions. Such kind of enthusiasm is worth acknowledging. This d

At the Opening Seminar of the Center for Discourses in Transition, Professor Paul McIvinney brought together a group of scholars who I believe were connected together with their enphasis on interrogating neoliberalism and processes of social/cultural change. The talk today was opened by Professor Fairclough who walked us through a careful discourse analysis of the global economic discourse. Professor Fairclough's work clearly laid out the groundwork for Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and the ways in which CDA is tied to the interrogation of public discourses of neoliberalism played out in the articulations and arguments around the financial crisis and the economic benefits enjoyed by Bankers. Professor Adam Jaworski offered yer abother entry point to engaging neoliberal privilege by interrogating the ways in which tourist guide discourses serve specific functions and occupy specific positions of privilege. Through his close reading of the micro data on the interactions at tour

Methodologically, as we develop participatory processes in culture-centered research, these processes are both organic and cyclical. The organic nature of CCA processes suggest that when we work with community partnerships and community members, the relationships among the multiple stakeholders (and yes, given the circles of participation in CCA, these are indeed multiple relationships in multiple contexts at multiple levels) are continually evolving. Being open to participation in ways that are responsive to community needs suggests that we continually re-evaluate where we stand with respect to the choices and the decisions we make through the lifecycle of the project. This also means that the same decisions need to be revisited at multiple entry points at multiple levels of our relationships, partnerships, and roles within the CCA network. Moving the gamuts of decision-making through these multiple cycles calls for a great deal of patience as the same sets of decisions need to be re

In preparing for my talk in Denmark this coming week, I have been contempating on the corporate practices under neoliberal governance that epitomize corruption. These forms of corruption range from lying about specific actions and practices, to stealing the property of indigenous peoples and then patenting them, to stealing the lands of the poor under the name of development and urbanization, to using a wide variety of legal methods to silence the voices of the poor from policy and justice platforms. However, the beauty and effectiveness of neoliberalism lies precisely in its capacity of utilizing a variety of public relations tools to put forth a variety of labels and naming devices to hide the fundamentally corrupt and unethical nature of these practices. In a piece titled "Public Relations as Knowledge Production under Neoliberalism," I put forth the argument that producing knowledge that is fundamentally untrue lies at the heart of this large-scale exercise of corruptio