Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Many of you have heard me share with you stories of my grandmother, Nana. An amazingly strong woman, nana was a healer, a knower of secrets that worked wonders on my health and my spirits. She was an amazing source of knowledge, one who believed in the principles of Marxist socialism and also believed in the incredible powers of the spirit. She was an avid reader, one who read more than eight hours a day. The daughter of a medical doctor and the niece of the scientist Sir J C Ghosh, the architect of India's now-fabled IITs, she was a student of science. Married to a family of engineers, she voraciously read books for herself, her husband, her children and her grandchildren. Nana taught me to love the world of books. For her, the spirit of science was embodied in asking questions, in not taking things for granted, and in drawing upon systematic observations to arrive at conclusions. Perhaps it is this very spirit of science that worked in her everyday resources of hea

July 5, 2010. In an article titled " The trophies of Operation Green Hunt ," the academic Nandini Sundar interrogates the complete erasure of stories of large scale violence deployed by the Indian state on its tribal subjects. She documents the rapes, murders, arrests, and encounters, most of which are disproportionately carried out on women. The unprecedented degree of state-sponsored violence carried out on indigenous women is the subject of her critical interrogation. Most of these stories of violence go unnoticed and unheard. We don't feel outrage as middle-class subjects of Shining India, having been led to believe that this is collateral damage that is natural to our democracy. The media mostly don't cover the cases, and even when they do, the story is buried somewhere in a back page in a small paragraph. And even when we see these stories, we pass on, getting on with our lives. We are normalized into not feeling empathy. Noting this collective inabili

Even in death, the politics of race shapes what we remember, who we remember, and how we remember. A Black US President feels for the children of Newton. He imagines them as his children, and is lost for meaning at the loss of the White children in rich suburbia of Newton. His solidarity for these children is expressed in the pain that he visibly feels and the responsibility he takes for collective action. The President’s sense of solidarity connects his experiences as a father with the fathers of the children of Sandy Hook. His tears offer a moment of authenticity through which we connect with him and with the pain of being a parent who has lost a child. Like him, as a father, I feel pain. I also feel pain for the children in Gary, Indiana, a place a few miles South of Chicago where Black children die from gun violence. I have heard stories of suffering and hope that community members in Gary share. In Gary, the politics of race is written into the everyday organizing of sch

A story on Al Jazeera Television memorializing the victims of the Newton shooting describes the short lives lived by the children, describing their lives, remembering their acts of kindness, and describing their innocence. As I bear witness to the stories memorializing the children that were killed violently in the Sandy Hook shooting, I feel pain in seeing the faces of the children whose lives were taken away. Seeing their faces, reading their names are acts of memorializing, of remembering them, and of acknowledging the dignity of their lives. Recognizing the names of the children gives meaning to their lives and offers a space in our thoughts for recognizing their everyday lived experiences, the potential they could have achieved, and the people they could have become. As we feel pain in witnessing the lives of the children, we connect with them. We empathize with their journeys, and find a way to link our separate stories with theirs. Our feelings of pain and empathy thus

From the screen of the Television set which is playing a John Wayne classic, gunshots are flowing everywhere. The good guys on horses are killing the bad guys. And the gun is their weapon. The gun is the salvation in a plot of good versus evil. It will kill the enemy and the hero will use it adeptly and expertly to seek out moral justice. For the Frontier man, the gun is the weapon for justice. Owning the gun and using it against the enemy is embedded within the broader cultural story of "good versus evil." Guns bring about liberty. And owning the gun is the right of the citizen, understood in a storyline of democracy and liberty. Citizenship is connected to the right to own. And more specifically, to the right to own a gun. The gun symbolizes a technological innovation, an innovation that is able to carry out mass killings. Its sheer force lies in its technological ability to kill at a distance. The greater the distance and the greater the ability of the

On Thursday, 6/12/12, two Chinese workers workers perched themselves on a tower crane to protest outstanding wages that were owed to them by their employer Zhong Jiang (S) international: http://www.straitstimes.com/breaking-news/singapore/story/two-workers-china-charged-criminal-trespass-after-crane-protest-201212 The workers were charged with criminal tresspass for their crane protest. From the preliminary findings from the Ministry of Manpower, it is apparent that the two workers Zhu Guilei and Wu Xiaolin had approached customer relations of MOM on Wednesday, 5/12/12 over the outstanding salaries but did not have any supporting documents. In my fieldwork with migrant workers, listening to their voices, I have often heard anecdotal accounts of unpaid wages. From a communicative standpoint, the question that relates to the complaint registered by the MOM focuses on "What supporting documents were needed by the ministry?" "How are these supporting docum

Tomorrow, we bring several different voices at the table on a conversation on "Communication and Social Change" at CARE. http://www.care-cca.com/communication-social-change-emerging-technologies-a-global-symposium-dec-4-6/ We will have a chance to hear from an NGO how they conceptualize social change and the work of social change that lies ahead. We will hear from an industry partner who works on private-public partnerships and CSR what social change means from an industry perspective. And we will have an opportunity to hear from activists and academics about the relevance of social change from the standpoint of communication theory. What is embodied in the forum tomorrow is a coming together of diverse understandings of the meanings of social change, raising critical questions, offering analytical frameworks, and fostering spaces for contention and collaboration. What is the most important part of CCA is its impetus on reflexivity, bringing multiple viewpoints i

The hunger of the body sits silently as loss in movement from one country to another in search of a living in fulfilling a promise of a home, of savings of a future for the children. The hunger of the body sits silently in search of sense in a job that would secure the promises. The body works harder, even harder in search of meaning in search of the promise in search of dignity, the promises made And the dreams unfulfilled. The hunger of the body sits silently as shame because the body must be tamed must be silenced must be erased Meanings don't belong here shuttered, lost, long betrayed. Dignity does not belong here As the body must work, and learn to be silent.

I am struck by the adulatory remarks in the major news outlets in India celebrating Bal Thackeray, remarking upon his sense of humor, his penchant for art and poetry, and his role as a political leader that united Maharashtra and gave a sense of national identity for its citizens. These adulations are completely uncritical, rewriting the story of a leader who often referred to Hindu sentiments to inspire violence and hatred. From watching and hearing all the praises, you would not know that this is the very demagogue who had inspired a generation of Hindu right wing fanatics, writing the script of a Maratha Hindu state. You would not know that inspired by Hitler, this was the leader who appealed to the politics of Hindu identity to call for massacres, erasures, and mass scale violence. What becomes most apparent in the storying of Mr. Thackeray's legacy is the fundamental paradox of neoliberal organizing of India. This is the essential paradox between a penchant for a na

Today, CARE Fellow Kang Sun presented part of his dissertation work on identity, space, and materiality among Chinese peasant workers in manufacturing units. It was a stimulating CARE presentation, one that opened up the discursive space for multiple questions regarding the role of identity at the intersections of the symbolic and the material. Kang is a master storyteller, one who draws you into his stories by connecting to his personal experiences. As he re-crafted the many stories that he has partaken in during his fieldwork, what I found striking about his stories was the amazing connection between stories and the need to draw attention to injustices. Stories became ways for giving voice to certain forms of injustices. It was through the many stories that Kang weaved along with his participants that we got to listen to the possibilities of change. The many stories planted in our hearts and spirits the seeds of hope and the ideas for possibilities. I came away enthused

In one of our earlier conversations on politics of social change, JT had noted how so much of the Indian left is occupied by Brahminized subjects who come from positions of privilege, having secured access to positions of leadership (intellectual or political) through access to instruments of education, the metropole, and the elite circles that operate in the metropole. The Tam Brahms, Bong Brahms, and North Indian Brahms that occupy these elite positions often come from positions of privilege, having been born into families with privilege and access, and having been educated into the norms of civility and participation. Their theorizing of Marx or Lenin or Engels therefore is borne out from these positions of privilege, often played out in easy access to resources and tools of learning. What then are the implications for Left politics and/or politics of social change when the discursive sites of articulation are themselves occupied by a Brahminized class that replicates privilege

Whether you look at feudal, communist, or capitalist systems, a seamless link that runs among the practices of these various forms of governing is the power held by networks of the power elite, and the transference of power within kinship ties. The power elite continue their rule over generations not simply by coercion but by manufacturing systems, processes, and strategies that work to propagate their power. This inbuilt power enables the movement of their future generations into the structures of power. This inter-generational transfer of power works both communicatively and materially, being symbolically perpetuated through the rules, tools, and requirements of entry into symbolic spaces of privilege. The effectiveness of the power elite in ruling spaces is precisely tied to the access of the power elite to resources through which they can perpetuate their power and control. The dominance of the power elite plays out across generations, ascertaining specific forms of entry

My talk in CNM titled "Returning the White Man's gaze: Reimagining social science research" generated some amazing conversations with my colleagues, who pushed me further through their questions to imagine what a politics of change might look like that works through a project of decolonization. One of the questions raised and that stayed with me was, "What about Third World oppressions that are carried out by indigenous subjects on other indigenous subjects?" Working out a politics of change from the Third is a dance of hope and hopelessness as Ambar Basu so eloquently writes about in his work with sex workers in the SHIP project in Sonagachi. You see, resisting the colonial gaze has to be the starting point in a poltics of social change as much of the inequities at the structural level are embedded within the Eurocentric logic and the foregrounding of Euro-centered rationality that privileges private property owning subjects as participants in the public