Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

I cry in our sadness In the loss of a little child in the hills and plains of Pakistan, US, Somalia, Afghanistan. I weep in pain in the suffering in our suffering. My grief like yours hurts. My loss like yours is loss. Our grief, here and there is grief. My body like yours hurts. But it is I who has to do the explaining It is I who has to be interrogated It is I whose motives have to be questioned It is I who will be accused of interrupting your grief It is I who will be lectured on civility the appropriateness of time, place, context. And I must go on Because grief must be interrupted. Lest it be used for more violence. I must go on Because Grief must be interrupted. Mine, yours, ours. Stories must be told, Imaginations must be engaged, questions must be raised, here, now, there Everywhere.  

Facebook today is inundated with accounts of pain, empathy, and outpouring of support for Boston. Headlines and posts such as "terror strikes again" have caught our attention once again. The show of emotion expresses itself in the act of reaching out, in finding a common point of emotional sharing with the people in Boston. Stories emerge that seek to respect the dignity of the lives lived. Our attention is drawn to the observations that this is one of the oldest marathons and that the race was taking place on a special day, symbolizing all the good things about freedom, liberty, and independence. The stories of heroism emerge on this backdrop to narrate the courage of the American people. The expressed emotions on social media ranging from pain to anger remind me of the range of emotions I was immersed in after the 9/11 attacks. The inherent goodness and strength of Boston residents is juxtaposed in the backdrop of the imagined perpetrator of terror. Along the lin

A Planned Parenthood activist who labels herself as feminist surprisingly uses the argument that "family planning interventions work and have effectively empowered women in the global South." She apparently draws on the rhetoric of gender empowerment to advocate for Planned Parenthood. What surprises me about the position articulated in the advocacy statement above is its uncritical celebration of the language of empowerment without interrogating the questions of power that are tied to the interpretive frames circulated in family planning interventions. I am also surprised by the erasure of the historic complicity of Planned Parenthood in racist population control programs in the early years, working closely with eugenicists to shape population control programs directed at poor, black and colored recipients of the Third World. The lack of historical familiarity with the context within which family planning interventions developed demonstrates the fluidity of human righ

The "Voices of Hunger" project, a narrative co-construction grounded in the CCA with the food insecure in Indiana, depicts the everyday struggles with the absence of food among the food insecure. At the time that the project was taking its roots, inequality in the US was on the rise, and there were a growing section of the middle class who had been "thrown to the streets." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcom.12009/abstract A theme that continued to reiterate through the stories of hunger was the uncertainty around it and the suddenness with which community members experienced it. http://www.care-cca.com/about/cca-video-series/voices-of-hunger/ The transition from a life of plenty to a life of hunger was often unexpected and sudden. It all happened overnight. The two storey home; the car; the fenced back yard. The signs of middle class comfort that depicted the life a large majority of Americans were soon disappearing, and for most of the com

Mediocrity is often built into the everyday practices of academe under the guise of civility. Civility becomes the trope that manages our academic relationships. I see this for example in how teacher student relationships are constructed. The value of such relationships measured in the form of student evaluations works well to reify the status quo. Teachers are prompted by the lowest common denominator under such systems of measurement. Learning takes the backseat as teachers work on minimizing assignments, making lectures entertaining etc. so that teaching evaluations can be higher. Minimizing expectations then works to reify the mediocrity of the status quo. As teachers, we pay more attention to making nice than to caring about our students learning. We are also trained to be inauthentic, managing our teaching by norms of civility in the mainstream, learning to stage a face. The neoliberal organizing of knowledge works precisely through the organizing of teaching under a

Over the past couple of months, I have been engaging adolescents in Marion County in centering their voices to identify heart health needs and propose solutions that are meaningful to them. The adolescent heart project emerged from the suggestions of the adults in the CUAHD project. Thus far, the experience of working with teenagers to design and implement a health campaign targeting heart disease has been interesting, and speaks to the uniqueness of our broad theoretical framework, the culture-centered approach that seeks to locate decision making power into the hands of the community. An example of the interesting dynamic that is playing out in the project is the concept of individualism versus collectivism in decision making and in driving the project forward. On March 6, I emailed the group about my inability to attend the planned strategy development workshop due to bad weather .Interestingly, the group proceeded with organizing the workshop as originally scheduled, and also set

In our ""CCA" module, we discussed the nuances in our understandings of objectivity in the social sciences. Delineating the break from the natural sciences, understandings of objectivity in the social sciences are constituted in the values of the researcher, her/his constructions of the self, her/his relationship with the subjectivity of the research participants, and her/his negotiations with materiality. That there are material contexts of symbolic behavior is a key point in culturally-centered work, and yet this material context is negotiated symbolically, through language and through acts of representation. In this sense, communication lies at the heart of the social sciences, the world of the material being negotiated through meaning making. We come to understand materiality through the symbolically mediatized narrativization of the material world. For example, the everyday lived experience of struggling with hunger is a material reality that is felt in the

The hegemony of West-centrism and the question of academic freedom: From a half-baked lens in my short time in Singapore Recently, a colleague at Nanyang Technological University, an associate professor of communication Dr. Cherian George was denied tenure (http://storify.com/kuekj/denial-of-tenure-sparks-furore).   Dr. Cherian is considered a leading public intellectual in Singapore, one who has opened up the discursive space to conversations about Singapore and its politics (http://www.cheriangeorge.net/).   This instance of Dr. Cherian’s denial of tenure has become the subject of widespread political participation, letter writing, and conversations across Singapore. The social media is rife with multiple conversation threads that have questioned the tenure and promotion process at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) as well as the fairness of the outcome (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/niftyc/archives/790).   Outpouring support from students and colleagues hav

When we began the partnership between the Indiana Minority Health Coalition, Lake County Minority Health Coalition, Minority Health Coalition of Marion County and Purdue University, we had two broad pictures in mind: (a) our partnership was focused on building health information capacities among African Americans in Lake and Marion Counties of Indiana, so that community members would have access to the health information they needed in addressing their heart health issues; and (b) our partnership began with the understanding that local community values, beliefs, and understandings ought to be centered in how problems and solutions came to be understood, implemented and evaluated. Now, as our culturally-centered heart health campaign wraps up the initial phase, I am struck by some key lessons regarding culturally-centered processes of social change, both in terms of research methodology as well as in terms of the development and evaluation of the campaign. The first lesson I have lea

I sit here head sunk in shame in the knowing that my Hindu soul stands a silent witness In the murder of a muslim brother. You say he was a terrorist one that deserves to die So I should celebrate so you don't count me as a traitor to my Hindu state of birth. I sit here unable to argue unable to have a conversation with you Because I too am the majority that takes for granted my body my privilege my identity Like you, I am complicit in murder. I sit here and write a poem in my pain as I witness a muslim brother led to the gallows. Without evidence Without due process With questions left unanswered. I sit here because I know that's what happens when you are muslim in Hindu India. I sit here and hold my child in pain As I know somewhere in Kashmir A child, the child of a terrorist has no father to hug him and to protect. A child left by his father to be cared for by God.

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