As a Professor of Communication teaching in Singapore, I have often been struck by the absence of introductory or advanced texts that are grounded in Singapore or in the broader context of Asia. I find myself having to cover Western concepts of Perception , Stereotyping , or Media Structures as the fundamentals of communication and new media theorising, modifying then the readings in the texts to "fit" my students in Singapore by drawing in examples or cases from Singapore. As I pick an international version of a much-used US-based text, I am left wondering what it means to have an "international" version of an introductory text, where most of the concepts are US-centric. Singapore emerges in my pedagogy as a source of case studies, built into a comparative frame where the foundations are covered in a required US text. I remain dissatisfied with this strategy of adapting a fundamentally US-centric text to the Singapore context of my students (I am not even s
This blog offers Mohan Dutta's reflections on the theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach, examining the interplays among Structure, Culture, and Agency in shaping marginalisation and the ways in which communities at the margins challenge structures. Writings on the blog are continually being revised to reflect the organic analysis of structure and agency.