My opening keynote at the International Communication Association regional conference in Brisbane titled "Communicative Transformations, Communities, and Imaginations: A Decolonizing Agenda" explores the possibilities of democratic politics in the global South. The talk seeks to engage with openings for decolonizing the "communicative inversions" that lie at the heart of the imperial project that constitutes liberal ideas, and at the same time offers opportunities for engaging with articulations of democratic politics that emerge from social change processes in the global South. I argue that these social change processes need to be strategically read as exemplars of the politics of decolonization in the global South, resisting the imperial reading of these processes as exemplars of the diffusion of the modernization framework of "democracy promotion." As observed by Partha Chatterjee in his discussion of everyday politics in the global South, the part
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.