Skip to main content

Posts

Lessons from the Charlie Hebdo attacks: Liberty, Western hypocrisy, and cultural context

Liberty, Western hypocrisy, and cultural context Mohan Jyoti Dutta The recent terrorist attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo have put on the global center-stage the ideas of free speech and liberty. Mainstream media and politicians, a large number of them from the West, have framed the attacks in the language of liberty, suggesting that the attacks are acts of violence on the ways of the free world, aka the West. In solidarity with the magazine, the twitter hashtag #jesuischarlie has garnered global popularity. The hashtag expresses the global support for media to draw and voice diverse, even provocative ideas, freely. The #jesuischarlie twitter feed also serves as a space for sharing many of the Charlie Hebdo images, equating the act of sharing the images with assertions of freedom and liberty. The images of a free global order juxtaposed against the images of extremist Islamic fundamentalists, are presented in a binary. The many different depictions o

The Attack of Politics on University Campuses: The work of communication

University of Michigan Professor of Communication Susan Douglas has come under attack from the political Right for a column in the magazine In The Times. In her column titled "It's okay to hate Republicans," Douglas opens with a rhetorical attention grabber "I hate Republicans," beginning with "I can't stand the thought of having to spend the next two years watching Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Ted Cruz, Darrell Issa or any of the legions of other blowhards denying climate change, thwarting immigration reform or championing fetal 'personhood'," and drawing the attention of the reader to the climate of intolerance that is promoted by the conservatives. Professor Douglas' essay, read in full, attends to the underlying principles of aversion to social change and acceptance of inequality that form the core of the conservatives. The political right, including a Republican member of the Board of Regents of the University

Tenure in the university and personnel decisions

The accelerated corporatization of University structures breeds new forms of vulnerabilities within Universities, essentially altering the mission, vision, and organizing structures of Universities. Universities, having had to raise funds in the face of reduced state funding and public support, have to increasingly depend on donors to carry out their vital functions. Moreover, in order to participate in this continually reinvented game of branding and unique selling propositions, which in turn are essential to further fund-raising, Universities have to keep generating the perceptions of speed, innovation, and change. To sustain the brand image of the university, new programs must be introduced, new buildings must be built, new initiatives must be launched, and new labs must be built. The glamor and appeal of the university are maintained through the deployment of an army of mid-managers who implement newly borrowed metrics, come up with new set of indicators, and introduce eve

The civility police and censoring protest against uncivil violence

This past summer, the months of July and August in 2014, witnessed gruesome attacks carried out by Israel on Gaza. As the social media reverberated with images and protests against these ghastly and uncivil acts of violence carried out by a powerful nation state with its imperial backing, civility on social media emerged as the metric of conversation, operating strategically to silence dissent. As I have blogged in earlier posts, Professor Steven Salaita, who had secured an appointment at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, was de-hired from his job apparently because he had violated some unspoken civility code. In speaking about the decision to de-hire Professor Salaita, Chancellor Phyllis Wise of the UIUC cited personnel reasons while ironically parroting her well-practiced speech on her commitment to diversity, multiculturalism, safe spaces on university campuses, and academic freedom. Later in the summer and through the early Fall, several University leaders across t

Empiricism and the project of critical social sciences: The contribution of the CCA

Culture-centered projects of social change intervene in the elite world of theorizing by seeking to co-create spaces for subaltern theories. A key element of this intervention is the actual creation of material and symbolic spaces for subaltern articulations in conversations with subaltern communities. Subaltern theories emerge through conversations among subaltern communities, activists, and academics. Empiricism, attending to the expressions of materiality in everyday lived experiences, is integral to the formulation of theories within the meta-theoretical framework of the CCA. Emergent theories voiced through articulations of lived experiences by subaltern communities, are grounded in the everyday understandings, interpretations, and actions negotiated by community members. The CCA thus is a constitutive framework for method and theory. Culture-centered projects seek to contribute to subaltern struggles with material resources by creating material interventions.

A response to the White Man's (Un)Imagination: Does Decolonization = ISIS?

During my recent talk on decolonization, I was approached by one of these White men, who with a smirk on his phase, reminded me, "You know, an example like ISIS also uses the same language of decolonization that you are talking about." He then went on to educate me about the need to delineate between the good and bad kind of decolonization, offering a lesson that this talk about decolonization is fine as long as it is palatable to our White Master. I suppose, he wanted to be the gatekeeper in theorizing about which kinds of talk of decolonization would be acceptable. The parallels offered between decolonization struggles and ISIS when talking about decolonization asserts the dominance of US/Western hegemony even as it hypocritically ignores the history of violence that is integral to the narrative of Western (un)civilization. I see such parallels drawn between ISIS and conversations on decolonization to be heuristic devices that distract attention away from the broad h

Decolonizing democracy and politics of social change

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