Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Your white guns targeted at the black, brown, colored seas of protest will someday be held accountable in a court of justice, asked to recount the number of dead, recount the stories of violence that make up your White ideas of liberty and freedom and democracy. Your white guns  and your sham of democracy, civility, and citizenship, will be judged in a court of brown, black, colored peoples. You will have to do the recounting You will have to recite the names Standing there, you will be asked to do the explaining for the black lives lost to your senseless violence. Your white ideas of justice Will be turned upside down for their hypocrisies and farcical performances You will be asked to describe the violence that runs through your being Through your police, through your military The fundamentalism you inspire, to account for The guns you make, and the armies you send around the globe masked as democracy.

This is an often repeated scenario: A White male professor asks a graduate student from China "Aren't you biased, given that you are doing this study on Chinese netizens?" "Tell me why should this be generalizable." This stance is reflective of the power of Whiteness to erase its own location and specificity as a universal, while simultaneously turning the "other" as the subject of investigation. Objective distance is therefore something that needs to be performed when studying the exotic "other" located elsewhere. The fact is that most of our journals are inundated with White American scholars making a large number of grandiose claims about human behavior on the basis of studies conducted on White subjects in the classroom. In the sense of these claim made by the White man then, almost all of communication scholarship is fundamentally flawed (or at least large parts are). The scripted retort voiced by the Chinese student to the White

In a recent piece documenting the experiences of migrant labor amid market reforms in China, I was reminded by one of the reviewers that social scientific work should stay away from "politics." In another conversation with a graduate student conducting an ethnographic study of cellphone penetration in an indigenous context, I was reminded of a note from a reviewer who urged her to stay away from advocacy because she referred to her data from the field that challenged the hegemony of transnational corporations in the mobile phone sector. As an aside, the reviewer who made this comment often did work for mobile phone companies as a consultant or as a collaborator. In each of these instances, critique directed at the broader corporatized context of neoliberal governance and its local manifestations is seen by these traditional social scientists as being overtly political, polemical, and/or advocacy. Thus "politics" stands in as a referent to critique of the he

In one of my recent posts, I discussed the overarching framework of Whiteness that shapes communication practice and the ways in which Whiteness lies at the heart of the prevalent norms of communication, civility, politeness, and interaction. My post was misread as being racist by a senior industry practitioner who took my reference to Whiteness as a marker of racism, as an indicator that I was somehow racially marginalizing members of the White community. He cited his commitment to racial harmony to chastise me. In such instances of disagreement, engaging in dialogue offers an opportunity for working through arguments, finding spaces of common grand and articulating spaces of departure.  In these instances of disagreements with practitioners who often have the economic power of the well-heeled purse-string or the enticement of the coveted industry partnerships, it is vital to revisit theorizing as the everyday practice of academia. Moreover, it is vital to look at such disagreeme

The limits of White liberalism are embodied in the hypocrisies and double standards in White articulations of liberty and freedom. The rhetoric of this version of liberalism is emboldened in its double standards. As the father of liberalism, John Stuart Mill, was eschewing the virtues of liberty, he was justifying the English occupation of India. The recent New York Times Editorial on " Modi's Dangerous Silence " is another reflection of this double standard. As I have noted elsewhere, the ascendance of the Hindu Right in India needs to be critiqued with vigor and full force to secure the space of multifaith syncretism that forms an integral part of an Indian articulation of nationhood. However, for the New York Times   to criticize the Hindu Right's efforts of mass conversion as dangerous reflects the kind of double standard that is integral to White liberalism. Mass conversions after all are the mantra of the White-Western way of life. From the Chris

The President of the University of Illinois Campus Faculty Association President Professor Bruce Rosenstock shared today his email exchange with Chancellor Phyllis Wise, requesting the Chancellor to respect the recommendations offered by the CAFT report prepared by the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure (CAFT) at the University of Illinois. The email exchange, carried out between the dates of January 29, 2015 and February 5, 2015, once again is a reminder of the large gap between the rhetoric of civility performed by the Illinois administration as a justification for the decision of the University to de-hire Professor Salaita and the actual practices of incivility reflected in the behaviors of the University administration. The exchange read in full also depicts the paradoxically closed nature of the University administration and its decision-making processes, scripted in cryptic messages from the Chancellor that stand in stark contrast to the performance of her avowed comm

As universities globally are being pushed to offer valid and reliable accounts of their work and performance, there is a global frenzy across university campuses for measurement and evaluation. University administrators, all set to capture university productivity in some raw number, are driven by the quest for simplified metrics, algorithms, and statistics. The controversial Purdue president Mitch Daniels, who during his time as Indiana governor had come under fire for introducing school-wide performance-driven reforms that many academics argue fundamentally broke the backbone of K-12 education in Indiana, is now all set to introduce metrics for measuring critical thinking. Faced with a faculty that is uncertain about the meaningfulness and effectiveness of a research design that would capture critical thinking, Daniels notes " "How about we get going on the meat and potatoes of critical learning and not put that off another 12 months? … There could be a little learn-

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

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

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

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