Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

One of the key arguments of the CCA highlights the ways in which communication is integral to the creation of the margins. How do we as academics gathering stories from individuals, families, and communities at the margins remain accountable for the stories we tell? Whom are we accountable to for the stories we tell? And how are we complicit in reproducing marginalization even as we seek to engage with the margins? The CCA foregrounds the importance of turning narrative accountability to the margins we work with. This notion of being accountable toward the margins suggests that the narrative account voiced by the academic or the NGO has to be evaluated by those at the margins we work with.  Moreover, the notion of "working with" inverts the framework of "extracting stories from" or "targeting messages at." As a research method, the CCA anchors itself in the idea of solidarity. Collaborating with the margins is first and foremost a recognition

Across college and University campuses, groups such as Hillel have served as the mouthpiece of Israel, operating effectively to silence any criticism of Israel, the illegal Israeli occupation of land in West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, and the systematic apartheid carried out by the Israeli regime. The trope that is often deployed by these propaganda units is one of antisemitism. To the extent that something can be labelled as antisemitic, it is no longer legitimate. The legitimacy of any claim based on evidence can be discounted and silenced to the extent that the claim can be established as being antisemitic. By this logic for instance, this post documenting the linkages between the framing of antisemitism by Zionist groups as propaganda tool will be labelled as antisemitic. Drawing upon heuristics attached to antisemitism, the goal of many of these campus groups is to target vigorously any criticism of Israel and to create a climate of fear around voicing any such cr

The emails transacted over personal email accounts by the Illinois administration reveal that the Illinois administration had consulted the Public Relations firm Edelman . Now if you take a good look at Edelman, you recognize that the PR company does a lot of talking about values such as engagement, transparency, and trust. These values, Edelman suggests, are the communication values of the new millennium, essential to cultivating trust in a climate of falling trust depicted in the Edelman Trust Barometer . In fact, in an Institute of Public Relations Award ceremony speech on engagement, you hear Mr. Edelman speak eloquently about the interplay of policy and communication, suggesting that communication practitioners have a pivotal role in shaping organizational policy. Here is Mr. Edelman exhorting PR practitioners to practice PR as engagement: Given Edelman's strong claims about its commitment to engagement, it came to me as great surprise to learn that the Illin

The University of Illinois announced on August 7, 2015, that Chancellor Wise and key administrators on the Illinois campus switched to personal email accounts to communicate about sensitive issues to avoid the scrutiny brought about on the University by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the backdrop of the un-hiring of Professor Steven Salaita. For instance, in one email to a Professor of Law, Chancellor Wise noted "We are doing virtually nothing over our Illinois email addresses...I am even being careful with this email address and deleting after sending." The email is an excellent example of the sort of opaqueness with which Chancellor Wise had been making her decisions at Illinois. It is also demonstrative of a deeper sense of incivility, incivility that is depicted in her unwillingness to be held accountable. In fact, the decision to switch to a private email account and then to delete the emails demonstrates an uncivil preoccupation with holding on to power

On August 6, 2015, almost exactly a year after the academic Steven Salaita had been informed that his services at the University of Illinois were no longer needed, a federal court rejected the University's argument that it did not enter into a binding contract with Professor Salaita because the offer to employ him was subject to approval by the Illinois Board of Trustees. The court's rejection reiterates the premise under which academic hires are made across campuses in the US, with the signature by the Board of Trustees being just a rubber-stamp, an ornamental step in the hiring process. Presiding on the case, Judge Leineneweber noted, "If the court accepted the University's agreement, the entire American academic hiring process as it now operates would cease to exist, because no professor would resign a tenure position, move states, and start teaching at a new college based on an 'offer' that was absolutely meaningless until after the semester already st

As Greece prepares to vote on the referendum on July 5, 2015, we are witnessing the direct confrontation between democracy and economics, bringing to the fore the threat to democracy embodied in elite-driven expertise-based decision making reflected in the decision making structures of the Troika, namely the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. As a condition for the debt bailout program, the Troika imposed on Greece the same policy conditions that have been carried out for the previous five years to be continued, a condition that would continue to have the greatest impact on the poorest segments of the population.   Prof Dutta on Democracy and Greek Referendum Agreeing to the condition would mean that the popularly elected Syriza government that came to power on the mandate to offer an alternative to the austerity measures that have been carried out in Greece since 2010 would either need to radically shift its stance on aust

Ashish is a twenty-one year old boy of privilege, studying in one of those engineering colleges in India that his MNC Executive father placed him in by paying a large donation to the college. His upper caste dad of course was more than happy to chart out the destiny of his only child, the heir to the upper caste throne of the family. After all, this is the entitlement his dad had experienced all his life. Someone to cook, someone else to clean, someone to drive the car, and someone else to polish the shoes. Ashish had grown up seeing his dad have high expectations from those that served him. After all, a servant has to be kept in his place. Ashish had grown up seeing his parents manage this role so well, dictating, abusing, blaming, and disciplining.  Having grown up in a family of four, and being the only boy in the family that his parents so desperately wanted for many years so they could earn their legitimacy, Ashish has a strong sense of who he is in the world. He has not ha

One of the elements I often discuss when sharing the framework of the culture-centered approach (CCA) is the role of listening in opening up the space for communication. As a research device thus, listening performs a meta-theoretical function. It teaches us about the processes of communication capacity building even as it creates spaces for diverse voices, articulating multiplicities of understandings and solutions. This two-step framework is particularly salient when we as researchers work with communities at the margins. Listening is not simply about creating the spaces for those in the margins to voice their meanings but is also about questioning what we know about listening. Because our understandings of communication are situated at the intersections of culture and structure, the interpretations of listening are also contextual. So what are some ideas that we can work with when considering the processes of listening? At one level, to introduce a framework of listening into

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