Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

I attended earlier this month a good friend and classmate’s wedding in Vietnam, but as usual, I did not do any research about the place I was going to, preferring to let serendipity take me wherever it pleased. My friend’s hometown, Bien Hoa city, is about a 45-minute car ride from Ho Chi Minh City airport. Her husband’s friends and I arrived at our hotel in the late afternoon, which didn’t leave us with much time before we were bussed off to dinner together. That evening, when I returned to the hotel, I searched on my phone for highlights in the city that I thought I might visit after the wedding lunch reception the next day. My google search yielded the following: Workshop highlights dioxin contamination at Bien Hoa Airport en.vietnamplus.vn/workshop- highlights -dioxin... bien - hoa .../67199.vnp o     Cached Oct 21, 2014 - Around 250000 cu.m of soil in Bien Hoa City , the southern province of Dong Nai, are contaminated with dioxin at levels ranging from 1000 ppt 

Marginalization happens at various levels- sometimes it’s a community and sometimes it’s a land. The north eastern pat of India have generally failed to get much attention as any other part of India. For most of the mainlanders (as we like to call them), few words that come to their mind instantly are exotic, disturbed area, seven sisters, Assam etc. The land where I grew up also goes through the same crisis. I have always struggled to explain to people about the place from where I am. I belong to one of the tiniest states of north east, Tripura.  There could be possibly various reasons for the ignorance of people or the mainlanders. One of the reasons could be scanty representation of this place in media or our school text books. The severe under representation of the north east India is something worth thinking about. It diminishes the space for debates over serious issues and problems of north east. Lack of knowledge or it’s topography could possibly be one of the

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