Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

In this blog, I want to question the idea of ‘legitimacy’ within the discourse of development – the legitimacy of certain people as citizens.  I want to ask, who are the people that a developing country considers to be important for continuing to chart a successful path towards development? And who are the people that a developing nation considers to be unimportant for its development? I want to show that the narrative of development has a large share in maintaining the ideas of legitimacy. I will explore the idea of ‘legitimacy’ in the context of the farmer population in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra in India.  On the basis of news results that appeared on the first page of Google News, for the keyword search of ‘farmers’ suicides Maharashtra’, the following observations and analysis was made. The articles relating to farmers’ suicides often spoke of the causes and solutions to the given situation where farmers in Maharashtra are committing suicides in large number

Recently, a photograph showing a staff of a famous Singapore confectionary chain filling up plastic bottles with soya milk from another company went viral. Netizens were incensed because this publicly-listed confectionary BreadTalk had been selling soya bean milk for years, billing it as “freshly-prepared”. The company quickly pulled its product from its shelves and issued an apology that baffled more than it explained. “We've heard your concerns over our soya bean beverage sold in stores … We would like to apologise for any misaligned presentation or wrong impressions created, and clarify that it is never our intention to mislead,” according to its press release. I was gobsmacked. Here was a company that not only was using language hideously to get out of a tight spot, it had for years instructed its employees to deceive. And why did it take so long for this to emerge? Why wasn’t there any whistleblower? Surely this act cannot be perceived as honest any way you cut it. Ho

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