Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

In Dutta's Communicating for Social Change, he speaks of neoliberal governance of global health by powerful institutions such as the World Health Organisation and how their agendas are in line really with the interests and agendas of powerful transnational actors. This brings to mind an important incident in 2007 after the avian H5N1 flu virus started moving from southern China to parts of the Middle East and Europe. The virus had flared anew the year before in Indonesia. The latter outbreak was worrying to the scientific community because it happened in a single extended family in Karo, Sumatra, where the virus showed sustained transmissibility, passing from relative to relative at least three times over. This opened up the possibility that it may have mutated to becoming more easily spread among humans. But what shocked the scientific community next was how Indonesia refused to share its seed virus with international scientists. Its argument was that once released, ...

Subramaniam and Kawachi's (2004) meta-analysis and research into the strength of association between income inequality and health is at best inconclusive. In their paper, they say the relationship between the two is furthermore confounded by factors such as individual income, education, regional effects and potential lag effects. Having lived in southern China for nearly two decades, I am not one to be easily sickened by bad air. During all those years, I was perhaps affected three or four times and each time, it took me around a month to get over a night cough. But this week, plantation fires in Indonesia started deliberately by Big Business to slash and burn for the next planting season has blanketed Singapore and parts of Malaysia and Indonesia with a deadly, choking haze. The pollution index shot to as high as 250 PSI (pollution standard index), which is in the "very unhealthy" range. This means even healthy persons are advised to avoid pr...

Increasingly, health communication scholarship has been arguing about the marginalized population to become the focus of health campaigns in reducing the health disparity between the health rich and health poor. The culture centered approach advocates participatory cultured centered research by deeper understanding of culture. It reinvigorates the health advocacy campaigns by listening to the health problems faced by the communities, and in looking for solutions that are meaningful to cultural members and not dictated by external entities (Dutta-Bergman, 2004). The culture-centered approach exemplifies the need for creating a space for greater critical dialogue (Dutta & DeSouza, 2008). In this blog, I seek to elucidate the need for a space in Indian news media for the marginalized community, ‘high risk’ community, while addressing HIV/AIDS. National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO), a division of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare that provides leadership to HIV/AIDS c...

In this blog I want to draw parallels in the ethnographic inquiry as a methodology used in feminist research and that used for CCA research. Women’s Studies programs in the academes emerged from women’s movements outside of academe. ‘Feminism’ itself was and is, first and foremost, activism, and then an academic enterprise. Starting with the movements for voting rights for women, and moving to ‘sisterhood’ and collectivity, and sexual rights over own bodies, to the ‘third wave’ feminism that seems to emphasize women as individuals rather than as a unified group, feminism and feminist scholarship has moved hand-in-hand. Feminism as an academic enterprise began with questioning the ‘objective’ inquiries often undertaken by male sociologists in the working sites that employed men. Feminist scholarship took women scholars to the field sites that were populated by women, such as domestic spaces. They foregrounded the knowledges that women possessed, and attempted to give what was un...

On Saturday, I headed to an election rally by the Singapore Democratic Party with my partner. It was lively and several of the candidates spoke well. Their speeches were studded with memorable anecdotes, what I always refer to as "nuggets" to my students. When it ended, we thought well, what a lovely evening, and we headed to dinner at a coffee shop nearby. The shop was packed with elderly men, mostly drinking beer and talking politics. Those who were not talking were transfixed by the TV, where the late night news was playing in Mandarin. We too watched the news as we ate, which was all about the various rallies taking place all over the island before the election on September 11. But at one juncture, I noticed a wiry, elderly man swaggering and dancing his way to the front of the TV screen. He clapped his hands and started dancing with his hands outstretched as he watched a candidate of the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) delive...

In the reading "Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research", Dwight Conquerwood cited Raymond Williams who talks about class-based arrogance of scriptocentrism, pointing to the error and delusion of highly-educated people who are so driven in on their reading (sic) that they fail to notice that there are other forms of skilled, intelligent, creative activity, such as theatre and active politics. This error resembles that of the narrow reformer who supposes that farm labourers and village craftsmen were once uneducated, merely because they could not read. He argued that the contempt for performance and practical activity, which is always latent in the highly-literate, is a mark of the observer's limits, not those of the activities themselves. I was at once moved and excited reading this as this has always been a lingering thread in my mind. Over the last two decades, I have had many encounters, deep and extended, with farmers, labourers and villagers - or...

1991 or 1992, one of those years, an impressionable time in my life, when I was being exposed to many different worldviews through introduction to new books.  Many of these books became windows into learning about the world, brought through new friendships in college. One of these books, "Atlas Shrugged" made a big impact on me as it challenged many of my earlier held beliefs and values about commitment, service, and lending your voice in solidarity with the struggles of the poor. I remember, the most exciting part of reading Ayn Rand was the exhilarating sense of freedom at the recognition that caring for others is a hypocrisy, that the best I could do was to pursue my own dreams and unleash my own capabilities. The narrative worked well because it fit nicely with my aspirations for upward mobility. Ayn Rand told me that caring for others or commitment to community are hypocrisies. The best way to contribute to society was to care for my own self and for my own...