Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

The best of my teachers pushed my comfort zones and tested my ability to learn, stretching my imagination and my intellectual capacities, and emboldening me to be open to experimenting. The classroom as a site of experimentation and new learning however is increasingly becoming rare, ironically in a global environment that has latched on to the buzzwords of innovation, creativity, and experimentation. An increasing threat globally to the spirit of education as experimentation and new learning is the reduction of education to the dictates of a homogeneous mass market. A mass market-based logic conceptualizes education as a commodity measured on fairly homogeneous sets of criteria applied uncritically. Excellence, innovation, multiculturalism, global outlook—these are the buzzwords for most universities catering to a global market, with little room for differentiation. Each of these terms, excellence, innovation, multiculturalism, global outlook, otherwise admirable m

It was during the 1970s when the world witnessed the uprising of Jamaican people against the neocolonial in the country to improve their social conditions. It is thrilling to see the unique bond the movement shared with Reggae, its worldwide popularity, and how it reshaped the meaning of the whole movement. It is known that reggae music increased the visibility and popularity of the Rastafarian movement worldwide, but it also made the movement impure and gave rise to a new group called the pseudo-rastafarians, perpetuated the nuances of the two ideological groups - political and religious rastafarians into irreconcilable rift.   In its journey from the primitive studios in Jamaica to the state-of-the-art studios in the United States or Great Britain, the reggae music lost its true essence of the movement, and the portrayal of the Rastafarian movement metamorphosed into a pan-African movement. Unlike early roots reggae, the worldwide popular reggae music projected the Rastafarians,

Cultural studies has taken much inspiration from postcolonial studies, and adopted critique as its main strategy. Critiquing, although a powerful tool, especially in creating counter discourses, whether it is to counter colonial historiography or neoliberal consumerist logics, it is basically a tool in the hands of the literate intellectuals having abilities to express the critique eloquently. How does then cultural studies relate to the indigenous struggles and everyday lives of people? How does the project of cultural studies change the material conditions that facilitate neoliberal capitalism? As Pezzulo (2011) contends, drawing inspiration from Grossberg, that there is a need for pragmatic practices of social change (p.127). A necessary shift from postcolonial studies, according to me is to engage not in historical narratives, but with the contemporary ones, where change can be effected in the present. Cultural studies stands to offer important guidance for this age

Upon reading Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak" and Mohan Dutta and Ambar Basu's "Negotiating our Postcolonial Selves", I noted the point made that work involving the subaltern comes "with no guarantees" because the subaltern is heterogeneous and hence, "non-narrativisible". The understanding I derive from this is that the researcher, with all his or her privileges, cannot ever fully be in the shoes or fully understand the subaltern participant because he or she can never have the same lived experiences of that person. We need to come to terms with the other's difference and accept the impossibility of ever knowing it because it exceeds our understanding or expectations. Here, I am reminded of the time when I began my study into the benzene poisoning of factory migrant workers in southern China in 2013. At a meeting with four collaborators, three of whom were themselves subaltern victims of occupational illnesses, I presented my i

Mediocrity and the race to leadership Globally, the crisis of academic leadership is a phenomenon felt across University campuses, especially as campuses struggle to find the anchors on which they can overlay their vision and mission. One of the problems across these University campuses is the rise of the mediocre careerist that is all too hungry for power. Leadership, rather than emerging as a response to a calling, has become a product of strategizing, planning, and mapping. Leadership, rather than being a function of integrity and ethics, has been turned into a well practiced ritual of sycophancy. As a result, what you get in many leadership positions on University campuses today are mediocre academics who are unsuccessful in their academic pursuits, have poor CVs, but have figured out very well how to network, understand the organizational culture, and speak to the right person at the right time. For these careerists, the way to power is their cultural capital in the

In this blog-post I want to suggest that an interpretive research project based on farmers’ suicides in India would look different from a CCA project even though it draws on interpretive tradition. A short literature review of the articles on farmers’ suicides revealed to me that the aim of an interpretive project could focus on the ‘meanings’ of suicides (e.g. Münster, 2015; Kaushal, 2015; Shah, 2012). These articles also ground the meanings of suicides in a critical framework, where they offer a critique of statistical representations of the data by the Indian state, various forms of public discourse such as literary works, documentaries, corporate social responsibility initiatives, and singular cases where individuals from high paying jobs work for improving the situation of the farmers. Kaushal (2015) alludes to solidarity with the marginalized populations when she suggests that however distant the responses from middle class public discourses are from the realities of the farm