As professors, students, researchers, we live amid incredible privileges. These privileges are products of organizing structures of societies that enable and reward specific forms of participation while simultaneously undermining other forms of participation. One of the outcomes of an identity-based education that is all too ensconced in apolitical identity politics is its inability to interrogate the politics of knowledge production. As a consequence, in many of the classes we teach, we leave un-interrogated our own positions of privilege and the positions of privilege our students occupy. By being in the classroom, our students occupy positions of privilege. Especially so when access to education is a commodity, out of reach for large sections of the population. I am often struck therefore by students who walk into the classroom with the deeply held notion that they are Gifts of God, that they are special. An identity-based education that is propped up on the tools o
This blog offers Mohan Dutta's reflections on the theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach, examining the interplays among Structure, Culture, and Agency in shaping marginalisation and the ways in which communities at the margins challenge structures. Writings on the blog are continually being revised to reflect the organic analysis of structure and agency.