A culture-centered project is a journey in humility, an ongoing process of "learning to unlearn" the theories, concepts, and tools one has been taught to learn to excel in the academic pursuit of success. To listen to voices of communities at the margins of the social system of which the academic is a part, one has to look carefully at one's own position as an academic within this network of privilege. To look at and carefully examine one's own position is to acknowledge the confluence of structures that reproduce this privilege, the very structures that also produce under-privilege. What are my privileges, how have and how are these privileges produced, and how do I benefit from these privileges? How do my privileges produce under-privilege? In other words, privilege and under-privilege are two sides of the same coin. Because I am privileged, because I occupy a position of privilege, someone else is positioned as without privilege. In this sense, I as an a
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.