Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

CARE collaborators activists Vanessa Ho & Sherry Sherqueshaa The CCA begins with the recognition that to address health inequalities, unhealthy structures need to be fundamentally transformed. Without changing these highly unequal structures, the overarching conditions that threaten the health of the poorest and the most marginalized remain intact. The health inequalities persist because the structures continue to threaten the health of the most vulnerable, producing precarious conditions of life and livelihood. As an explicit framework for communicating for health equity then, the CCA brings about a paradigm shift in traditional health communication. Acknowledging the limits of behaviour change programs that individualize health risks, the CCA shifts the role of communication to advocacy directed explicitly at resisting and transforming structures. CARE's activist-in-residence program models this framework of social change communication as integral to the transformati

It is increasingly fashionable for a certain brand of Cultural Studies to declare, "resistance is irrelevant." This brand of cultural studies, I term as "neoliberal Cultural Studies," re-fashions cultural studies as superficial definition of cultural artefacts in the service of the global free market. Inherent here is the agenda of knowledge production to serve the neoliberal turn. The surface-level description of cosmopolitanism, hybridity, and cultural heritages in global markets is re-worked into the ideology of the free market, depicting the collaborative possibilities that are opened up through the expansion of the free market. Culture, and the knowledge about culture, in this depiction is worked into the global logics of the free market. Depictions of contexts and objects immersed in these contexts uncritically reproduce market-driven logics describing global flows. Depictions of consumption practices for instance offer celebratory narratives of t

I was interrogated by the system, "What do human rights have to do with health communication?" The culture-centered approach seeks to build communicative infrastructures for listening to the voices of the margins. The communicative infrastructures serve as anchors to the articulation of transformative processes that challenge the unhealthy structures that constitute health. The recognition that the inequalities in health outcomes are often produced by highly unequal structures that are sustained and reproduced by unhealthy policies emerges as the basis for health communication as health advocacy. In the voices of the margins, the challenges to health are often understood as challenges of human rights. Beginning with the notion that health is a fundamental human right, communities at the margins co-create advocacy strategies directed at resisting structures that deny them this fundamental human right. As a way of responding to the interrogation, I went back to the

Harmony is often used as a term drawn from Confucianism and other cultural tropes connected to Chinese origin narratives to portray a positive narrative of institutional and organizational cultures. In such narratives, a desirable harmonious structure is one that is devoid of conflict and dialectics, one where "all get along." The condition of "getting along" is placed in opposition to notions of conflict and argumentation. Obfuscated in this narrative however is the way in which the concept of harmony serves as a trope for reproducing and protecting privilege in Chinese majority societies. As a trope, harmony calls for the production of consent, while simultaneously erasing the voices of difference and dissent. "Other" voices from elsewhere are projected as threatening to the desired state of equilibrium. That this desired state of equilibrium often typically serves the dominant elite categories is obfuscated in the discursive space. The voi

Raksha Mahtani Raksha Mahtani is currently a teaching assistant in Communications and New Media. Before this, she served as a Research Assistant at the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) and at the Asia Research Institute (ARI). Raksha’s work on academic-activist collaborations explores the ways in which social impact can be theorized, measured, and evaluated. 1.       Please share with us your CNM journey. You know, I first came to CNM in 2008, during my sabbatical from Purdue University. This was a way for Debalina and I to be together for the first time as a family in the same space because of the US immigration laws that meant that she had to wait before migrating to the US. Then head Milagros Rivera was building a department that was truly inter-disciplinary, bringing together computing scientists, interactive media designers, artists, social scientists and humanities scholars to generate a creative space for conversati

Having watched the long six hour exchange that seemed like an interrogation of the scholar PJ Thum, I felt a sense of sadness. Academics are often called upon as experts to offer their knowledge in policy making processes. However, I had not personally witnessed anything like this in any other part of the developed world. Here we had a politician, a representative of the state, performing what appeared to be an interrogation of an academic under the framework of a select committee, carrying out a performance that begun and ended with the scholar's integrity and academic credibility being brought under scrutiny. The performance, I worry, if not interrogated for its quality and tenor, will send out a chilling message to academics in Singapore and elsewhere working on Singapore-related issues, especially when the findings of their work don't align with or even interrogate the state-sponsored line. [Now even writing about this, while sitting here in Singapore

A critical component of the social justice work of CARE is the work of communication in imagining and working toward structural transformation. Structural transformation in political, economic, social, and cultural formations is explicitly intertwined with the work of co-creating communicative spaces in working with the margins. To work toward co-creating these communicative spaces is to perform "embodied risk." The formation of communicative structures at/with the margins embodies risks to the material and symbolic formations of CARE work. These risks, expressed in the form of various strategies of repression directed at the work of culture-centered approach, are indicators of the very transformative nature of culture-centered projects. Because and when the work of CARE co-creates infrastructures of participation at the margins, various forms of power and control are directed at the work. These risks, experienced on the body as the corpus of social justice work,

The turn to "culture" as a legitimate tool for measurement, evaluation, prescription, and implementation is intertwined with the incorporation of culture into sites of state-market control. Culture, as the handmaiden of the neoliberal transformation of societies, is incorporated into the logics imposed by the state toward the transformation of human lives under the overarching logic of the market. The cultural subject is an individualized self-interested consumer, participating through the state-controlled techniques of hyper-engagement to generate revenues for the market. The authoritarian techniques deployed by the state mechanize the terms, textures, techniques, and possibilities for cultural participation. The message, "the market rules," is incorporated into a wide range of cultural artefacts that consistently sings the song of the market. Cultural consumption, mediated through the market logics, is turned into points of profiteering, simultaneou

The circulation of the "fake news" discourse reinvents the Cold War narrative of geoinsecurity to reinforce the power and control of hegemonic power structures globally. In the hands of the global elite, "fake news" is the new instrument for reproducing elite power and control, recycled as the weapon for silencing difference, working through the role of the state in carrying out techniques of social media governmentality. The manufacturing of threats serve the strategic purpose of introducing greater and newer methods of repression. Similar to the strategic manufacturing of the "Red threat" as a basis for authoritarian control and repression during the Cold War, the manufacturing of the "fake news" agenda serves as the pretext for the reproduction of draconian laws that fundamentally threaten free speech and freedom of expression. As in the instance of the "Red threat," the paradox of the "fake news" trope is its re

Universities, as modern capitalist organizations, reproduce practices of exploitation that are often obfuscated by the gloss of projected images. Metric mania, the drive toward simply counting in the game toward rankings, is reflected in the blind allegiance in such Universities globally to measuring dollar values of grants and numbers of publications in varieties of tiered journals (tiering itself is a form of categorization that reproduces exploitative practices). One of the effects of this neoliberal obsession with metrics is its role in (re)producing cultures of academic practices that threaten the very nature of academic work. Academic integrity is sacrificed to the accelerated quest for numbers. One such threat to academic integrity is reflected in rent-seeking behaviors of senior academics. What is projected as the academic culture of collaboration driven by faculty in senior ranks within institutions is often driven by practices of exploitation (Of course, there a

In the many culture-centered projects implemented across the globe, the development of habits of participatory communication in local cultural logics and in ongoing relationships with structures is integral to the co-construction of social change interventions. Communication as advocacy emerges from within the infrastructures of participatory communication grounded in community life. For instance, the understanding of racism as a chronic determinant of cardiovascular disease among African Americans emerges as a site for participatory politics that seeks to transform the unhealthy structures of racism. In doing so, advocacy directed at transforming racist structures is fundamentally grounded in local participatory logics of community life. Movements such as the #BlackLivesMatter movement emerge as grassroots-driven, community participatory spaces directed at transforming the structures. The understanding that health is constituted in the organizing of local-global structures i