Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Much of the work of authoritarian regimes is on deploying the power of totality to silence voice(s). The capacity of voice to disrupt the power and control of the regime perhaps is one of the most fundamental fears that drive regimes. Regimes, obsessed with power, operate on the perpetual fear of the loss of power. Inherent in the workings of the regime is a deep-seated anxiety about the threat to the exercise of power and control that constitutes its everyday legitimacy. Regimes therefore invent a variety of techniques, from forced disappearance and murder, to arrests for threatening national security, to police investigations for scandalizing the legitimacy of existing power structures, to criminal defamation suits. Although the degree of violence and force differs across the techniques, what is common to them is the deployment of state structures to silence voice. The state, rather than being a resource embedded in democratic norms, is mobilized to silence differenc...

Professor Mohan J. Dutta will deliver the keynote titled "Decolonizing the rural: Rural economies and radical democracies in sustaining futures" at the " Rural Socio-Economic Transformation: Agrarian, Ecology, Communication and Community Development Perspectives" Conference held at the  IPB International Conference Center Bogor, West Java , INDONESIA on November 14 and 15, 2018. He will be joining the  Minister of Village, Development of Disadvantaged Regions And Transmigration, Republic of Indonesia, in the Opening Plenary. Here's the details of his talk: Decolonizing the rural: Rural economies and radical democracies in sustaining futures The rural has been conceptualized in top-down expert/elite driven interventions emerging from the global centers of power as passive sites of interventions. Expert interventions serving capitalist and colonialist agendas have systematically targeted the rural as the primitive "other" to be saved through mar...

"Being strict" if often a code for abuse in academia. "Being strict" produces and enables cultures of abuse by legitimizing abusive faculty behaviors. The guise of "being strict" justifies faculty behaviors that target students, making them acceptable, almost desirable to the university, as behaviors that protect and uphold the standards of academe. Moreover, "she is only being strict" is often the justification that enablers of abuse in faculty cultures use to support perpetrators of abuse, while at the same time retaining their pretend-radical, privileged positions as so-called voices of societal conscience. I can turn the other way and not say anything about ongoing abuse in my department as long as I can tell myself "Oh, she is just being strict." Imagine a Full Professor that systematically abuses graduate students, berating them publicly, going off in a fit of rage without any reason and attacking their competence. ...

When I was trained as a health communication scholar, much of my learning was based on the model of individual behavior change, defining communication as messages directed at raising awareness, changing attitudes, and promoting healthy behaviors. This line of health communication scholarship has had a long history, having been applied to create and strategically disseminate health messages to target populations. My ongoing journey in collaborating with communities at the margins taught me that the problem of health inequalities that I was grappling with were much more to do with existing structural inequalities that constitute health than to do with the absence of knowledge, attitudes, and individual behaviors. Although communication as message could indeed be directed at target populations, such a narrow framework of communication did not really address the larger structural inequalities, the inequality in income distribution, the absence of structural resources, the poverty of...

Pakeha claims to merit often obfuscate the structures of Whiteness that make invisible Pakeha mediocrity, inverting Pakeha mediocrity as merit. The ability to erase the sources of its privilege is fundamental to the reproduction of privilege. Pakeha privilege reproduces itself by bringing forth the question of merit, articulating that merit ought to serve as the basis for evaluations, appointments, and mobility. The language of meritocracy on the surface appears committed to equality and claims to offer a level playing field. Commitments to addressing deep-seated racist inequalities are then projected as anti-meritocratic. Yet, what this discourse of merit strategically erases are the fundamentally racist inequities in how structures are constituted that underlie access to the playing field. The rules of the game are dictated by the White majority culture, embedded in its logics of White norms. Moreover, the claims to merit often work to hide the lack of merit in mainstrea...

Professor Mohan Dutta delivers keynote at International Conference on Communication and Media, 2018. Resisting culture as neoliberal development: Indigenous imaginaries of alternative economies With the incorporation of culture as a tool of development, neoliberal cultural studies have articulated the imaginary of a post-ideological global order to extract cultural articulations as sites of privatization, free market promotion, and extraction of labour and raw material. The turn to culture in neoliberal development under the framework of cultural intelligence, public culture, creative city promotion deploys the logic of culture precisely as an instrument for market promotion. Drawing upon the culture-centered approach that offers a framework for solidarity at the margins that resist the neoliberal order, I will attend to indigenous imaginary of alternative economies rooted in cultural articulations of socialist development and social justice.

The problem of academic dishonesty is a key challenge in many rankings-chasing Asian universities. Practices of stealing works of students and junior colleagues are often embedded in power hierarchies of Asian cultures, where the culture of stealing is normalized into notions of academic position. Consider for instance a full professor that owns a laboratory and critical equipment infrastructure in the laboratory. He then expects every Assistant Professor using the equipment to include him as an author. Consider another instance of an Associate Professor in Quantum Physics collaborating on a project with an Assistant Professor [based on an idea developed by the Assistant Professor] take the key ideas framing the project and apply them to a different context to publish a first-authored journal article where she claims ownership of the key ideas. Consider another instance of an Assistant Professor in Biomedicine working on a collaborative grant with a Full Professor...

Growing up in the mofussil in a context of the trade union movement and rural organizing, I learned early on from my everyday environment to be suspicious of the category of the "Calcatian antel" aka the "intellectual" or the "intellectual of the Calcutta brand." You identify this kind with its class history as a collaborator of the power elite. High on rhetorical flourish, and vacuous in substance, this is the class that will make all kinds of commitments about solidarity when convenient and disappear when solidarity is actually needed in struggles of change. With a father working as an extractive manager for one of the large corporations that inhabited Calcutta of the 1960s and 1970s, the Calcatian antel went to an elite convent in South Calcutta, and then to one of the elite Calcutta institutions where the children of the well-heeled go. Having grown up very much as a class collaborator, the village and the rural and the poor didn't ex...

  At the 103rd annual convention of the National Communication Association in Dallas, Texas, the association highlighted the many ways NCA members are practicing solidarity in the age of globalization, in large part by sharing their expertise as communication teachers, scholars, and practitioners with a wide range of international community partners. While NCA continues to celebrate creative partnerships that can fuel international collaborations, the association believes also that showing solidarity means highlighting flagrant violations of human rights in rogue regimes and elsewhere around the globe. For example, in December 2017, Jolovan Wham, a veteran Singaporean activist, was jailed on the charge of violating Singapore’s Public Order Act, under which even one person can be considered an “illegal assembly.” Wham was practicing the cherished right of free speech when arrested. Wham’s case is particularly pertinent for NCA , as he is a collaborator with NCA member Dr...

The Nas Daily video  blog on Singapore and the social media buzz it created in Singapore around its authenticity reminded me of my own negotiations in Singapore. Let me begin by saying, I love Singapore. Of the many parts of the world I have traveled to and lived in, Singapore tops the charts. I have loved Singapore from back when I was a teenager, forming some of my impressions and ideas of development,  progress, growth from the story of Singapore. One of the earliest stories of Singapore I had read was an Opinion piece by the Bengali journalist Sunanda K Datta Ray, then editor of The Statesman (the paper that most Bhadralok Bengalis wanting to perfect the art of English prose read those days). Datta Ray, although a narrator of a different genre from the now-famous Vlogger Nas Daily, crafted a story of Singapore that is all too similar to the punchy Nas Daily vlog: Singapore, the model of Asian development at the crossroads of Asia....

The colonial roots of the modernist framework of free speech is embedded in hegemonic constructions of civility. Inherent historically in the idea of free speech is the marking of communicative space, shaped in the ambits of colonial power. Free speech and colonialism are co-constitutive. The freedom to speak historically belonged to the White colonial master, even as the colonized were systematically and often violently erased from the spaces and sites of articulation. Marked as the "other" of civility, the colonized belonged outside the public sphere, outside the domains of civil society. White colonial societies reproduced the image of the primitive savage to erase colonized voices even as they celebrated emancipatory ideas of free speech. The freedom of speech thus was a privilege of White colonialists while colonized savages, the other of modernity, were systematically erased from spaces of participation. As colonized voices started emerging in resistance...