Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

The project of colonialism in India needed for its ongoing reproduction the "babu," trained in English and cultivated to serve his colonial master. The babu is educated with techniques of servitude, being taught the everyday practices of serving his master, while at the same time, subjugating the underclasses to extract the resources for his master. The babu worked in clerical jobs, various colonial administrative services, and in a wide array of intelligence functions that served the colonial machine. The "babu" therefore has historically been the very face of oppression among the poor and the underclasses in colonial Bengal. You see this in the mistrust toward the figure of the "babu" among the underclasses in present-day Bengal. The phenomenon of the colonial babu has cultivated entire generations of opportunist servants to power starting from the colonial times, ingraining in middle-class English speaking Bengalis the habits of servitude. T

It was summer. A summer when the violence escalated. In those months, when the repression accelerated from polite threats to sit down meetings to direct threats to the accusations, I was writing this encyclopedia entry on Power and Control for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Witnessing power work through the cells of my body, feeling my body respond to the repression from bouts of throwing up to losing consciousness, disrupted my understanding of power as communicative, anchoring the discursive sites of power in material articulations. I felt the brute effect of power even as I was writing about it. My readings and re-readings of Marx, Adorno, Gramsci were intimately intertwined with my experiences with power, resisting it, and negotiations of it in an ever-contingent space of (im)possibilities. In this Review, I explore the interplays of the discursive and the material in the production of power and control. Power is both a force that perpetuates oppr

Much of the terms of internationalization of Communication as a discipline driven by the International and National Communication Associations are juxtaposed in the backdrop of the proliferation of the Communication discipline outside of the U.S. Across Asia, from China and India to Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Bangladesh, communication programs have proliferated at an exponential rate. The growing communication sectors across Asia call for pedagogical opportunities that train the next generation of communication practitioners across Asia. Communication training in many parts of Asia is driven by practical industry needs for communication skills. Programs therefore focus on teaching the basic skills of journalism, marketing communication, advertising, and public relations. Although the nature of communication training varies across sub-regions and nation states within Asia, the overarching emphasis on skills training for the professional communication industries is a thread

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 and doin

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