Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Add caption   If you are at all conversant with Bengali culture, you are likely to have come across the "andaje gombhir" Bengali.  The term "andaje gombhir" is contextually Bengali, one that is difficult to translate literally into English. Roughly, it translates into the "know-it-all" pretentious intellectual-performing Bengali that has an expert opinion on every subject and is entitled to pass such opinion, irrespective of her/his expertise. For instance, the andaje gombhir Bong will tell you autoethnography is an useless a-theoretical fad, one that is anti-intellectual. When you ask the andaje gombhir Bong to elaborate on that opinion, she/he will have nothing of substance to back up the statement, except to perform a serious intellectual-appearing face. The non-verbals will tell you that as a mere mortal, your asking for backing for the claim, is out of line. The andaje gombhir Bong will declare that your question about theorizing social class in inter

CARE community researchers and organizers co-creating a food distribution system amidst COVID-19 The culture-centered approach (CCA) lives in, breathes from, struggles through the skin.  We have to be willing to see and name our complicities with the structures, as well as struggle through in dismantling these structures if we care about transformation.  Without this willingness to see one's complicity and the commitment to work to dismantle it, our critical articulations reproduce the colonizing logics of the structures. Any theorizing of the CCA therefore has to work by grappling with what it is to work of/from/with/in/through the skin.  To work of/from/with/in/through the skin is to have the politics of one's skin embedded within the struggle for structural transformation. To work of/from/with/in/through the skin is to commit to ameliorating the tragedies of life that are inflected daily on the margins. Without the "skin in the transformation," the theorizing work

  One of the most powerful tropes of neoliberal governmentality is happiness.  Individualizing the anxiety, anguish, and deep sense of insecurity that are the byproducts of five decades of relentless neoliberal transformations, the owners of transnational capital and the enabling structures of the state proselytize us into happy subjects who see inequality, poverty, precarity, and struggles as personal failures. The prescription then is to turn these personal failures into successes in the competitive neoliberal order.  To succeed in the marketplace, one must first and foremost be happy. One must learn to find joy and be joyful. One must be self-fulfilled so he/she can find fulfillment in the mechanisms of the market. Any failure to attain happiness, joyfulness, and a state of self-fulfillment is a personal failure.  An entire industry of self-help, pop psychology, meditation, and new age spiritualism has propped up to hold us up to this state of happiness. This cluster of positive emo

What would it take to create a climate for supporting empirically-grounded socially impactful social science scholarship in Singapore? This is a question that has surfaced over the last five years, including generating substantive discussions in media, public sphere, and political discourse. Analysts often point to the lack of empirically-grounded socially impactful social science scholarship in Singapore. The problem is often positioned as one related to rankings, suggesting implicitly that the drive toward rankings in Singapore-based institutions has a key role to play in the lack of social relevance of social science scholarship. The solution to this lack of socially impactful social science scholarship is often framed as the need for hiring a core of Singaporean academics that would be committed to the local context. In this blog post, I will argue that while the drive toward rankings is indeed an impediment toward generating socially impactful scholarship in Singapore (with the em

For anyone that has been to a Durga Puja in Singapore, the account I offer here is both familiar and often accepted as normative.  Durga Puja is a celebration of Bengalis, a five-day festival that celebrates the victory of the Goddess Durga over Mahishashura (the asuras are synonimized with evil) in upper caste Hindu narrative (inverting the narrative of violence carried out by upper caste Hindus over the indigenous peoples, as voiced in Santali narratives of the festival). In Bengal, Durga Puja is celebrated over a period of five days although the preparations for the festivities take place often over two months. The celebrations of the Durga Puja in Singapore take place in two distinct registers, narrativizing the trajectories through which caste and class in the Bengali context travel through Singapore.  The puja of the expatriate, upper caste, upper class Hindu Bengalis, mostly from West Bengal (henceforth referred to as expat), and the puja of the working class Bengali migrant wor

When voices from the margins speak out/up, the dominant structures will respond by attempting to silence these voices. Whether you are co-creating a culture-centered intervention within a form of government that presents itself as a democracy or in a form of government that is more strictly authoritarian or a form of government that is somewhere in between, power is invested in protecting itself. To protect their interests, those in power will create as normative/cultural specific forms and strategies of silencing voices from the margins.  Because culture-centered interventions, when they actually work, co-create infrastructures for the voices of the "margins of the margins" (see Dutta, 2020), the interventions themselves as well as the accompanying structures are often the targets of attacks. The attacks can take a wide range, from actual violence, to labeling the infrastructures as anti-national (against the national interest) to raising accusations of foreign interference

<Notes from fieldwork> Working in a patriarchal Asian authoritarian regime where university structures were deeply complicit in the reproduction and circulation of a climate of sexual harassment, one of the emergent areas for CARE's work has focused on sexual harassment within Asian universities. Through face-to-face participant observations, digital participant observations, focus groups, in-depth interviews, and two cross-sectional surveys, our team of academics, community researchers, and activists have documented the various forms of sexual harassment in Asian universities. Much of this work within the university was shaped by the recognition of the urgency of social change within the university, with multiple accounts shared by students, graduate staff, non-academic staff and junior academic staff of experiences of sexual harassment that were not dealt with.  In CARE's work with the question of sexual harassment in Asian Universities, particularly salient was the dep