Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

The far-right thrives on hate .  Hate is both a political and an economic tool. It drives profits, both for the producers of hate and the platforms carrying the hate.  Hate delivers an ever-expanding global market of readers/viewers/listeners. Moreover, it delivers a political market . That's why hate proliferates in election cycles, building up to elections. Whether it is Modi's Hindutva , Bolsonaro's Brazilian Christo-fascism , or Trump's white supremacist Christian nationalism , far-right authoritarian strategies depend on hate to take over democratic processes and spaces. One of the cornerstones in the political mobilisation of the far-right across these movements is the attack on education and learning, seeking to replace critical education with propaganda upholding the majoritarian ideology (consider here the convergence in the attacks on history curricula), activated around drummed-up fears of what the youth are being fed in schools. Moreover, the ideology seek

Figure 1: Screen Capture of Karl du Fresne's attack on the discipline of Communication and Media Studies on The Platform [The far right in Aotearoa has been driving an organised attack on the discipline of Communication and Media Studies. This opinion piece is part of a five-part series on the organized attack of the far right on Communication and Media Studies pedagogy and research. Recently, this ecosystem has picked me as a poster child for the discipline, pushing forth a conspiracy about a sinister "Left Woke Agenda." The first two of the pieces in this series are responses to targeted attacks on my research programme, and the next three pieces will offer disciplinary analyses. Such attacks from the far-right, through mobilization of othering discourse , rendered virality through digital platforms, are integral to the mobilization of violence targeting academics. As a member of the Board of the International Communication Association, I think it is critical that we ta

The figure of the "Miya" forms the infrastructure of the anti-Muslim hate in Assam, the Northeast frontier of India.  In this essay, I will argue that the genocidal hate reflected in anti-Muslim violence and anti-Muslim public policies in Assam is mirrored in the ongoing production of the "Muslim other" in the infrastructure of the fascist National Register for Citizens (NRC) carried out by the Hindutva regime.  The rhetorical trope of the "Miya" depicts the power of cultural discourse in organizing violence through the turn to a monolithic cultural essence based on exclusion.  The construction of the "Miya" as the Muslim other lies at the core of the cultural chauvinism that has historically mobilized the middle-class, upper-caste cultural nationalist movement in Assam. Elsewhere, I have described the communicative tools that actively produce "the other" to organize cultural nationalism , constructing the nation on the basis of a monol

Image taken from the Twitter account @grugstan depicting Nazi salute at the anti-transgender rally in Australia, March 18, 2023 The Christchurch terrorist attack is often individualized in mainstream public discourse as the act of an individual extremist.  This individualization of white supremacist violence is an essential feature of the whiteness of the settler colonial state. In this individualizing ideology, violence is attributed to a lone extremist who has been radicalized.  The Christchurch terrorist attack on two masjids in March, 2019 killed  44 Muslims praying at the mosque The response then is an individualizing response, directed at the individual extremist with the justice system of the settler colonial state organized to respond to the extremist.  The intelligence-security apparatus of the settler colonial state is organized around techniques of surveillance and monitoring directed at identifying and containing individuals likely to be radicalized and turned into extremis

Image from AAUP I have written elsewhere about the communicative infrastructure of the Free Speech Union and the investment of this infrastructure in a particular form of free speech that reproduces the hegemony of the powerful while continuing to perpetuate the silencing of marginalized voices. In my analysis, I noted that the survey designed by the Union to assess academic freedom in Aotearoa New Zealand seemed to have a preconfigured ideological agenda. The items guiding the report put out by the Free Speech Union seem to have been designed to reach the preconfigured conclusion that there is a "woke culture" threat to academic freedom in Aotearoa New Zealand, some kind of conspiracy of social justice warriors to shut down academic freedom. Salient here is the framing of the issues tied to freedom of speech, “gender and sex issues” and “treaty issues.” I had written about how these two issues are the sites of targeted attacks by the far-right at the margins of society in

I have been so looking forward to reading Byron Clark's "Fear." Over the past three years, as I have read and watched Clark's analyses of the far-right ecosystem in Aotearoa New Zealand, I have come to respect his evidence-based analytic work that is at the same time activist , directly responding to the threats to marginalized communities posed by far-right extremism. His analytic work has been critical to the ongoing challenges to far-right extremism led by activists. Byron's knowledge of the hate ecosystem emerges directly from the empirically grounded challenge he has posed to this ecosystem by placing his body on the line . It is worth pointing out here, that like many other activists in this space, Byron mostly does this work as unpaid labor, and he sustains himself through his day job (I will return to this point toward the end of the article). So, when some of my activist interlocutors whose work challenges Islamophobic hate in Aotearoa sent me a review of

  The neoliberal university is replete with a large-scale overload of managers. These are non-academics, mostly without PhDs, that are hired to manage academics and the academic processes of the University. These managers have mostly never stepped into a doctoral programme, a research field, or the classroom. So mostly they have no clue about the academic mission of a university. This is a problem because if you don't know the service or the product you are managing, you would be clueless about how to manage that service or product. So, although these managers are hired to increase efficiency, they end up severely depleting efficiency, cause harm to university processes, destroy the academic culture of the university, and severely deplete its productivity. These managers infantilize academics and mostly have very little respect for the labour of academics. This results in the ongoing devaluing of academic labour, be in teaching, research, or public engagement, with academics bogged