Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Figure: An image from CARE's "I Choose Highbury" campaign In Aotearoa New Zealand, the land of stunning landscapes and a purportedly egalitarian spirit, there's an undercurrent that often goes unspoken: a culture of mediocrity intertwined with whiteness that systematically sidelines bold, disruptive work—especially when it challenges the Pākehā status quo. This isn't just abstract theory; it's lived experience. Let me share a recent reflection from my own journey in academia, one that highlights how white privilege operates through funding panels, perpetuates mediocrity, and ultimately wastes resources while marginalizing brown excellence. The Grant Rejection: Praise from Peers, Dismissal from the Panel It started with a grant application to a major New Zealand funder. Our project proposal underwent external peer review, and the feedback was glowing. Reviewers lauded its methodological rigor, ambitious scope, theoretical relevance, novelty, and potential for r...

The Zionist Free Speech Union Board Member Dane Giraud appearing on the far-right media space The Platform In an era where the language of "terrorism" is weaponized to maintain power imbalances, the CCA offers a powerful lens for understanding how settler colonial structures perpetuate violence. It illuminates the ways in which settler colonial terror operates—not just through physical acts of dispossession and genocide, but through communicative strategies that label critical voices as "terror" itself. This communicative inversion lies at the heart of the global propaganda networks of Zionism. This blog post explores this dynamic, drawing on the theoretical framework to show how such naming is integral to reproducing and perpetuating settler colonial terrorism. Ultimately, it calls for culture-centered scholarship that decolonizes terrorism studies by centering the voices of the marginalized and naming the role of settler colonial terror in sustaining genocide, ra...