Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

  "A Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight": Trumpism, White Supremacy, and the Genocidal Grammar of Empire The president's threat to annihilate Iran is not an aberration. It is the latest installment in a five-century war on the global majority — and it demands a politics equal to its scale. On the morning of April 7, 2026, the President of the United States posted the following words to his personal social media platform: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will." He then added that "now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?" He concluded by congratulating "the Great People of Iran" on the imminent end of "47 years of extortion, corruption, and death." Read it again. Read it slowly. A sitting president, speaking...

  In a tiled kitchen somewhere in East Midnapore, a woman in a cotton saree leans toward her phone camera between stirring something on the stove and answering a child off-frame. She is talking, in English, about Stanley Kubrick. Then about Premchand. Then about the way the panchayat in her village handles a woman who walks out of her marriage. Her vowels are round in places the Bombay-Delhi ear has been trained to flag. Her grammar occasionally folds in on itself the way self-taught grammar does. She does not apologise for any of it. She just keeps talking, and the Reel keeps rolling, and somewhere between the Kubrick and the Premchand a small earthquake travels up through the fibre-optic spine of the Indian internet and lands, with an audible crack, in the drawing rooms of South Bombay and South Calcutta. Her name is Pujarini Pradhan. She is a rural Bengali woman who married young, taught herself to read the books she wanted to read, and now, in 2026, runs one of the most-watch...

In the early hours of Easter Sunday 2026, as American pilots were being fished from the Persian Gulf after a high-stakes rescue mission, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social what may stand as the clearest distillation yet of how a particular strain of cultural extremism has fused with the machinery of state power. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,” he wrote. “There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” The post was not an aberration. It was the logical endpoint of a worldview that has moved, over the past decade, from the margins of American conservatism into the operational grammar of Western foreign policy.  A bridge in Karaj, Iran struck by US airstrikes, Associated Press A culture-centered analysis—one that treats foreign policy not as abstract strategy but as an extension of deeply held cultural narratives about civilization, b...

Engineering has long positioned itself as a neutral, objective discipline—one of elegant equations, efficient systems, and technical mastery. Yet in practice, it has too often served as an unwitting accomplice to inequity: dams that displace Indigenous communities without consent, algorithms that embed racial bias, infrastructure that ignores the lived realities of the poor, or “smart cities” designed from boardrooms half a world away. These are not anomalies; they are symptoms of an engineering culture that privileges universalist solutions over contextual justice. True just engineering —engineering that actively advances equity, dismantles oppression, and centers human dignity—demands more than good intentions or ethics checklists. It requires a theoretical reorientation. The culture-centered approach (CCA) offers precisely such a framework. By foregrounding the dynamic interplay of culture, structure, and agency, CCA transforms engineering from a top-down imposition into a dialogic,...