The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  When white mediocrity calls the IITs a "junk house": what the trolls reveal about the long afterlife of empire By Mohan J. Dutta, Dean's Chair Professor of Communication, Massey University; Director, Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) Over the past several months I have been the target of a coordinated online harassment campaign in Aotearoa New Zealand. The campaign has many themes, but a small and revealing strand keeps surfacing in the comment threads: jabs at my education. "World renowned, I think not, he has an Indian degree." "Must have graduated from one of those fake degree factories." "What even is IIT, some Indian junkhouse." "Never heard of it." These comments are not, in any meaningful sense, claims about the Indian Institutes of Technology. They are claims about who is permitted to be taken seriously in a Western public sphere, and whose credentials are presumed to be counterfeit...

  Solidarity holds us: a culture-centered note on community, critique, and the work of being held By Mohan J. Dutta, Dean's Chair Professor of Communication, Massey University , and founding Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) . I want to write this post as a record. Not the analytic record, which I have built across white papers and journal articles on the Free Speech Union , Family First NZ , the Hindutva infrastructure in Aotearoa and the broader far right pipeline. This post is the record of solidarity. This post is the record of who has held me up, household by household, when the targeting has arrived in waves since September 2025. This post names them. The naming is the work. The pattern: not one incident, a sustained campaign In September 2025 I wrote, on X and on my CARE blog , that Charlie Kirk was a white supremacist far right figure, and that the attempt by the Deputy Prime Minister to memorialise him in the New Zea...

  The Excellence They Cannot Bear: Maiki Sherman, White Backlash, and the Global War on Indigenous Women in Journalism A CCA reading of brilliance, structural envy, and the international architecture of resentment I. The Award On the night of 22 May 2026, in a ballroom in Tāmaki Makaurau, the New Zealand Media Awards named Maiki Sherman the Political Journalist of the Year. The judges, Graeme Muir and Leigh Pearson, wrote that her portfolio "took the viewer into a highly charged, multi-layered news story, drawing on contacts, knowledge, and insight," and that her "storytelling was exemplary, bringing impact and on-the-ground reality to a powerful political story." Guyon Espiner of RNZ was runner-up. Thomas Coughlan of the NZ Herald was a finalist. This is the senior political-press field in Aotearoa, and at the top of it, recognised by her peers, was a Māori woman. The standard had been set earlier in the same awards by Q+A with Jack Tame's interview with ...

When parliament defines a woman, whose woman are they defining? The Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill has passed its first reading in our parliament, with National and ACT lining up behind New Zealand First to write into Aotearoa's law that a woman is "an adult human biological female" and a man "an adult human biological male." Jenny Marcroft, the MP whose name the bill carries, told the House that what it means to be a woman is "under attack," and that this legislation will deliver clarity and consistency by reflecting reality in the language of our laws. Winston Peters framed the bill as Aotearoa "catching up" to the United Kingdom's Supreme Court. New Zealand First vowed to fight what it calls " cancerous social engineering " and "woke ideology." This is the script. The same script, almost word for word, that the transnational far right has been circulating through its ecosystem for ...

  When the "lone blogger" amplifies the far right: Ani O'Brien, Tommy Robinson, and the mainstreaming of Islamophobic conspiracy in Aotearoa By Mohan J. Dutta Yesterday in central London, tens of thousands of supporters of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon — better known as Tommy Robinson — packed Parliament Square as he asked them: "Are you ready for the Battle of Britain?" The framing was deliberate. The "Battle of Britain" invokes wartime mythology of national survival against an existential foreign enemy. In the grammar of the contemporary far right, that enemy is Muslims. As the BBC reported , the rally extended a militant trajectory that began with September's 150,000-strong "Unite the Kingdom" march, at which Elon Musk told the crowd by video link: "Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or die." This is the political ecology in which I want to situate a question that is increasingly ...