Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

At the glittering India AI Impact Summit 2026 held in New Delhi, what was pitched as an ode to India's rapid technological advancements turned into a memefied fiasco . A private institution from Greater Noida, Galgotias University, seen in the public sphere as closely aligned with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) , displayed "Orion", a robotic dog that they claimed had been created by their Centre of Excellence.  Professor Neha Singh told the state-run broadcaster DD News during a viral interview about the robot as an exemplar of indigenous innovation, claiming, "You ⁠need to meet Orion. This has been developed by the Centre of Excellence at Galgotias University. She went on to share that it is "mischievous" and has the ability to transform itself. However, social media detectives quickly revealed the truth - Orion is the Unitree Go2, which is a commercially available robotic dog made in China that can be purchased for approximately $2,800. It is...

My commitment to anticolonial work has been forged in the fires of the Global South, where colonialism's scars run deeper than borders.  They have been shaped by my ancestors who committed to resisting the terror of the colonial apparatus, often at great personal cost. One of my grandfathers took the pledge of anticolonial struggle, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's non-violent resistance to Britsh colonial terror. For decades, I've wielded words as weapons against oppression—dissecting Hindutva fascism, white supremacy, far right Zionism and the settler colonial machinery that devours lives from Palestine to Aotearoa.   But since October 8, 2023, when I dared call the breach of Gaza's apartheid wall a "powerful exemplar of decolonising resistance," I've become prey.   Not for celebrating blood—God, no; I condemned the civilian horrors, the rapes, the kidnappings, rooting my analysis in Fanon's rupture of power and Gandhi's non-violent ethos. The very ...

I have long argued that the Free Speech Union New Zealand is part of a much broader global far-right movement organized around the far-right construction of free speech—one mobilized to protect and safeguard one particular kind of speech (largely white supremacist, misogynist, patriarchal speech that targets down on minorities) while framing women, gender diverse communities, migrants, Indigenous peoples, and Black communities as threats.  This movement constructs the narrative of "woke culture" as existential danger while systematically erasing the discursive registers for those at the margins.  Free speech is constructed as a feature of Western civilization and migrants, women, gender diverse communities are constructed as perennial threats to this rhetorical construction of free speech. The FSU's recent response to my critique, and the toxic ecosystem it cultivated in reply, demonstrates this far-right infrastructure operating openly, without pretense. This isn't a...

The Epstein Class, the War on Accountability, and the War on Woke The recently released Epstein files reveal something more chilling than the crimes of one man. They expose the communicative infrastructure of a class formation—what Ro Khanna has termed the "Epstein Class"—and document in real time how this formation mobilized to defend itself against the greatest threat it had faced in decades: the MeToo movement. These aren't just the private musings of a disgraced financier. They're a window into how power protects power, how sexual violence gets defended through coordinated media strategy, and how the "war on woke" emerged as counter-insurgency against accountability, with star academics and intellectuals providing its intellectual architecture. In August 2018, as MeToo transformed from hashtag to institutional reckoning, publicist Peggy Siegal wrote to Epstein from a sailboat in Greece. A Page Six story had referred to Epstein as a "reviled billio...