Redifining Culture in Public Diplomacy

Current public diplomacy efforts talk a great deal about cultural exchanges and creating cultural understanding. In most of these efforts, cultural understanding is defined in terms of cultural exchanges of artists, performers and writers rather than focusing on "real" points of entry for listening to various cultural communities (see for instance, the following report by the Advisory Committee on Cultural Diplomacy).

Although the arts and performances do provide insights into a culture, these are in many ways only some aspects of cultures. Arts and performances are important and yet only some of the more visible and easily accessible aspects of cultures. Ignoring the values and beliefs of cultures and the contexts within which these values and beliefs are negotiated leads to a short-sighted approach that ultimately does not engage with the deep-seated logics of the culture, which might in many instances be contradictory to the values and beliefs of US culture.

Ultimately, these cultural exchanges are seen by public diplomats as ways of winning the hearts and minds of reasonable people elsewhere in the world rather than as entry points for developing understanding. Culture here serves as a way of generating public opinion elsewhere that is supportive of the US, it values and foreign policies. Culture becomes a tool for transforming other cultures, and the values and beliefs in these cultures. To the extent that the concept of culture is limited to cultural exchanges that seek to win the hearts and minds of reasonable people elsewhere, it serves the problematic logic that the values and beliefs of US culture are the only "rational" values and beliefs, and the ways of life of other cultures need to be transformed. Such a notion is not only arrogant, but it is also profoundly short-sighted in the realm of public diplomacy efforts that need more of an impetus on listening.

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems with w...

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor On the architecture of the Aotearoa culture-war machine, and the danger it poses to a democracy heading into 2026 There is a particular cadence to the afternoon on which the career of a senior Māori journalist at TVNZ is finished. It is unhurried. It begins with a tweet — in this case, a single image of a typed statement, posted by Maiki Sherman, the now-former political editor of TVNZ, on the afternoon of Friday, 8 May 2026, announcing that she had parted ways with the broadcaster. The post was terse, dignified, and final. As RNZ later reported , Sherman wrote that the scrutiny of the previous week had placed enormous pressure on her and rendered her role "untenable." The first wahine Māori to lead a major broadcaster's political team was gone. The story that finished her had not, ten days earlier, existed in any newspaper, on any wire, on any website you would consider mai...

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