Adapting behaviors...

My take home message from this week's readings was that in many instances focussing on "adapting behaviors" would do much good than focussing on "prevention". Of course, ideally, we should work on prevention behaviors but there are situations in which culture, structure and agency make it difficult to display the preventive behaviors. In such circumstances, an adaptive behavior makes sense.

Lifeskills training, training to negotiate, skill building on taking the optimum decisions within the context are ways in which we promote "adaptive behaviors". Of course I am trying to connect culturally situated approaches with the "behavioral" approaches. Focussing on adaptive behaviors also has a good match with the "prediction" objective; as they are more efficient and achievable.

Consider the oft discussed case of vegetable and fruit consumption as a cancer prevention behavior being advised to the inner city population. Here, we would not get much of an outcome in terms of actual display of the behavior as issues of structure and access come into play. At risk of sounding cultural relativist, I would also say that there are cultural issues imbued in the segment of populations related to food consumption (Ref. soul food...) which most often constitute the inner city populace. So, what do we do as health communication experts? Maybe the answer lies in promoting "adpative behaviors". But again let me make it clear that this is just a part of the whole rubric and not the solution "PILL".

My other take home message was that when I do research with vulnerable populations, I should always take care not to raise expectations..a la Susser and Stein...They got their publications and "ethnographic research" trips to exotic places and hard to reach populations..but the female condoms remained out of reach from 1992 to 1999 and still today. As researchers, scholars, practitioners, do ask...What gives..? There is not a right (desirable?) answer again and it depends on you and your priorities and level of comfort.

Jai Ho!!

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 wit...

Upper caste Indian women in the diaspora, DEI, and the politics of hate

Figure 1: Trump, Vance and their partners responding to the remarks by Mariann Edgar Budde Emergent from the struggles of the civil rights movement , led by African Americans , organized against the oppressive history of settler colonialism and slavery that forms the backbone of US society, structures around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) formed an integral role in forging spaces for diverse recognition and representation. These struggles around affirmative action, diversity, equity and inclusion were at the heart of the changes to white only immigration policies, building pathways for migration of diverse peoples from the Global South. The changes to the immigration policies created opportunities for Indians to migrate to the US, with a rise of Indian immigration into the US since the 1970s into educational institutions, research and development infrastructures, and technology-finance infrastructures. These migratory structures into the US were leveraged by l...

The Projection Machine: Epstein's Intellectual Network and the War on Trans People

The anti-transgender activist Posie Parker in Aotearoa NZ An Industry Built on Inversion Anti-transgender hate is an industry. Not a movement, not a moral concern, not an organic uprising of worried parents — an industry, deliberately constructed, lavishly funded, and strategically deployed to protect the interests of the powerful men who finance it. And like most industries built on fear, it requires a credible monster. Transgender people — a community representing roughly one percent of the population, facing disproportionate rates of poverty, violence, suicide, and discrimination — have been selected for that role with remarkable precision. The 2025–2026 release of the Jeffrey Epstein files has made something newly visible that was always structurally present: the men who built the ideological infrastructure of anti-trans politics are, in many cases, the same men — or the direct intellectual descendants of the same men — who moved through the social world of a convicted child sex tr...

Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

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