CCA: A new but necessary lens in my research

If the act of developing a working knowledge of a theoretical framework using the culture-centered approach is like jumping off a diving board, then I’m certain I just left the board. While my own research has continually revolved around the area of culture, CCA is a lens that provides a wildly new view. I gladly embrace it for its valuable insight and ability to establish a dialogue with and among audiences that have typically been set out on the peripheries of the social environment. But, frankly, it is just plain hard… not because it is hard to accept, but because it is hard to practice. For the first time in my education and research, I have to deconstruct many of common understandings of audiences and social dynamics that I’ve been taught over the years and begin rebuilding them simply to be more purposeful in my research.

Therefore, I’m thankful for the readings which challenge me with this new lens. For example, the Boddy article regarding spirit possession was, of course, a hurdle using my CCA lens. The difficulty was not in the content… I can understand that anthropologists are often pushed to “demystify analytical terms and resist being seduced into thinking that they dispassionately reflect reality…” (p. 408). This, of course, is not surprising when it comes to the topic of spirit possession. It’s seems reasonable to break down the phenomena through rationalization (i.e. medical terms, physiochemical body issues, and psychiatric disorders). Rather, the difficulty came for me when I personally began to consider the differences between central and peripheral possession. As Boddy identifies and discusses the rationalized research, it became very challenging for me to set the medical, psychiatric and even sociological explanations aside and simply look at spirit possession as a functioning and, dare I say, necessary component of the structure, agency and culture of each of these groups.

This challenge I’m faced with doesn’t make me doubt the applicability of CCA. Rather, I become more adamant of recognizing how this fits and why it needs to become a necessary component of my research. I’m certain it has a place and I look forward to a few months down the road when this lens is much more comfortable.

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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