Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Critical Cultural Studies in Global Health Communication Series Editors: Mohan J. Dutta, Purdue University & Ambar Basu, University of South Florida Global changes in migratory patterns, the increasing health inequalities faced by the poor, the health risks faced by communities at the margins of global societies, and the communicative nature of health problems have drawn additional attention to the relevance of studying health communication processes across global cultures. This series will challenge West-centric ideals of health and human behavior by publishing theoretically- provocative, pedagogically-critical volumes addressing the intersection of communication principles and practices with health concepts and structures. The series editors seek book proposals that address (a) the storied nature of health communication practices that are globally situated; (b) structurally-constituted nature of health communication; (c) individual and collective processes of communicating ...

Walking away from the first focus group and training session, I was especially surprised by the ways in which, through means of our brief 2 hours session, the attendees had begun to build a sense of camaraderie. Immediately upon entering the room, one participant recognized another from receiving services at the food pantry. Spawning from their acquaintanceship, a number of participants then began to share advice about receiving services, such as what pantries were open at particular times and locations. Others ended the evening by offering a ride home to an attendee that had missed the bus. I have written in my project journal about an emerging theme of selflessness and gratitude in my interviews, and being witness to such acts verifies my prior assertions. Particularly, a common critique relates to the ability of the food assistance system to provide enough quality food to all patrons in need. Getting access to food is a personalized need, basic to one’s survival. Despite the persona...

A couple weeks ago, I questioned my assumption that there was a lack of a social network among food insecure. Did this commonality of interviewees happen to be a fluke or a norm? As I read through Chapter 8 in Communicating Health I realized that low social capital could be a possibility. However, I guess I now find myself at a crossroads with more questions than I do with answers. The presence of social capital lends itself to more established networks and a sense of solidarity within the community. As a result, what should be seen then is a more advantageous interaction with agency, structure and culture on behalf of the community. When social capital is lacking or absent, there is a missing framework on which to introduce opportunity and improvement. Perhaps where I find myself with the most questions is when social capital is lacking or non-existent within a marginalized audience. If the individuals we have interviewed lack the networks and solidarity like I sense that they do...

Dutta’s chapter on culture and resistance poses some interesting questions regarding the processes by which marginalized communities enact their agency through offering opportunities for structurally altering the systems that sustain their positions at the margins. After reading, I found myself immediately considering some of the interview responses for the food insecurity project that individuals had shared. It seems as though, despite their underserved status, those in the food insecure community still find ways to enact resistance against the unfair practices of the food provision system in this community. Often enacted at the micro-level, these resistive acts work to open up spaces of social change by creating new meanings and by offering alternatives to the dominant discourses. For instance, I spoke with an individual yesterday who detailed the injustices present within the food pantry for union members, which allegedly refuses pantry access to those long-standing union members (o...

The intersection between communication, resitance and social change is a key point that strikes me as unique in this week’s readings. I am intrigued by this overlap because of incessant conflict between oil corporations and indigenous communities over seismic operations in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The contexts may seem somewhat divergent on the surface in that the readings highlight resistance in health-related contexts. By contrast, the resistance in Nigeria is tied to marginalization with respect to dearth of basic facilities in indigenous communities despite several years of oil exploration and concomitant environmental pollution. Given the overlap between structural marginalization and health, both scenarios provide opportunities for convergence. I use convergence here to mean similarity of prevailing /unfavorable circumstances that trigger agency or resistance from indigenous communities. Nigeria’s Niger Delta region represent the eight oil producing states in Nigeria ...

In reading Sirisha's post that poignantly addresses the pathologization of the Third in mainstream discourses in the West as epitomized in the Oscar winning productions "Born into Brothels" and "Slumdog Millionaire," I am reminded of a social gathering a few years back. "Slumdog" was released, was an Oscar nominee at this point, and was all the rage in the popular culture circuits. At this gathering, a colleague (you guessed it, Caucasian and male) walked up to me and asked if I had ever really visited a slum, because he referred to an NPR story that supposedly made the argument that it is Indians who haven't really seen the slums that have problems with the movie "Slumdog Millionaire." [Granted that the materiality in the frames of Slumdog do have a base in the deep-seated inequalities in contemporary India, the frames in the movie I would argue further perpetuate these inequities by participating in the circulation of a neoliberal readi...

The reading on the Participatory change among the Commercial Sex Workers in both the programs viz., SHIP and New Light Project has created an urge to point out towards the problem of building trust among the people we work with and amongst themselves in programs such as these which aim at bringing a "social change" through the solidarity networks among the community members. The first hurdle that I could identify while reading this piece is about gaining trust among the sex workers. It needs, not a simple effort but a very time consuming and confidence exhausting one. Gaining access to such areas in itself is so tough and this hurdle is further made tougher to cross by the earlier researchers or film makers or whatever they may be who have selfishly used their obnoxious stories for their goals of controversial movies or dissertations and publications in case of academicians or funding agencies. Most of them have exploited these people and left them with no hope for improvemen...

This is a comment in reponse to Yogita's well articulated point about history of ideas...sometimes, comments tend to be hidden, so am posting this again. Thanks for referring to the James Scott piece on domination and resistance, as that's precisely where I would like to then build from in attempting to work out my half-baked ideas of social change articulated through subaltern narratives shared at the margins. As policies and programs carried out within the neoliberal configuration and directed at projects of development continually use the Eurocentric vantage point, albeit working closely with the local elite, to put forth specific development programs and policies, the work of contemporary SS scholarship has to reinvent a strategically organized politics that works on change from the margins by fundamentally disrupting the Eurocentric hegemony, and by acknolwedging the legitimacy of subaltern viewpoints that have otherwise been treated as magic and sub-standard by these ve...

This is a reflection of a recent experience with a piece I had sent out for peer review. This piece drew upon Subaltern Studies theory to articulate the processes of erasure in the Eurocentric mainstream. One of the reviewers responded to this piece by noting that this argument has already been made in the Communication literature (citing a piece in rhetoric that was published in 2000 by a Caucasian scholar at a mainstream American university). So I went back to the piece with the idea that I had something new to learn, although even on its face, the reviewer's argument did not work as the postcolonial and Subaltern Studies literature predate to arguments made by South Asian and Latin American scholars starting in the 70s. I still wanted to check out this 2000 piece to see if it was indeed citing some of this postcolonial work (as far as I knew, other than the works of Raka Shome, Radha Hegde, Radhika Parameswaran, and some other scholars of Latin American and South Asian origins, ...

Two key points that got me thinking in this week’s readings include the erasure of women’s breastfeeding knowledge by the biomedics, and the double speaking that characterize breastfeeding initiatives (the chapter by Emily Kripe in Zoller & Dutta). First,I consider the erasure of women’s agency. I begin with a quotation that accurately reflects the plight of women in Third World countries with regard to breastfeeding: “This transfer of breastfeeding knowledge from its practitioners to the domain of medical professional, from being embodied to requiring learning, involves a privileging of headwork that not only reinstalls the mind-body dichotomy of the Cartesian subject, but disempowers women as mothers at a time when their corporeality is most active and symbolically significant” (Barlett,2002,p.376) quoted in Zoller and Dutta (2008). The move to deny women of their agency interests me because of current trend in some developing countries. In Nigeria for instance, Not for Profit...

In reading the final chapter of Communicating Health: A Culture-Centered Approach , I found it very helpful to have a complete overview of the entire culture-centered process in research, understanding, and necessary structural shifts. What was also reinforced for me was that this approach is both challenging and critical, especially when one is willing to recognize that erasure has taken place within a marginalized community. However, something also struck me as I read and was reminded that culture is dynamic and that the “values, beliefs, and practices that constitute the culture become meaningful when articulated in the context within which they are realized” (p. 256). Of course, this definition has been a common statement made in our weekly discussions. But, how it was substantiated for me this week as I read it again comparing it to a notion I recently read in Charles Tilly’s book Durable Inequality. In the opening pages, Tilly describes James Gillray, who was Britain’s first pr...

So here's a story of an immediate experience this morning that relates to the conversations we have been having about structural barriers. As I share this story, let me first share that I am a health communication scholar with a graduate education and with almost a decade of experience listening to stories of individuals, families, and communities about their experiences with healthcare. On one hand, I believe that my education and scholarship have given me the skillsets to ask questions, to engage critically, and to push the envelope; on the other hand, I also believe that I miss many opportunities to ask questions, simply because of the length of the interactions in the provider's office. Today's experience that I will share with you relates to billing. So we had gone in to the physician at one of the Arnett locations for a regular physical. The co-payment was made at the counter ($15), and we walked away with the assumption that the rest of the bill ($128 as I would co...