Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

I have increasingly thought about the number of times that I have heard Indian parents talk about the success of their kids, planning for a good career, and finding the right kind of enabler/ladder so that the child would adequately climb to the established measures of success. This quest for the child's success among parents on one hand is understandable. Every parent wants their child to do well, to have a secure future, and to have the resources they need to live a comfortable life. The desires, on the other hand, often singlehandedly play out in a linear narrative, and this is the part that needs to be deconstructed critically...the career path to success seems to be utterly narrow and well laid out: get an engineering degree, and after you get an engineering degree, get an MBA. This to most Indian parents seems like the easiest route for their child to be successful. Education, thus narrowly defined, is initially loaded up with the emphasis on the sciences, followed by the eng...

Shifting my focus from policy-related books, I’ve devoted my attention this week towards absorbing information in the academic literature related to experiences of food insecurity. Broadly, I’ve learned that the experience of food insecurity is collectively shared. While I dislike making generalizations across geographic locations and communities, it is easy to see that those facing hunger in the rural communities of Oregon and Appalachia are quite similar in their perceptions of the experience to those we’ve interviewed as part of our Voices of Hunger project. In De Marco, Thornburn, and Kue’s (2009) analysis of the experiences of the food insecure in rural Oregon, similar contributors to food insecurity were noted, including a lack of health insurance and foregrounded requirements to pay for bills and rent, as well as the administrative hurdles potential recipients face in determining their eligibility for national safety-net programs. I was particularly intrigued by their discussion...

In moving forward with my food policy readings, I’ve spent the last few days absorbing “Sweet charity: Emergency food and the end of entitlement” by Janet Poppendieck. While she hasn’t been as straightforward in declaring her positionality on the food insecurity issue as was Winne, I have really appreciated her writing style as a member of academia, a sociologist specifically, who is consistently able to blend her scholarly understanding with practical sensibilities. She spends a brief portion of her introduction detailing her methodology, which included participant observation, interviews, and archival analysis at food pantries, food banks, food rescue programs, and soup kitchens in nine different states across the span of 7 years. From the start, I was drawn into the book per my sharing of Poppendieck’s most notable fear: we are becoming attached to our charitable food programs and increasingly unable to envision a society that wouldn’t need them. As she suggests, we are so busy buil...

This week, in addition to reading Winne’s “Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty,” I had an opportunity to visit another mobile food pantry offered by Food Finders in West Lafayette. While my primary purpose wasn’t to serve as a volunteer for Food Finders (instead distributing and helping participants complete the community needs assessment from the health department that I’ve worked on for some time), it was difficult not to once again share in the experiences and listen to the voices of those visiting for free food. First, I was pleasantly surprised to run into 5 of our participants from the “Voices of Hunger” project. Seeing them there was a reassurance that they are all surviving amidst their hardship, and brief conversations with them spawned two interesting thoughts in relation to my food policy readings. First, I chatted with one of our former participants (of the most engaged in the project) about a conversation she had with a Senator a few weeks prior...