Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

At the Opening Seminar of the Center for Discourses in Transition, Professor Paul McIvinney brought together a group of scholars who I believe were connected together with their enphasis on interrogating neoliberalism and processes of social/cultural change. The talk today was opened by Professor Fairclough who walked us through a careful discourse analysis of the global economic discourse. Professor Fairclough's work clearly laid out the groundwork for Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and the ways in which CDA is tied to the interrogation of public discourses of neoliberalism played out in the articulations and arguments around the financial crisis and the economic benefits enjoyed by Bankers. Professor Adam Jaworski offered yer abother entry point to engaging neoliberal privilege by interrogating the ways in which tourist guide discourses serve specific functions and occupy specific positions of privilege. Through his close reading of the micro data on the interactions at tour...

Methodologically, as we develop participatory processes in culture-centered research, these processes are both organic and cyclical. The organic nature of CCA processes suggest that when we work with community partnerships and community members, the relationships among the multiple stakeholders (and yes, given the circles of participation in CCA, these are indeed multiple relationships in multiple contexts at multiple levels) are continually evolving. Being open to participation in ways that are responsive to community needs suggests that we continually re-evaluate where we stand with respect to the choices and the decisions we make through the lifecycle of the project. This also means that the same decisions need to be revisited at multiple entry points at multiple levels of our relationships, partnerships, and roles within the CCA network. Moving the gamuts of decision-making through these multiple cycles calls for a great deal of patience as the same sets of decisions need to be re...

In preparing for my talk in Denmark this coming week, I have been contempating on the corporate practices under neoliberal governance that epitomize corruption. These forms of corruption range from lying about specific actions and practices, to stealing the property of indigenous peoples and then patenting them, to stealing the lands of the poor under the name of development and urbanization, to using a wide variety of legal methods to silence the voices of the poor from policy and justice platforms. However, the beauty and effectiveness of neoliberalism lies precisely in its capacity of utilizing a variety of public relations tools to put forth a variety of labels and naming devices to hide the fundamentally corrupt and unethical nature of these practices. In a piece titled "Public Relations as Knowledge Production under Neoliberalism," I put forth the argument that producing knowledge that is fundamentally untrue lies at the heart of this large-scale exercise of corruptio...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/27/india-land-idUSL3E7IN05N20110727 Here's example of another news story in mainstream media that does not question the neoliberal logic of land grab in the context of development. Questions worth raising in this backdrop are questions such as: Who should have the ownership of the lands? What are the implications of the displacement of the poor to force top-down housing projects under the name of development and growth? What are the ethical principles that underlie the urbanization projects which are accompanied by the large scale displacements of the poor? Once again, absent in the media story are questions of neoliberal greed that privilege the "rights" of Indian yuppies in the large metros to own property by paying Lakhs and Crores of Rupees. Absent in Indian public discourses are fundamental questions that interrogate the uneven nature of development? Absent are the difficult questions of displacement that are intrinsically t...

The city of Bangalore is an excellent example of the point I noted in my earlier blog. The report shared on my blog points toward the political nexus behind the land grab operation. What the report does not bring into question though is the growing development of Bangalore as the IT hub of India, the burgeoning middle class in the city, and the epitomization of this middle class desire in the new complexes, housing development projects, and flats that have come up in the city. The myopia of media coverage and public discourse on corruption in India (and this includes the short-sightedness of the Lokpal discourse) is its inability to fundamentally interrogate the desires and dreams of middle class Indians that underlie the nexus between corporations, criminals, and politicians. Although the politicians depicted here indeed need to be interrogated, we also however need to examine our own aspirations that fuel large scale landgrab all across the country. For instance, after watchi...

When I hear the stories about their aspirations among friends and family, I am often struck by the narratives of making money by buying and selling property. The desire to make a quick buck by buying and selling property has become all too common of a story in neoliberal India, so common that it almost seems commonsensical to be a middle class Indian and to own multiple flats, each of which is seen as an investment opportunity that gives higher and higher return on investments (ROI). The neoliberal dream is embodied in the desire to own a flat, in Rajarhat, or Naui Mumbai, or Noida. Parents dream of their child's success in terms of the number of flats owned by the child. Fathers want their daughters married off to middle class boys with pockets that can afford them multiple flats in the Lakhs and Crores. The promise of the neoliberal dream for the middle class Indian is in the ownership of this piece of security and economic growth. The promise of neoliberalism in India is deepl...

Further building on our earlier discussions, I want to point toward the notion of "presence" in the field which has occupied a key position in CCA research. The co-constructive moment of CCA calls for the researcher to be "present" in the field, at the moment of the interaction where knowledge is co-constructed. For my own research, this has meant that I spend substantive amounts of time in the field and on the road. For example, with the heart health disparities project with African American communities in Lake and Marion counties, I personally often spend between 6 to 10/12 hours in the field. Our CCA research team as a collective spends between 20-60 hours in the field collectively, in addition to our community organizers and community partners who are present at the field sites. Although all this presence in the field takes up both a lot of time as well as lot of energy, the fundamental tenets of CCA rely on these different forms of investment in order to crea...

One of the most fundamental tenets of CCA is I believe the authenticity of the researcher in his/her relationship with the field site, which is tied to the fundamental premise that one needs to spend extensive amounts of time in the field, getting to know the field and making herself/himself vulnerable to participants and their stories, interacting with participants with an openness to listening to their stories, and co-creating theoretical and pragmatic entry points with cultural participants through their stories. For us as CCA researchers to co-script stories of change with participants, we need to be extensively devoted to our field sites, taking up the challenges of intense field work and sometimes when needed, placing our selves at risk so that entry points to change can be co-created with cultural participants at the margins (granted our taking up of these risks are minuscule when compared to the everydayness of the risks and threats that communities at the margins live under). ...

So here you go. I have often been puzzled as to what it is about CCA that threatens your typical academic. Why is it that when presented with the idea of CCA that your "typical" Comm scholar often has a gut response of defensiveness? (Of course, I am using the label "typical" to refer to a specific representation of the average, the middle, the central tendency that occupies the status quo; and of course, there have been a number of Communication scholars who have opened up, encouraged, and nurtured some of the basic premises of CCA). For this blog though, I am going to refer to that central tendency or the mediocre average that responds from various positions of feeling defensive, articulating this response in various froms of pettiness and petty politics (Marx is so right on target when he refers to the bourgeoisie as "petty"). Yesterday, during our Hunger Coalition meeting, one of our community members who has herself experienced hunger summarized her...