Neoliberalism,Agriculture & Communication

In Chapter 3 of Communicating Social Change, Dutta (2011) unpacks how the logic of positive values attributed to technology and modernization are used communicatively to market Western agricultural agendas that displace Third World agricultural practices, consequently forcing Third World farmers to depend on the West. Examples of such communicative strategies include the rhetoric of innovative practices, modernization, mechanized farming, and high productivity. Dutta also discusses how the rhetoric of philanthropy, development, aid, and scientific legitimacy are utilized to diffuse Western agricultural concepts that disenfranchise and impoverish peasant farmers in Third World countries.
My Questions:
1. Given that local elites who own the spaces for the expression of alternative rationalities for listening to the voices of the Subaltern advocated by Dutta are often times accomplices in development projects, what other strategies can be employed to challenge the status-quo.
2. According to Dutta (2011) the promotion of modern technologies and concepts such as the genetically modified seeds in Third World countries are implicitly carried out in collusion with global development agencies. Given that the leadership of these agencies resides in the West, how can Third World countries disrupt these power structures in light of the material inequities that exist between both regions. What communicative strategies will help to change the power equation?
3. Could the negative impacts of Western agricultural agendas such as environmental degradation, loss of communal identity and economic power that often accompany modernization projects be regarded as unintended consequences by chance?

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...

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 with w...

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor On the architecture of the Aotearoa culture-war machine, and the danger it poses to a democracy heading into 2026 There is a particular cadence to the afternoon on which the career of a senior Māori journalist at TVNZ is finished. It is unhurried. It begins with a tweet — in this case, a single image of a typed statement, posted by Maiki Sherman, the now-former political editor of TVNZ, on the afternoon of Friday, 8 May 2026, announcing that she had parted ways with the broadcaster. The post was terse, dignified, and final. As RNZ later reported , Sherman wrote that the scrutiny of the previous week had placed enormous pressure on her and rendered her role "untenable." The first wahine Māori to lead a major broadcaster's political team was gone. The story that finished her had not, ten days earlier, existed in any newspaper, on any wire, on any website you would consider mai...

The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

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