Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Lifted by the unfettered hubris of helium, a balloon rises ponderously, meeting little resistance in its upward ascent... The smallest needle, with the slightest prick to the taught rubber membrane and... Pop! “What do you get out of this? School credit or something, right?” asked Roy toward the end of our interview. We were sitting outside a building on campus on an unseasonably warm and sunny day. The trees were all blooming pretty white flowers that smelled like decaying ass. “Yeah,” I replied matter of factly, “I do get credit for the course, and gain experience in doing interviews from talking with you about these kinds of things. But...” and I briefly went into the longer-term objective of the food insecurity project to help develop solutions with problems in getting food to the hungry. As I described this I felt the stinging discomfort from his probing of my academic motives fade away, and wondered if this was a sign of working through my positionality or the a...

In Chapter 6 of Communicating Social Change, Dutta 2011 articulates the centrality of dialogue in bringing about social change. According to him, dialogue creates opportunity for listening to alternative rationalities that disrupt dominant views, and structures ultimately leading to social transformative politics. Dutta also identifies the following as important attributes of dialogue humility, reflexivity, authenticity, listening, willingness to learn, and commitment to social change. This means that for an expert or academic to promote social change using the Culture Centered Approach, the person must embody these qualities. The person must be willing to listen, must be willing to lower his/her ego to learn from indigenous populations, or subaltern population, and must continually reflect upon the privileges of his or her actions and inactions. I could not agree more with the potential of dialogue in bringing about social change. For instance, dialogue with community members in the H...

1.) What issues surround the notion of strategic essentialism in the politics of representation and dialogue? What risks are run when groups are essentialized for the sake of making a stand, but at the same time, what stands to be gained? How should scholars or practitioners negotiate these issues? 2.) What are some of the ways that projects of social change might be evaluated? What happens once changes are achieved? Or in other words, what does the process of social change for a particular project or issue look like after transformations have been made?

1) How did the examples (e.g. Every Kid Counts) provided by Frey and Carragee demonstrate communicating social change? In what ways is it similar/different from the concepts identified by Dutta in our readings thusfar? 2) What is "communication orientation"? How is it different from standpoint theory? In what ways does co-culture theory achieve similar/different aim and projects as CCA?

So I just interviewed three people in a row about food insecurity (See transcripts 2, 3, 4, to be posted at a later date).  One man, his girlfriend (debatable?), and her dad.  I'm not sure if the girlfriend was a girlfriend, since he called her his girlfriend but she called him her roommate in the the interviews.   Here were stories about kidney failures, medical problems generally, and being so bored that you spend your efforts on thinking of ways to kill time in your life.  And yet, in comparisons to other interviewers, I was not emotionally moved by these stories.  Sometimes that makes me feel soulless, not because I think anything is wrong with me, but because I feel like others must think there is something wrong with me for being such a dispassionate person.  Maybe it's because in some ways I don't relate at all, even though in some ways I do understand. For example, I understood the boredom of the participant who would rather pay for cable and...

After doing this first interview (see transcript 1), I felt like she was very self-conscious during the interview, like she was worried about she was being perceived, and like she wanted to say the "right" things. For me, this came up particularly in areas like when I asked her what sort of foods she liked to eat, and she had what I felt was a "typical female response" of "salads,...no sweets". I say "typical" not because that's what most females like the most, but because I feel like in Western culture that's what women who are concerned about their diet and weight want to be seen as eating; at one point this participant said she didn't want to "get fat".  Usually people on food stamps and worried about hunger are more concerned about getting "enough" to eat rather than worrying about getting too much to eat. She also expressed how she didn't want to eat Ramen noodles, and I definitely got the impression she...

Assignment List, H400, Religion in America LR: I want to start with “What does hunger mean to you? What does it mean to be hungry?” MA: well, hunger for me is like when you don’t have any food, your stomach growling and its hurting because you don’t have anything to eat LR: Definitely. So would you say hunger is something people have pretty much daily, like in between meals you get hungry, or is there a difference between hungry and starving? MA: yes there is. LR: okay and how would you describe that difference? MA: well hunger I said was in between meals, you know, I guess what…what I was saying was starving, you know? But um, yeah, um starving is when you don’t have any food or you don’t know when your next meal is gonna come or whatever… LR: okay, um, what has been your experience with getting food? Like, is that a pretty normal thing to have in your house or is it kinda a day-to-day sorta? MA: um, I go shopping about once a week and um I get food sta...

Rachel is the mother of Laura, who Soumitro had interviewed a few days earlier. Laura told Rachel about the project, and she had also taken several recruitment fliers to pass out to people she knew would benefit from taking part in the project. Though I did not realize it at the time, this simple (f)act – what us researchers call “snowball sampling” – was one example of the larger importance of communication in struggles with hunger. Speaking of the local food pantries, churches, and other organizations she has to rely on for food, Rachel said, “But I recommend a person— I always tell people you want something to eat you could go here and they’ll help you, they’ll help you... especially with peoples that got kids. Yeah, they’ll help you.” Throughout our conversation, Rachel continually placed the conditions of others before her own concerns about herself. When she moved to Lafayette in 2009 after being homeless in Chicago for several years, she did not want to impose herself on...

1.) What are the various facets of resistance that are discussed in this week’s readings? How do the insights from these readings help us to approach and understand the contours of mobilization and resistance? 2.) Kahn critiques many past attempts to research peasant ideologies and resistance as being detached from the immediacy of the localized contexts being studied: “the longer-term evaluation of the academic texts tends to have very little to do with peasants or, perhaps more accurately, the participants in the concrete struggles in which peasants are involved” (71). In what ways does the culture-centered approach address this issue? Is the abstraction or generalization required by theorization inherently distancing?