Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

It is only fitting that I write this note of goodbye on this CCA blog. Purdue. It is midnight and I am supposed to be working on giving feedback on Sydney's dissertation (which I am doing by the way in case you read this Syd as I write this blog). We had our farewell today. As with farewells, the evening was a reminder that my time at Purdue is coming to an end. It is also a time for me to take stock of all that for which I am grateful to Purdue. As I saw so many colleagues who had come to say their goodbyes, I also was reminded that I will not be seeing many of them again, at least not in the same space as a colleague in the same institution. So I wanted to write this note to say thank you to so many of them. My senior colleagues, Professor Stewart, Professor Webb, Howard Sypher, Glenn Sparks, Steve Wilson, Beverly Davenport Sypher, Patrice Buzzannell, Robin Clair, Felicia Roberts, Marifran Mattson, you taught me about excellence through your own work, through your...

1) Should sites of participation happen as Habermas suggested, with equal participants in a rational discussion, or as Bhabha suggested, through intersections of control and resistance? What would those sites look like? How can we create them? 2) Is is possible to un-co-opt an organizational space for resistance after the mainstream neoliberal (or other dominant structure) has co-opted it?

This week’s readings center on the importance of participatory social change strategies, the inherent tensions, and its potentials for social transformation. In the opening section of Chapter 9 of Communicating Social Change, Dutta (2011) draws upon Habermas’s (1989) concept of “openness, dialogue, and inclusiveness” as important tenets in participatory social change processes. The assumption is that such openness creates equal opportunities for community members to deliberate on a relevant issue to them. Drawing from the dynamics in our Hunger and Food Insecurity Coalition community project thus far, I am wondering how inclusive a participatory social change process can be. For instance, there are active and passive community members in the coalition. At our last meeting for instance, community members suggested having a “face for their proposed campaign against stigma” often associated with the hungry and food insecure. According to the community members, such person must be vocal, p...

1.) Given the centrality of social capital in participation, in what ways do we see social capital related to both the material and symbolic dimensions of inequality? 2.)   The debates between co-optation and social change, as well as the status quo versus structural transformation, have been discussed from various angles throughout the readings in recent weeks. Yet, what becomes the role for activists, scholars, and communities engaged in change efforts once desired changes have been met? Does change necessarily mean a move from margin to center, and if so, what new challenges arise from this relocation in social, political, and economic space?

Two-year Postdoctoral Research Fellow Positions 15 July 2012 2 positions available immediately . Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) Department of Communication and New Media Faculty of Arts and Social Science National University of Singapore, Job Description: The Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation is a project-driven center housed in the Department of Communication and New Media at the National University of Singapore that utilizes ethnographic and participatory action research methods in carrying out culturally-centered social change interventions in marginalized populations. The Center is global in scope with initial project emphases in South Asia and Southeast Asia. The goals of the Center are to (a) create a strategic research core for the social scientific study of health communication and social change issues in Asia (e.g. China, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand...

In articulating organizing strategies for social change, Dutta (2011) discusses the role of resources in community organizing for social change. 1.Wondering how community or subaltern groups implement organizing campaigns when they have no access to resources. E.g., in circumstances when the dominant structures employ all tactics to prevent such groups from having access to resources. In other words, can large scale community organizing be effectively implemented or successful without financial support?What should the groups do when they are restrained from accessing any form of resources that will support social change processes 2.Also Dutta (2011) highlights the importance of information sharing in planning and implementing resistance projects. Given the censorship of information dissemination channels by the dominant structures, wondering how subaltern groups navigate information censorship

On pg. 238, Dutta mentions that "the increasing availability and use of the Internet as a communicative platform" has greatly helped activists to organize on an international scale. But in what ways can groups -- who are too marginalized to access the Internet either because of their lack of education or infrastructure or both or are too underprivileged to attend an international conference of grassroot-level activists -- get their voices heard on a global platform/forum? In a hypothetical situation, say, after a successful social resistance movement, when a resistive group comes to the table for negotiations with the structures, or powers to be, how do they decipher whether they are being coopted or not, since structures can operate in insidious ways?

1) How does organizing subalterns under the dominant structures of economic political organizations upend or reinforce the dominant structure? In other words, is speaking the "language" of the dominant structure to voice the subaltern voice actually just a co-opting of the subaltern voice? 2) What effect does identifying and classifying issues do to the overall ability of the subaltern to speak his/her voice? In other words, does it help in the short run but hurt in the long run for the subaltern to be able to speak, especially if their needs change?

1.) As noted in the readings, organizing for social change fundamentally occurs on a collective level, with frames, identities, issues, resources, etc deriving from individual experience to gain collective resonance. Given this, what is meant by the term “collective agency”? In other words, in what ways are individual and collective agency similar and different both in conceptualization and in practice? 2.) The CCA approach to empowerment foregrounds the perspectives, rationales, and agency of the marginalized, which serves to challenge or provide alternatives to dominant structures precisely through the privileging of those who have been excluded from discursive sites and processes of decision-making. This stands in contrast to the participatory development approach, which relies on experts imparting to the marginalized various skills and knowledge derived from the repertoire of the status quo to empower communities to act within the dominant socio-political-economic system. W...

Assignment List, H400, Religion in America Transcript #2 LR: what does hunger mean to you? M: when my kidney starts hurting. LR: you have something wrong with your kidneys, like dialysis or something? M: no, so some people are only born with one kidney, and I’m one of those. So I gotta be careful, my kidney hurts a lot. LR: so if it hurts all the time, how do you know when it hurts because of hunger? M: it’ll hurt real bad for a second and then it’ll start to go away. LR: okay, so do you have any experiences where it’s hurt and you haven’t been able to get food? M: I go to the food pantry. LR: do you like going to the food pantry. M: no, the kidney doctors keep telling me that I should eat fresh food and fresh meat and stuff like that, no pot and no coffee, and it’s hard to do that cuz the only thing I can really get is juice from the food pantry and that’s not a guarantee every time either and I don’t get a lot of money to go out and buy food...