Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

The "Voices of Hunger" project, a narrative co-construction grounded in the CCA with the food insecure in Indiana, depicts the everyday struggles with the absence of food among the food insecure. At the time that the project was taking its roots, inequality in the US was on the rise, and there were a growing section of the middle class who had been "thrown to the streets." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcom.12009/abstract A theme that continued to reiterate through the stories of hunger was the uncertainty around it and the suddenness with which community members experienced it. http://www.care-cca.com/about/cca-video-series/voices-of-hunger/ The transition from a life of plenty to a life of hunger was often unexpected and sudden. It all happened overnight. The two storey home; the car; the fenced back yard. The signs of middle class comfort that depicted the life a large majority of Americans were soon disappearing, and for most of the com...

Mediocrity is often built into the everyday practices of academe under the guise of civility. Civility becomes the trope that manages our academic relationships. I see this for example in how teacher student relationships are constructed. The value of such relationships measured in the form of student evaluations works well to reify the status quo. Teachers are prompted by the lowest common denominator under such systems of measurement. Learning takes the backseat as teachers work on minimizing assignments, making lectures entertaining etc. so that teaching evaluations can be higher. Minimizing expectations then works to reify the mediocrity of the status quo. As teachers, we pay more attention to making nice than to caring about our students learning. We are also trained to be inauthentic, managing our teaching by norms of civility in the mainstream, learning to stage a face. The neoliberal organizing of knowledge works precisely through the organizing of teaching under a...

Over the past couple of months, I have been engaging adolescents in Marion County in centering their voices to identify heart health needs and propose solutions that are meaningful to them. The adolescent heart project emerged from the suggestions of the adults in the CUAHD project. Thus far, the experience of working with teenagers to design and implement a health campaign targeting heart disease has been interesting, and speaks to the uniqueness of our broad theoretical framework, the culture-centered approach that seeks to locate decision making power into the hands of the community. An example of the interesting dynamic that is playing out in the project is the concept of individualism versus collectivism in decision making and in driving the project forward. On March 6, I emailed the group about my inability to attend the planned strategy development workshop due to bad weather .Interestingly, the group proceeded with organizing the workshop as originally scheduled, and also set ...

In our ""CCA" module, we discussed the nuances in our understandings of objectivity in the social sciences. Delineating the break from the natural sciences, understandings of objectivity in the social sciences are constituted in the values of the researcher, her/his constructions of the self, her/his relationship with the subjectivity of the research participants, and her/his negotiations with materiality. That there are material contexts of symbolic behavior is a key point in culturally-centered work, and yet this material context is negotiated symbolically, through language and through acts of representation. In this sense, communication lies at the heart of the social sciences, the world of the material being negotiated through meaning making. We come to understand materiality through the symbolically mediatized narrativization of the material world. For example, the everyday lived experience of struggling with hunger is a material reality that is felt in the...

The hegemony of West-centrism and the question of academic freedom: From a half-baked lens in my short time in Singapore Recently, a colleague at Nanyang Technological University, an associate professor of communication Dr. Cherian George was denied tenure (http://storify.com/kuekj/denial-of-tenure-sparks-furore).   Dr. Cherian is considered a leading public intellectual in Singapore, one who has opened up the discursive space to conversations about Singapore and its politics (http://www.cheriangeorge.net/).   This instance of Dr. Cherian’s denial of tenure has become the subject of widespread political participation, letter writing, and conversations across Singapore. The social media is rife with multiple conversation threads that have questioned the tenure and promotion process at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) as well as the fairness of the outcome (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/niftyc/archives/790).   Outpouring support from students and ...