Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

What should be the commitment of the humanities and social sciences in Asia in covering concepts and ideas rooted in Asia? How should these commitments play out in the composition of research and teaching faculty in Departments located in Asia? How is the project of de-Westernization to be accomplished when the majority of the teachers and researchers that inundate the Asian academe happen to be from the West or are trained in the West? How is the project of de-Westernization to be accomplished if the majority of the decision-makers who offer leadership are from the West? In other words, How does the question of representation play out in the composition of Departments and Faculties of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences located in Asia, and in the composition of leadership roles and structures within Departments, Colleges, and Universities?  What is the desirable composition of a Department of say Communication located in Asia? And what are the implication...

A number of my friends have shared with me their wonder at our decision to move to Singapore. They have shared their surprise as well as their inspirations. I had a pretty solid appointment at Purdue in a leadership role and Debalina had promises of a tenure track career at one of the leading communication departments that also has a lot of history in the discipline. Moving to Singapore and to NUS had a number of underlying reasons, a lot of them personal, and some really important ones that were professional. One of the most salient reasons for the move was what I thought was a truly transformative opportunity for putting my commitments to de-Westernizing communication to action. Of course, one could make the argument that the process of de-westernization needs to happen at the very heart of Empire. Through deconstructing and critique, the workings of power can be carefully examined within spaces of belonging in the Western academe. I had been doing that, sometimes successful...

As a Professor of Communication teaching in Singapore, I have often been struck by the absence of introductory or advanced texts that are grounded in Singapore or in the broader context of Asia. I find myself having to cover Western concepts of Perception , Stereotyping , or Media Structures as the fundamentals of communication and new media theorising, modifying then the readings in the texts to "fit" my students in Singapore by drawing in examples or cases from Singapore. As I pick an international version of a much-used US-based text, I am left wondering what it means to have an "international" version of an introductory text, where most of the concepts are US-centric. Singapore emerges in my pedagogy as a source of case studies, built into a comparative frame where the foundations are covered in a required US text. I remain dissatisfied with this strategy of adapting a fundamentally US-centric text to the Singapore context of my students (I am not even s...

Science. Your tools that are named as sacred forces seeking truth and justice. Immersed in the farce of your Whiteness. Science. Made up by your games by your rules by your desires to Control the Coloured Body That waits to be invaded. Science. Your tools of oppression that you carry out everyday in the name of Truth The games you play in the name of Justice. Science. How you justify your senseless violence as the message of peace. Even as you build walls and kill and deny the basic rights of access. Science Your violence and Injustice Your methodology and its instruments Unjust Violent Oppressive Imperial Couched as always in the farce of Objectivity.