Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Global Media Journal  CALL FOR PAPERS Theme of Fall 2014 Issue Financialization, Communication, and New Imperialism Guest Editors: Mohan J. Dutta, National University of Singapore Mahuya Pal, University of South Florida The global financial crisis marks on one hand the ruptures in the universalized logic of neoliberal capitalism as a framework of global development, and on the other hand, narrates the story of the increasing consolidation of power in the hands of the global elite achieved through the language of the free market. As we have argued in our earlier work on globalization and communication, meanings constitute the center of global financialization, consolidation of wealth in the hands of the global elite, and the deployment of technocratic efficiency as the solution to development narrowly conceived as economic growth (Dutta, 2011; Pal & Dutta, 2008). Even as these shifts in global power depict the new networks of power that operate glo...

The increasing patterns of global inequalities that have been brought about by the global organizing of politics and economics on the basis of the ideology of the free market are empirically witnessed across global spaces. In a number of academic as well as think pieces (including pieces on this site), I have been writing about the evidence that documents the patterns of these inequalities, and the relationships of these inequalities with entrenched patterns of political and economic policies that have blindly favored deregulation, minimal state intervention, and the weakening of the public sector. The University along with powerful think tanks has been a key site in the achievements of the neoliberal revolution. A brand of elite academics at elite academic institutions have played central roles as the mouthpieces of capitalism, offering philosophical frames, political theories, and economic ideas for the shaping of the world in the free market logic. In short, the academe has playe...