Skip to main content

Unequal acaedemic labour: Time and work in culture-centered projects




unequalacademiclabor>

In 2004, I wrote 15 peer reviewed articles drawing upon quantitative large-scale survey data that I had "not" gathered. I had not done the field work for this research (mostly conducted by large survey companies).

Also, in 2004, I published 14 peer-reviewed journal articles, mostly in top tier disciplinary and sub-disciplinary journals. Once again, most of these articles were quantitative articles, drawing upon quantitative analysis of data I had not myself gathered.

A couple of these pieces are among my most highly cited pieces, one of them putting forth a theory I had developed on the basis of my quantitative analysis.

Something else also happened in 2004.

It was the year that I published my first ethnography in the journal Communication Theory. The piece titled "The unheard voices of Santalis" was drawn from my ethnographic fieldwork started in 1998.

Dutta‐Bergman, M. J. (2004). The unheard voices of Santalis: Communicating about health from the margins of India. Communication Theory, 14(3), 237-263.

My almost two-decade-long ethnography in Jangalmahal has only seen three journal articles, in spite of the many grueling hours in the field and in spite of the many vulnerabilities of doing this work (not to be romanticized). The rich stories, many of them shared through collaborative processes of attempting to develop solutions, many of them shared amid resistance and violence (between 2008 and 2012, large areas of Jangalmahal were sites of resistance, state sponsored violence, and Maoist violence), are often unwritten.

The impetus to publish these pieces in journal articles is overpowered by the desire to save the stories, to respect their incompleteness, and to recognize that their time has not yet come.

The impetus to publish the pieces is taken over by a commitment of the CCA to not publish culture-centered work till community members feel that change has been achieved in some small way and that entry points have been created.

Most importantly, the impetus of writing the stories is taken over by the joys and struggles of academic-community partnerships in working on potential solutions, albeit fragmented and contingent.

What is salient in these experiences is the fundamental difference between quantitative and qualitative research and the differential forms of labour that go into these practices of generating academic scholarship.

More importantly even, the slowness of CCA projects is grounded in the anchoring of the CCA in structure and structural transformation.

To publish any ethnographic work, and especially culture-centered work that seeks to see change in structures through participatory processes, it takes me a minimum of three  to five years (with the first one to two years on fieldwork, second and third year on developing the change processes, and fourth and fifth year to the process of academic writing). 

The writing of culturally-centered projects thus is slow, taking the depth of turns, the richness of layered narratives, and the incompleteness of fragmented and contingent dialogues. 

 Anchored in an axis of structural transformation, the value of this work is measured in the meaning it brings about for the communities it works with, and the changes in structures it introduces.

 By its nature, this work is contingent, incomplete, and slow.

 To invite spaces for such work is to recognize the fundamental difference of culture-centered projects of social change from quantitative data driven projects. The criteria of commitment and reflexivity we expect from culture-centered scholars mark an altogether different register for the design, practice, and evaluation of research.

Popular posts from this blog

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

  The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...
Read more

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems with w...
Read more

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor

  The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor On the architecture of the Aotearoa culture-war machine, and the danger it poses to a democracy heading into 2026 There is a particular cadence to the afternoon on which the career of a senior Māori journalist  at TVNZ is finished. It is unhurried. It begins with a tweet — in this case, a single image of a typed statement, posted by Maiki Sherman, the now-former political editor of TVNZ, on the afternoon of Friday, 8 May 2026, announcing that she had parted ways with the broadcaster. The post was terse, dignified, and final. As RNZ later reported , Sherman wrote that the scrutiny of the previous week had placed enormous pressure on her and rendered her role "untenable." The first wahine Māori to lead a major broadcaster's political team was gone. The story that finished her had not, ten days earlier, existed in any newspaper, on any wire, on any website you would consider mai...
Read more