Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Engagement taxes the body of the engaged academic. Some days, when the body is tired, and the spirit has been beaten up by the insistence of structures to be impervious, the engaged academic wonders: What is the price we pay for engaged scholarship? Engagement assumes a sense of willingness/openness of structures "to" engage. Engagement also assumes the continued openness of communities at the margins to engage, to come to conversations, especially when their lived experiences with engagement often teaches them to not trust structures, to not have hopes in the possibilities of making spaces within structures. In this dance between community life and organized structures of social life, the engaged academic negotiates power, the privilege of the engaged position, and the challenges that come with it. Because in so much of my earlier writings I attend to Spivak's evocative concept of "privilege as loss," in this post, I will attend to the...

Society and impact are the two definitive constructs that make up the concept of social impact. Yet, this very nature of social impact that is guided toward the question of social good and the role of knowledge in contributing to social good is increasingly obfuscated from corporatized metrics for measuring social impact and from the benchmarks put forth by university administrators speaking to this corporatized structure of Universities globally. In this narrowly corporatist view, social impact is defined and measured in instrumental metrics that serve the interests of transnational capital. The guiding principles for articulating and evaluating social impact are narrowly constrained within corporatist agendas. Metrics such as industry engagement, patents, and revenue generated are thoughtlessly calculated and put forth as metrics of social impact. Inherent in these uncritical adoption of corporatized metrics is the fundamental rift between social impact and the corporate a...