Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

When you come home mother, You with your power and glory, and blessings and grace. These saffron-wearing thugs, bandanas on their heads, tridents in their hands, the asuras of the Hindu-rashtra, run in fear for their lives. When you come home mother, You with your love and anger, and strength and justice. These hate-mongering chanters of Ram-naam, with hate in their hearts, the desecrators of your name, go into hiding. When you come home mother, You with your joy and rage, and care and force. These miscreants that plant the seeds of violence, threaten to turn your land into Gujarat or Ayodhya, evanesce into the ether. When you come home mother, You with your power and glory, and blessings and grace, Your children, Hindus and Muslims, come together in united resolve, To keep these mandarins of hatred and violence Out of your land.

When working on culture-centered projects of social change, our research team is often approached by academic partners wanting to adopt the culture-centered approach or wanting to secure an entry into a collaboration with a community partner. While in many instances, these relationships result in mutual learning experiences, and bring new insights into the work of the CCA, in some instances, academic partners in culture-centered projects have not really imbibed the basic principles of the CCA before approaching collaboration. Some partners are eager to get a publication out on this or that marginalized community. The work of our team then becomes one of building the ethos of patient co-learning. That this or that publication is not what one is targeting when embarking on a culture-centered project is the first lesson. Academic partners are sometimes too eager to take this or that element of the CCA and market it as their own contribution. You forget that the hard work of c...

The very nature of structures, as frameworks for organizing communicative opportunities, is antithetical to the creative expressions that emerge organically from communicative spaces in community life. In other words, structures, with their rules and roles, forms and mechanics of control, impede the possibilities of expressions, especially expressions that emerge spontaneously from the everyday interactions and textures of community life. With their monocultures, driven by homogeneous logics of control and profiteering, structures see creativity as opportunities for consolidating power and control. Creativity is the next buzz word for drawing in investments and for fashionable product positioning. The scramble of authoritarian structures globally for the creative unique selling position is a good reflection  of this drive for creativity as a profitable resource, commoditized into instruments that can draw in financial opportunities. Creativity is targeted as a site of ...