When structures strategize to cultivate creativity, creativity emerges as/in resistance

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 management, written into organizational logics of efficiency, turned into quantifiable metrics that structures can utilize to reproduce their power and control.

In contract, creativity in cultural contexts, as the everyday expressions of new ideas and thoughts, thrives in the fissures of such structures, not in manicured creative innovation hubs, but amid the resistance voiced in community contexts, amid the expressions of everyday life in community participation.

Structures form the constraints on which creativity works in order to foster spaces, sites, and opportunities for expression.

The very impetus of structures to cultivate creativity is resisted through the everyday expressions of creativity in community life.

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 ...

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...

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...

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