Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

The culture-centered approach (CCA) outlines a conceptual framework for communication for social change, developing empirically grounded tenets that map out key concepts of communication within the broader ambits of social change. As a meta-theoretical framework for communication for social change, the CCA explores the ways in which culture, structure, and agency constitute spaces for meaning making and sites of participation for communities at the margins of social systems. Social change in the context of marginalization specifically attends to the co-creation of communication infrastructures, communication tools, and communicative spaces where the voices at the margins of societies are heard. From the question of systematic erasure of subaltern subjectivity, the CCA theoretically grapples with the work of communicative processes in disrupting these erasures, the role of communication in struggles for voices to be heard, and the array of communication strategies that open u...

2008. During our trip to Phuket, Debalina and I were inundated with images of White men, mostly middle-aged and above, roaming the streets of Phuket with women that seemed to barely have crossed their teens or just beyond their teens. This sight, of the "old White man" with a young Asian woman, often old enough to be his daughter, is a fairly common sight across East and Southeast Asia. The image is so common that it is naturalized as part of the scenery, a normative element of the "unique selling proposition" of Phuket, Bangkok, Bali. The liberals and Asian apologists of cultural tourism have often responded with the concept of consent, noting that the women participating in these "relationships" offer their consent in participation, that they are fully aware of the consequences of participating in such relationships, and therefore, make active choices. However, consent and participation are never devoid of power. To construct some elaborate...

Figure: The activist Samarendra Das organizing the Foil Vedanta campaign in the backdrop of the Vedanta mining operations in Zambia. Culture-centered processes of social change, grounded in the voices of the margins within local contexts, explore the ways in which communicative spaces can be co-created through collaborations with those at the margins. In the co-creation of these communicative spaces as well as resulting from these communicative spaces, a plethora of communicative strategies emerge. For those at the margins, these strategies become ways of securing access to resources that are mostly erased or absent. While in many instances, collaborating with(in) institutional structures to shift normative expectations prove to be effective, in many other instances, an antagonistic strategy is necessitated to create the grounds of claims-making. A monolithic focus on collaboration with institutional structures often ends up perpetuating the status quo, without creating t...