Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Having watched the long six hour exchange that seemed like an interrogation of the scholar PJ Thum, I felt a sense of sadness. Academics are often called upon as experts to offer their knowledge in policy making processes. However, I had not personally witnessed anything like this in any other part of the developed world. Here we had a politician, a representative of the state, performing what appeared to be an interrogation of an academic under the framework of a select committee, carrying out a performance that begun and ended with the scholar's integrity and academic credibility being brought under scrutiny. The performance, I worry, if not interrogated for its quality and tenor, will send out a chilling message to academics in Singapore and elsewhere working on Singapore-related issues, especially when the findings of their work don't align with or even interrogate the state-sponsored line. [Now even writing about this, while sitting here in Singapore...

A critical component of the social justice work of CARE is the work of communication in imagining and working toward structural transformation. Structural transformation in political, economic, social, and cultural formations is explicitly intertwined with the work of co-creating communicative spaces in working with the margins. To work toward co-creating these communicative spaces is to perform "embodied risk." The formation of communicative structures at/with the margins embodies risks to the material and symbolic formations of CARE work. These risks, expressed in the form of various strategies of repression directed at the work of culture-centered approach, are indicators of the very transformative nature of culture-centered projects. Because and when the work of CARE co-creates infrastructures of participation at the margins, various forms of power and control are directed at the work. These risks, experienced on the body as the corpus of social justice work,...