Raksha
Mahtani
Raksha
Mahtani is currently a teaching assistant in Communications and New Media.
Before this, she served as a Research Assistant at the Center for
Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) and at the Asia
Research Institute (ARI). Raksha’s work on academic-activist collaborations
explores the ways in which social impact can be theorized, measured, and
evaluated.
1.
Please
share with us your CNM journey.
You
know, I first came to CNM in 2008, during my sabbatical from Purdue University.
This was a way for Debalina and I to be together for the first time as a family
in the same space because of the US immigration laws that meant that she had to
wait before migrating to the US.
Then
head Milagros Rivera was building a department that was truly
inter-disciplinary, bringing together computing scientists, interactive media
designers, artists, social scientists and humanities scholars to generate a
creative space for conversations on the emerging new media landscape and
communication. These conversations were truly cutting-edge, pushing the
boundaries of how we come to understand the nature of communication. What
touched me greatly about the department was this constant exploration of new
ideas. Millie planted in me the idea of returning to Singapore. So when she
invited me to consider the Headship for CNM, I thought, this would be a great
way to continue this conversation. I returned to Singapore in 2010 as Lim Chong
Yah Professor, delivered a talk on “Communications and social justice,” and got
to meet colleagues once again, and then returned in 2012.
I
have been honoured to lead a department with so many inspiring colleagues.
Professors T. T. Sreekumar, Ingrid Hoofd, Lonce Wyse, Denisa Kera, Hichang Cho,
Milagros Rivera, Julian Lin, Iccha Basnyat, Alex Mitchell, these are some of
our many inspiring colleagues to work with, who shaped and helped grow my own
thinking. While unfortunately some of these colleagues left CNM, they continued
to shape the CNM vision through ongoing conversations. The 2018 Communication
Interventions conference we are now holding will see a number of these
colleagues return.
Between
2012 and 2018, our department grew rapidly. Our student numbers increased,
course offerings covered a depth and a breadth that was unique not only in Asia
but globally. I was lucky to lead a curriculum revision that sought to define
our core identity and build a learning journey around this identity. When you
think of CNM, you think about the kinds of students we attract and nurture. I
am proud to witness the journey of students who are deeply grounded in theory,
engaged in conversations with practice, and committed to making Singapore and
the world a better place to live in. Our curriculum has grown and developed
with this ethos at heart. Our internships, partnerships with practitioners,
academic-practitioner conversations are all grounded in this ethos of
connecting communication to everyday life. Our emphasis on connecting digital
making, digital storytelling, art practice, fundamentals of social science
(with compulsory quantitative and qualitative research methods) and humanities
prepare students that are well-rounded and solidly grounded. Our faculty
experiment with a variety of methods of pedagogy, and at the same time offer
vital anchors for interrogating these methods in terms of their relationship
with the neoliberal university.
To
keep up with the student demands, the Department has been on a hiring spurt. We
hired a number of young junior colleagues, including Drs. Nancy Flude, Elmie
Nekmat, Taberez Neyazi, Jiyoung Chae, Ee Lyn Tan, Sofia Morales, Weiquan Lu,
Eun Hwa Jung, Shaohai Jiang, Renyi Hong, Andrew Quitmeyer, Asha Pandi, Dazzelyn
Zapata. Each of these colleagues are amazingly inspiring, doing work that is
pushing the boundary spaces between communication and digital artefacts, and
contributing CNM student learning in ways that push our students to imagine new
possibilities. We have been graced by the presence of a number of Visiting
Scholars, Professors Harmeet Sawhney, Charles Briggs, Barbara Sharf, Gary
Kreps, Deborah Lupton, Jeffrey Peterson, Evelyn Ho, Susan Douglas, Debbie
Dougherty, Raka Shome, Sameer Deshpande. These colleagues from across the globe
have enriched our worldviews.
I am
delighted to see our hard work and creativity as a department be recognized in
our global reputation. Not only is CNM a “go-to” department for many peers
across the region and Asia who join us to study our curriculum innovations, but
we are also recognized for our leadership in building a program with the ethos
of “communication that creates.” This creative potential of communication is a
theme that resonates across the array of practices in CNM, always with an eye
toward generating social impact.
2.
You have spoken before of
your great affection and fondness for Singapore. How has it been living
here?
Living in Singapore has been
one of the most joyful experiences of my diaspora life. In almost half of life
spent outside my country of origin, I found “home” in Singapore, in its wide
diversity of and respect for different cultures. I could be walking down a
street, and be immersed in conversations that ranged from Malay to Singlish to
Mandarin to Tamil. I could be walking down a few blocks, and find a mosque, a
Buddhist temple, A Hindu temple, and a Church, all woven together in a
neighbourhood. I could walk into a hawker center and have my fill of the spicy
Szechwan Qong Qing chicken, hotpot, thosai, and char kway teow. President Obama
described Singapore’s multiculturalism as “rojak—different
parts united in a harmonious whole,” drawing reference to the local dish that’s
a messy mix of all different fruits, itself a multicultural affair, with
Indian, Malay and Chinese influences. Our family, our children born in
Singapore, with US passports, and deep roots of joint families in India (both
Debalina and I come from Bengali joint families), has found root and meaning in
this Singaporean multiculturalism, has learnt life lessons from it, and
relished the diversity of interactions.
I have to share with you this
story, I had first read about Singapore in an Opinion Piece in The Statesman
when I was seventeen or so, about how this tropical nation in Asia that
guaranteed universal public housing. Embedded in this initial perception was
the story of a state that was committed to the wellbeing of its people. That
story had stayed with me.
Debalina and I spent six
months, our first six months living together as a couple, in the Gillman
Heights apartments (which were already being taken down part-by-part to make
room for the design wonder, Interlace), and our first child, Shloke was born
here that year. Incidentally, our next two children, Trisha and Soham, were also
born in Singapore. The people of Singapore, the hawker centers, China Town,
Little India, multicultural conversations, celebrations of difference, these
created great impact on my ways of being and thinking. I am touched by the
kindness of everyday Singaporeans and their openness to difference.
Although
I grew up a Hindu, I love the sound of the Azaan (the Muslim call for prayer
that echoes from mosques at early dawn and dusk). Debalina and I have spent
precious times walking through the bylanes of Arab Street. The diversity and
richness that you see along Bussorah Street, Haji Lane, Bali Lane, Muscat
Street, the serenity of the Masjid Sultan Mosque, the food at the local
eateries, these are part of our family.
Singapore is truly a crossroad of the world, with so many different
cultural experiences and narratives flowing through its spaces. The routine
everyday interactions, at the hawker stalls and food courts, at the
neighbourhood wet market, at the neighbourhood temple, have enriched our souls
as a family.
As a
scholar who studies everyday life, and does so by building academic-community
partnerships, I have been very lucky to build so many embedded relationships in
Singapore. Working with families residing in HDBs, and specifically in the
rental blocks, with transgender sex workers, with patients in hospital settings, I have come to witness the
everyday grace, dignity, and strength of Singaporeans. Forming advisory
boards for research projects, I have come away transformed by the depths of
conviction and courage of so many community members I meet.
Most
importantly, as a teacher, I have been inspired by my many students. They are
Singapore’s tomorrow, and in them, I see this beautiful conviction in working
toward a better Singapore, in contributing with heart, and in making a
difference. We have our alums who have gone on to climb difficult mountains to
raise funds for the needy, run social enterprises for women in poverty, develop
projects for low income families, create solutions for migrant workers – there
is so much heart in all of this. This heart is the other side of the Singapore
story, a story often untold.
3.
Impact is a theme that often
resonates through your conversations. So how do you understand impact?
The question of impact is a
tricky one. Impact often depends upon who defines it. For funded projects, it
is usually the funder that defines impact, and this is done in the form of
knowledge gained, attitudes changed, and behaviors adopted.
Impact itself can become a
game, with scholars often making tall claims to carry forward their research
careers, with little relevance to community life. You have a lot of posturing
that feeds the neoliberal configuration in academia. For instance, you have
academics writing about their role in social justice without ever having put
their bodies on the line. I have been struck by how often community members,
especially the marginalized in a society, note that academia sponsors the sort
of “tourism” where academics go in and out of communities, making knowledge
claims about the impact, all the while giving back very little in reality to
community life. So I am humbled and tentative when talking about impact,
grounded in the notion that impact has to be defined by the communities we come
to work with. This is especially critical because “community engagement”
“ground-up approach” “participatory action research” “PhotoVoice” etc. are the
precise tools of the neoliberal University, serving its logics of expanding
co-optation and control through the commoditization of social justice and
community participation as the “radical chic.”
For me, in my limited
knowledge, the impact of the work we have done at CARE as a collective is in
two aspects.
The first is in terms of the material interventions we create, with
the hard work of researchers, community members, community organizers, and
activists. So for instance, when we build a health center with collective
community effort, or build community cultural centers for participating in
local cultural practices of health (such as songs and dances that community
members see as integral to their health), or build community playgrounds, these
are material resources that are tangible. Community members can continue to tap
on these material resources in the long-run, as well as use these resource and
intervention models for their own advocacy in their communities. Similarly,
when we petition state development sectors to build irrigation systems or
sources of clean drinking water in communities, the interventions are tangible
to both community members and research teams.
The second form of impact
however is central to the work of the culture-centered approach (CCA), and is
the hardest to measure, the creation of
communication infrastructures and communicative capacities in communities at
the margins. This transforms into the ability of community members to
articulate their ideas, and have their voices be heard in ways they find
meaningful. Impact in this sense is both a sense of efficacy (the belief that
both individually and as a community) in being able to have a voice that can
make a difference. So a lot of the work we run on communicative capacity
building in collaboration with communities at the global margins translates
into the foundations for grassroots democracy that interrogate the practices of
marginalization. For instance, in our ongoing work with women farmers across
India, the communicative capacity turns into an interrogation of and resistance
to the marginalizing neoliberal agricultural policies, not just in local structures,
but also into the national and global structures. Similarly, in our
collaboration with Project X that we have worked on, the “Stiletto Alliance”
advocacy campaign disrupts the normative notions of gender performativity,
foregrounding the voices of transgender sex workers that draw out their
experiences of pain, strength, and advocacy.
4.
What has been your most
impactful work in communities worldwide?
The one most impactful
project that is very close to me is the “Voices of Hunger” project. It is
impactful because the nomenclature of the project, “Voices” and “Hunger”
emerges from communities experiencing hunger worldwide. Mapped across five
countries currently, from the US to India to Singapore, the project looks at
how hunger comes to be understood in the lifeworlds of those with inaccess to
material resources. I say this project is impactful because as a communication
intervention, it disrupts the erasure of hunger from national discourses. You
see, culture has systematically been deployed by those in power to make claims
to difference that justifies and perpetuates the hegemony of the elite. The
CCA, by inverting culture and by drawing on it as a site of storytelling from
the margins, creates narrative anchors that tell hitherto untold stories. The
many voices of the marginalized make power uncomfortable, holding it to account
through stories, images, and embodied presence. As communicative infrastructures,
the sites of storytelling at the margins transform the hegemonic structures of
storytelling, thus culturally centering communicative spaces.
5.
What are some of the most
meaningful moments of your Singapore projects?
One of the projects in
Singapore that holds great meaning for me is the “Singaporeans left behind”
advocacy project. This project is rooted in our work in building communicative
infrastructures for families living in poverty in Singapore, based on the idea
that these infrastructures will enable hitherto erased narratives to emerge. A
number of CARE team members, Daniel, Sarah, Naomi, Asha, and undergraduate
students Ling Yang and Jonathan, have worked on the different stages of what
has grown to be a widely networked project with many different components. Our
advisory board, comprising of uncle Willie, uncle Daniel, auntie Lily, auntie
June, worked together to develop a communication advocacy intervention,
carrying it all the way from developing communication strategy to designing the
intervention materials to developing tactical elements of the intervention.
When the campaign was released
in digital spaces, it reached approximately 1.3 million Singaporeans. The video
stories, crafted by advisory group members, and featuring them, introduced into
the discursive spaces of Singapore, conversations on hunger, poverty, and
inaccess. Moreover, the stories found
entry into mainstream and digital media, with feature length stories anchored
in the voices of our advisory group members. This project stands out to me,
like many of our other projects here, because it created a space for voices
that discussed experiences of poverty, hunger, and inaccess. Stories of struggle,
community, and change challenge the neoliberal narratives of resilience,
individual behavior change, and privatization constructed around poverty.
The project was truly
transformative because it created multiple sustainable infrastructures,
including building a foundation for a series of sustainable projects that are
driven by advisory group members. Material interventions such as running a
mobile food delivery infrastructures transformed our research and pedagogical
anchors, as well as generated tangible solutions for the communities we were
working with. Collaborations with partners such as “Food from the Heart” on
food insecurity offered strategic insights on developing material solutions to
food insecurity in Singapore.
Moreover, one of the vital
indicators of the strength of the project was in how it made various structures
respond, seeking to have control over the narratives. Although this became a
real challenge for the sustainability of the project, it also demonstrated one
of the key indicators of success of the CCA, intervening into the dominant
structures.
6.
What are some of the major
barriers you have faced in trying to realise these projects? Have you managed
to overcome them? How?
Let’s take the example I just
shared with you. One of the key barriers to social change communication
grounded in the habits of everyday democracy is the absence of communicative
infrastructures, and the structural responses to these infrastructures. So the
system, as a collection of institutions in Singapore, responded critically to
the “Singaporeans Left behind” project. The barriers ranged from asking for
explanations for why social change, to asking for explanations for the model of
the CCA, to asking for modifications to the elements of the campaign. The requests
for change that came top-down ranged all the way from requesting process-based
changes (such as how the CCA is conducted, who is involved, how the advocacy
and publication work is handled) to requests for content-based changes.
I don’t know we really
overcame these challenges per se. We found ways of negotiating and carry
forward. In some places, we, with the advisory board involved in that decision
as a team, made some modifications. In other parts, we didn’t. It was really
much like a choreography, with a clear commitment to transformative
possibilities grounded in the voices of the margins. This project presents
ongoing opportunities for such conversations because poverty is such a taboo
topic in Singapore, with invisible out-of-bound (OB) markers.
Broadly, I believe there are
two issues here. One is the unfamiliarity with academic work on social change
communication which is a major barrier. The hegemonic idea that academics
should somehow sit in the ivory tower and theorize from a distance translates
into suspicion of an entire body of well-established academic work that
traverses the boundaries between the theorizing and the practice of social
change. To overcome this, I worked continually on educating the systems,
bringing in the literature, drawing from the published literature. Although
this is something I had made very clear in conversations I had before taking up
the job in Singapore, I realize now that this work of educating the structures
and advocating for social change communication is a continuous journey.
The second is built around
the suspicion of the foreigner, marked as the outsider. For social scientists
broadly conducting field-based work, this challenge has to be negotiated. The
“foreigner” tag is often deployed by systems to shut out inconvenient empirical
observations. So when I am asked, “As a foreigner, why are you studying
Singapore’s poverty?” this is an excellent opportunity for me to educate the
relevant stakeholders and to build the spaces for doing the work that needs to
be done. That my studies are always local, intricately weaved in with the
threads of the global, is a point that I often have to make to resist the
xenophobic responses from the system.
7.
You have studied social
change communication over the last two decades. Most recently, you have worked
in Singapore. What do you think about strategies for communication for social
change in Singapore?
As one of my favourite
authors and colleagues, Professor Cherian George, shares how Singapore’s soft
authoritarian model of governance puts in places a variety of strategies of
calibrated control. Communication for social change in Singapore creatively
negotiates these structures of power and control, deploying a wide range of
communication strategies from dialogue to resistance. While on one hand these
communicative strategies depict the range of possibilities for how
communication is conceptualized, they also foreground the vitality of
advocating for communicative spaces itself. I disagree with the body of
literature that paints the diverse array of communicative practices under the
broad stroke of “accommodation” “pragmatism” or “dialogue” that erases the
stories of resistance that community members and activists participate in every
day, and in doing so, upholds the status quo. The richness of resistive
strategies that you witness in the everyday life of Singapore offer critical
anchors for how we theorize social change communication in Singapore. The work
I am doing with the veteran Singaporean activist Braema Mathi seeks to address
this diversity of communication for social change in Singapore. Braema has been a guiding post in fostering conversations on social change, and we are currently working on a book on social change communication. The white papers she created while at CARE have been powerful interventions in different aspects of social change communication.
8.
What advice do you have for
students of CNM?
As I shared earlier Raksha, I am inspired by our students.
They are our hope, our seeds for imagining tomorrow. I have therefore very
little to offer as advice. Instead, I am enthused about learning from them
about how they see themselves intervening into the world, and seeing them make
a difference through the participation in the everyday life of communication. Given
that so much of what we do in communication has been largely colonized by the
few that own most of the global resources, the work of social impact is
fundamentally about transforming these communicative inequalities. Now this
work is not going to be easy because the power elite control most of the global
communicative resources. Yet, how you co-create room for designing
communication that is democratic and imaginative will be central to the world
we will inhabit. How you pursue the path of truth even as communication is deployed
toward generating and reproducing falsehoods will be central to the world we
have for ourselves in the future. For some of you, you will directly will
directly work in civil society, in activist projects, in advocacy
interventions. For many others of you, you will go to work in various
disciplines and organisations – in civil services and in the corporate sectors.
Remember this, no matter where you go and what you do, how you make a
difference while pursuing the path of truth is going to be at the heart of your
everyday practice. Raksha reminded me of this beautiful Toni Morrison advice,
“I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly
trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need
to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower
somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”
9.
What thoughts you have for
your colleagues in CNM?
I am so very proud of you,
and proud of CNM. Keep doing the amazing work you are doing, pushing the
boundaries of thought and practice through the imagination of communication and
digital infrastructures of tomorrow. Inhabit with pride the spaces of radical
difference you have created. Your creativity, brilliance, experiments with new
thoughts, and commitment to making a difference inspire me. With this spirit,
you will create a world that is socially just, transformative, grounded in
theory, and embedded in deep empiricism. The CNM spirit, one of pushing the
established boundaries, will carry on through your work and teachings in the
classroom. I look forward to your ongoing experiments with communication and
digital futures.