Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

When I was trained as a health communication scholar, much of my learning was based on the model of individual behavior change, defining communication as messages directed at raising awareness, changing attitudes, and promoting healthy behaviors. This line of health communication scholarship has had a long history, having been applied to create and strategically disseminate health messages to target populations. My ongoing journey in collaborating with communities at the margins taught me that the problem of health inequalities that I was grappling with were much more to do with existing structural inequalities that constitute health than to do with the absence of knowledge, attitudes, and individual behaviors. Although communication as message could indeed be directed at target populations, such a narrow framework of communication did not really address the larger structural inequalities, the inequality in income distribution, the absence of structural resources, the poverty of...

Pakeha claims to merit often obfuscate the structures of Whiteness that make invisible Pakeha mediocrity, inverting Pakeha mediocrity as merit. The ability to erase the sources of its privilege is fundamental to the reproduction of privilege. Pakeha privilege reproduces itself by bringing forth the question of merit, articulating that merit ought to serve as the basis for evaluations, appointments, and mobility. The language of meritocracy on the surface appears committed to equality and claims to offer a level playing field. Commitments to addressing deep-seated racist inequalities are then projected as anti-meritocratic. Yet, what this discourse of merit strategically erases are the fundamentally racist inequities in how structures are constituted that underlie access to the playing field. The rules of the game are dictated by the White majority culture, embedded in its logics of White norms. Moreover, the claims to merit often work to hide the lack of merit in mainstrea...

Professor Mohan Dutta delivers keynote at International Conference on Communication and Media, 2018. Resisting culture as neoliberal development: Indigenous imaginaries of alternative economies With the incorporation of culture as a tool of development, neoliberal cultural studies have articulated the imaginary of a post-ideological global order to extract cultural articulations as sites of privatization, free market promotion, and extraction of labour and raw material. The turn to culture in neoliberal development under the framework of cultural intelligence, public culture, creative city promotion deploys the logic of culture precisely as an instrument for market promotion. Drawing upon the culture-centered approach that offers a framework for solidarity at the margins that resist the neoliberal order, I will attend to indigenous imaginary of alternative economies rooted in cultural articulations of socialist development and social justice.

The problem of academic dishonesty is a key challenge in many rankings-chasing Asian universities. Practices of stealing works of students and junior colleagues are often embedded in power hierarchies of Asian cultures, where the culture of stealing is normalized into notions of academic position. Consider for instance a full professor that owns a laboratory and critical equipment infrastructure in the laboratory. He then expects every Assistant Professor using the equipment to include him as an author. Consider another instance of an Associate Professor in Quantum Physics collaborating on a project with an Assistant Professor [based on an idea developed by the Assistant Professor] take the key ideas framing the project and apply them to a different context to publish a first-authored journal article where she claims ownership of the key ideas. Consider another instance of an Assistant Professor in Biomedicine working on a collaborative grant with a Full Professor...

Growing up in the mofussil in a context of the trade union movement and rural organizing, I learned early on from my everyday environment to be suspicious of the category of the "Calcatian antel" aka the "intellectual" or the "intellectual of the Calcutta brand." You identify this kind with its class history as a collaborator of the power elite. High on rhetorical flourish, and vacuous in substance, this is the class that will make all kinds of commitments about solidarity when convenient and disappear when solidarity is actually needed in struggles of change. With a father working as an extractive manager for one of the large corporations that inhabited Calcutta of the 1960s and 1970s, the Calcatian antel went to an elite convent in South Calcutta, and then to one of the elite Calcutta institutions where the children of the well-heeled go. Having grown up very much as a class collaborator, the village and the rural and the poor didn't ex...