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Professor Mohan J. Dutta delivers keynote at the "Rural Socio-Economic Transformation: Agrarian, Ecology, Communication and Community Development Perspectives" Conference



Professor Mohan J. Dutta will deliver the keynote titled "Decolonizing the rural: Rural economies and radical democracies in sustaining futures" at the "Rural Socio-Economic Transformation: Agrarian, Ecology, Communication and Community Development Perspectives" Conference held at the IPB International Conference Center Bogor, West Java, INDONESIA on November 14 and 15, 2018. He will be joining the Minister of Village, Development of Disadvantaged Regions And Transmigration, Republic of Indonesia, in the Opening Plenary. Here's the details of his talk:

 Decolonizing the rural: Rural economies and radical democracies in sustaining futures

 The rural has been conceptualized in top-down expert/elite driven interventions emerging from the global centers of power as passive sites of interventions. Expert interventions serving capitalist and colonialist agendas have systematically targeted the rural as the primitive "other" to be saved through market-based interventions that generate profits for transnational capital. The rural in the global South is materialized in development communication as the subject of colonial development interventions, storied in monolithic narratives of economic growth. The talk foregrounds the culture-centered approach (CCA) as a theoretical anchor for re-imagining the rural as the site of anti-colonial imaginary. Through case studies of autonomous development imagined in rural communities, the CCA outlines the tenets of democratic participation and dialogue that radically alter the neocolonial approaches to communication and development. The rural serves as a radically transformative anchor for storying sustainable economies that are grounded in socialist commitments to imagining global political economy.

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