Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Tyranny often does its work on us through the normalization  of its methods. It turns itself into the norm, its methods incorporated into our everyday behaviors and interactions. We are turned into tools of the tyrannical structure, often through our consent to participate in it. From the routine forms of participation in the everyday demands of tyranny to carrying out surveillance to  delivering punishment on behalf of the structure, we make ourselves as the instruments of tyranny. We even feel glee doing the work of surveillance or doing the work of crafting out the right punishment to the non-believer. Tyranny recruits into its structures the very best among us. Leading us to believe in its methods and its legitimacy. Cultivating in us the faith in the methods of tyranny as necessary responses to the non-believer. To have the courage to reject the methods of tyranny is seen as an act of betrayal, therefore calling for legitimate responses of violence. Tyranny is om

O n November 26, 2018, my colleague Professor Marc Lamont Hill, Steve Charles Professor of Media, Cities, and Solutions in Temple’s Klein College of Media and Communications, delivered a speech to the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People at the United Nations Day of Solidarity. In his powerful speech, Professor Hill offered an impassioned call for solidarity between people of color, drawing out a vision for anti-racist solidarity.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvzSv28z97o The speech made by Professor Hill is an excellent exemplar of principled communication scholarship that reaches out to the call for social justice.  In his speech, Professor Hill calls out Israeli state-sponsored atrocities and the ways in which these atrocities have systematically oppressed, colonized, and threatened the Palestinian people. He categorically outlines the violence, racism, and torture carried out routinely by Israel on Palestinians.

Over the past decade, CARE has had to negotiate the constraints on academic freedom across various spaces of our academic-activist-community interventions. The constraints on academic freedom of course differ in the form of questions asked, the tenor of the conversations, the scrutiny that the work of CARE is subjected to, and the arguments that are offered justifying the various forms of control that our work at the Center is subjected to. As a Center located within the University, CARE negotiates the structures within Universities as well as the broader structures in nation states, regions, and globally in its various projects of engaging and interrogating structures. Universities often are extensions of the hegemonic structures, with the discursive spaces of articulation shaped by these structures. Who can and can't speak at/in/from Universities is often dictated by the normative frameworks that are circulated by these structures. Whereas some of these strategies of