Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

by Bernadette Marie Calafell, Karma Chávez, Devika Chawla, Lisa A. Flores, Nina Lozano, and Bryan McCann On June 26, 2019, responding to the strong critique to the DS letter, Professor Carole Blair, a DS and a leading feminist scholar of Communication, wrote a response (pasted below). In this letter, Professors Bernadette Marie Calafell, Karma Chávez, Devika Chawla, Lisa A. Flores, Nina Lozano, and Bryan McCann respond to Professor Blair. Dear Carole, After considering several possible ways to respond to your recent Crtnet post amid the disci plinary fallout regarding NCA Distinguished Scholars and Marty Medhurst’s editorial, we have chosen to address you personally--for the impact of your post and the silence that preceded it is personal, professional, and political. As we believe you well know, these three things are always intimately entwined. We write to you as mid-career scholars working in various critical traditions. While our work differs in many salient ways, we ...

Women farmers of the Deccan Development Society (DDS) running the community workshop on video-based voice We at the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) are delighted at the recent recognition of our community partner, Deccan Development Society (DDS), with the 2019 UN-Equator Prize.  The Equator Prize is a recognition of community-led grassroots initiatives that offer solutions to sustainable development. For the last three decades, the  Deccan Development Society (DDS), has been developing culture-centered interventions in agriculture and ecology through sanghams, grassroots cooperatives owned by dalit women. These grassroots cooperatives are spaces for knowledge generation, drawing on indigenous knowledge, offering solutions to sustainable ecologies, and challenging the global onslaught of neoliberal agriculture, felt locally.  The interventions developed by the DDS have been at the forefront of offering an alternative mode...

From 2015, for a few years, I had the opportunity to team teach the introductory Philosophy of Communication, the fabled course at Purdue University that formed the basis of doctoral pedagogy in the program. The conversation on Whiteness that we witness today is a reminder of the many experiences of teaching the course and disrupting the doctoral program. On one hand, in my many years at Purdue, teaching this course was one of the most joyful experiences, an opportunity to witness the brilliance of colleagues, many of whom formed the canon of Communication. On the other hand, teaching the course embodied the emotional and cognitive labour of struggles against Whiteness while immersed in it. When reflecting on this experience and the painful work of labour, let me note in the beginning my gratitude to the White allies that stood in solidarity. As a team taught course, Com 600, embodied a pedagogy of debate. It was therefore set up like that, beginning with Philosophy of Science...

Mohan Dutta and Devika Chawla Another morning, another letter. Yet another letter that invokes the pain and sadness triggered by Medhurst's letter and the subsequent revelations in the various letters circulated by the Distinguished Scholars (DS) of our discipline. This new letter is from Professor Robert Craig, the former editor of Communication Theory, and a key scholar in the theorizing of communication. In what we will share below, the Craig letter (pasted in full below) re-enacts the erasures constituted in Whiteness, once again foreclosing the possibilities of dialogue. That this foreclosure is written into a narrative of hope and moving forward points precisely to the necessity for holding on to the rage, to making visible the violence and erasure constituted in the architecture of the discipline. Professor Craig begins his letter by reminding the reader that what the DS letter was actually doing was protesting the NCA Executive Committee's decision to change the DS...

Aunty Leigh (in red) at one of our advisory group meetings Te Patikitiki Library in Highbury, May 2019. E Tōku Hoa! Ko koe te rā nui o ngā rangi o Tōku tapu, kaua e tukua mā te paru o te ao tō miharo e huna. Rukea ki rahaki te ārai o arongakore, kia puta mārama mai ai koe i ngā kapua, ka kākahuria ai e koe mgā mea katoa ki te korowai o te ora.  - Ngā Kupu Huna o Baha’u’llah Aunty Ilene (Leigh)  Taiwhati passed away this week. She was a member of many community groups in Highbury and our CCA advisory group was very lucky to be one of them. The enthusiasm and generous energy that she brought to the group will be sadly missed. She played a key role in documenting and recording the ideas of the group and contributed ideas that were grounded in the depth of her experiences. I met Leigh towards the end of last year when my friend ...

Community radio of Deccan Development Society (DDS): Professor Vinod Pavarala is a pioneering scholar of community radio The ongoing conversation of #Whiteness in the discipline and the emerging impetus for changing the infrastructures of the discipline foreground the roles of the National Communication Association (NCA) and the International Communication Association (ICA). As these conversations seek spaces for voices of difference, the hierarchical structures of our organizations and their hegemonic formations are critically interrogated. In this snippet of Facebook conversation between Professor Vinod Pavarala and Professor Pradip Thomas, the very hierarchies built into the articulation of "Distinguished" is interrogated. Professor Pradip Thomas  at the University of Queensland is a leading scholar of communication for social change, with much of his impactful work spread across the global South. Professor Vinod Pavarala  at  the Department of Communication a...

One of my blog posts, " Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars " speaks to a recent conversation that has been generated in my field. The conversation responds to changes in how the field selects its Distinguished Scholars (with the capital D and capital S), the response of a current subset of DS to the changes in the form of a letter (a number of whom have rightly so, withdrawn their support for the letter), and an editorial by Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a DS, initially proposed for his journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs. The impetus of the conversation focused on the false dichotomy between diversity and merit that is set up to seemingly protect the "purity politics" of the discipline, embodying the racist infrastructures of the discipline. That diversity somehow threatens merit is often deployed across departments, graduate programs, and associations to prop up a White structure, while hiding strategically the very rules of this structure that consti...

Departures in Critical Qualitative Research (DCQR) Special Issue :   “Merit, Whiteness, and Privilege” Co-Editors : Elizabeth Desnoyers-Colas (Georgia Southern University); Mohan J. Dutta (Massey University); Amardo Rodriguez (Syracuse University) Hard Deadline : July 1, 2019 Submission Length: 1500-2000 words The Communication Discipline has a racism problem. In fact, the discipline has long had a racism problem, silenced by overarching structures that deploy the language of civility to erase conversations. These racist undertones of the discipline, written and co-opted into the articulations of diversity, equity, and inclusion came tumbling out on June 10, 2019, when an editorial written by a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, Martin Medhurst, for his edited journal, Rhetoric and Public Affairs was widely circulated. In the letter, Professor Medhurst rehashed the oft-used trope of “diversity and merit” to attack the democratizing processes being buil...

The International Communication Association (ICA) has over recent years established an internationalization agenda. As a part of the leadership, I had an opportunity to witness this agenda as it developed. Internationalization is seen as a way for diversifying the ICA beyond its US-centric roots in #Whiteness. Drawing on my experiences heading a department in Asia in a University that is deeply entrenched in the global rankings, I will argue that the agenda of internationalization articulated by ICA works alongside the orientation toward the Discipline from Asia as a space outside to reproduce #WhiteColonialism. As Asian Universities have emerged on the global rankings games, the aggressive chase for rankings has translated into the upholding of journal rankings and impact factors as the basis of climbing the rankings charts. The deep and constant awareness of the rankings as the drivers of performance orients these Universities toward hiring and rewarding scholarship that is ...

After having spent a day's labour dealing with the effect of the racist editorial statement made by the RPA editor and Distinguished Scholar Professor Martin J. Medhurst and listening to scholars of colour who have to inhabit the racist spaces of our discipline, I woke up this morning to the letter that was sent by 66 Distinguished Scholars (DS) of our discipline to the leadership of the National Communication Association. The list of colleagues signing the letter includes beloved colleagues and mentors who shaped my own journey as a scholar in the discipline, and colleagues whom I have seen as vital sources of solidarity. It is therefore in much pain that I write this response. This response to the letter is written with humility and in anguish, recognizing that the letter is not addressed to me.  I write my response shifting between third and first person, aware of the (im)possibility of dialogue as a wider collective in our discipline, scholars of colour and current leaders...