Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Figure 1: The #NoSingaporeansLeftBehind campaign created by families living in poverty in Singapore Across culture-centered interventions, the co-creation of voice infrastructures in partnership with communities living in poverty results in the ownership of decision-making processes in the hands of the poor. When the poor own the communicative platforms, make decisions on these platforms based on information they seek out in partnership with community organizations and researchers, and own the frameworks of evaluating the interventions they develop, the nature and quality of decisions become anchored in their everyday lives. As opposed to experts from the outside making decisions that are not grounded in the lived experiences of the poor, the culture-centered interventions developed and owned by the poor address the various underlying conditions causing poverty by being created by the poor. That experts often make decisions based on poorly informed, empirically empty ideolog...

"No Singaporean Left Behind" (NSLB) campaign in Singapore Between 2012 and 2018, the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) was housed at the National University of Singapore. Based on the theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach (CCA)  (Dutta, 2008), that conceptualizes communicative inequalities, inequalities in distribution of communicative opportunities, as intrinsically tied to structural inequalities, inequalities in the distribution of material resources, the Center co-created an array of communication interventions in partnership with communities at the margins in Singapore, India, Bangladesh, China, Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia.  Culture-centered interventions build voice infrastructures for the margins based on the theoretical argument that the erasure of voice infrastructures forms the basis of marginalization. The impact of these interventions are evident in the creation of material resources that...