Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

The hyper-precarity of the migrant worker, expelled into the spaces of discardability in neoliberal economies, is constituted by a politics of communciative erasure.  Yet, even as these grotesque forms of organizing that constitute discardable migrant bodies become visible, everyday forms of communication in hegemonic systems work to erase and render invisible the accounts of exploitation, extraction, and oppression. The grotesqueness of the otherwise normalized politics of "use and throw" is carefully tucked away from discursive spaces through various forms of communicative strategies to erase the voices of low-wage migrant workers.  Amidst their suffering and the negotiations of violence written into neoliberal societies, amidst the violence brought on their bodies by COVID19, workers speak up.  These very acts of speaking up must be violently shut down to keep intact the neoliberal narrative.  One such strategy, deployed by civil society organizations, state propa...

Recent years have witnessed conversations in communities of scientists and a certain strand of social scientists (particularly psychologists) on the "crisis of replicability." These conversations point to the problems with replicating studies, often noting that the processes of replication do not produce the same results (the replication success rate in many instances hovering between 30% and 40%).  The ideology of post-positivism that anchors the dominant strands of the sciences/social sciences (including in Communication Studies) sees this as a crisis. Any form of crisis-making is political work. We should be therefore asking, for whom is replicability a crisis? For what reasons is replicability a crisis? It is a crisis because the framework of hypothesis-making that dominates the sciences/social sciences works on the ideology of generalizability. This impulse of generalizing forms the colonial infrastructure of White knowledge systems that legitimize themselves through the...

And he stands  at your gates holding a placard with a smiling face, standing in peace as an invitation, a stand that threatens your house of cards, built on its  repressive rules, and tools to silence.

Courtesy CARE's "Respect our Rights" campaign One of the powerful lessons emergent from my ongoing dialogues with low-wage migrant workers in Singapore is the palpable sense of fear many workers feel.  This sense of fear is material. It is visceral. It is embodied. It is real. It is tied to and directly a product of the ways in which migrant work is organized in Singapore, the structures of employment in the industries that hire low-wage migrant labour, and the structures of the state institutions that regulate low-wage migrant work. Low-wage migrant work is temporary. Low-wage migrant work is constituted amidst tremendous power inequalities between the worker and the employer.  Last night, I was speaking with Jamal bhai.  We have been speaking often over the last month, his voice serving as an anchor that guides our ongoing work at the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), the directions of our research methodology, and the processes thr...