Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

If there is one thing that COVID-19 has made abundantly visible is the deeply unequal social compact we inhabit.  This inequality is founded on "communicative inversions," the turning on their head of material reality to convince us that the forms of governments that give massive tax breaks to the wealthy, attack our unions, and deplete state support for those among us that are struggling with getting by are necessary to remove poverty and to create opportunity. You see this language of "opportunity" used by the political elite across the globe.  The elite tell us that giving rich corporations tax breaks and creating policies that allow elites to make even more wealth for themselves is somehow the only way to generate employment opportunities for the rest of us. This story of "creating opportunity" through tax breaks and state subsidies for the already rich is the fundamental "communicative inversion." Of course, as a communicative inversion, it ...

In the theoretical work of the culture-centered approach (CCA), the critique of #Whiteness foregrounds and interrogates the hegemonic norms that privilege White culture structurally while undermining the imaginaries, lived experiences, and narrative capacities of colonized, enslaved, migrant, and refugee cultures. This critique attends carefully to the notion that the hegemonic cultural arrangements of #Whiteness circulate specific pathways of mobility for individuals born into a certain race (White and model minority Asian) while undermining the possibilities of such pathways for individuals born into other races (Indigenous, Blacks, Hispanics in the U.S. for instance).  This analysis of the movement from the critique of the structure to the exploration of individual pathways is embedded in the interrogations of the interplays between race, class, gender, and nationality in the production of marginalization.  A culture-centered reading foregrounds the ways in which structures...

Authoritarian capitalism, the collection of authoritarian techniques of consolidating power and control in the hands of the ruling class in order to serve the hegemonic interests of capital, is in its basic character bad for human health and wellbeing (one certainly does not need a pandemic to support this claim empirically, more on this in a later blog post). Paradoxically, authoritarian capitalism is often sold by the ruling global capitalist class as the epitome of efficient and clean governance. Transnational media, driven by the ideology of profiteering and owned by the transnational capitalists heavily invested in the ongoing expansion of the reach of global capital, hold up authoritarian capital as the mecca of good governance. Transnational organizations such as the various arms of the United Nations (UN, from World Bank to World Health Organization), having been thoroughly co-opted into the infrastructures of global capital over the last three decades, prop up exemplars of au...

Whiteness is bad for science. It is certainly bad for #CommunicationScience. It is the original #BadScience. In its unequestioned privilege reified through publication processes and organizational structures of the discipline, it (re)produces bad science, emboldened in White mediocrity and laziness, propping up as normative concepts that have been put forth by White academics for decades. It is bad in its stagnancy. It doesn't move. Take up a Communication Theory textbook and look at what makes up #CommunicationScience. The same old Balance Theories, Dual Processing Theories, and Theories of Communicative Competence dominate. A disciplinary outsider might think that #CommunicationScience stopped developing right at its birth. In other words, much of what we know as the science of communication is based on White, middle-class samples, theorized by White middle and upper, middle-class scholars. It is lazy because you can do all your claims-making and posturing, protected in your Whi...

The Jallianwala bagh masaacre The racist effects of White supremacy we witness across the globe today is supported by the ideology of Whiteness that takes as normative White constructions of organizing societies that are historically intertwined with the processes of othering, the active production of the other as the margins. The universality of norms propped up by Whiteness is tied to the ongoing erasure and marginalization of colonized peoples, slaves, and communities of colour exhumed from their spaces of livelihood by White colonizing processes. Whiteness and its normative ideals are therefore inherently racist. Consider for instance White notions of justice. The appearance of these notions of justice on the colonial register takes place alongside the gruesome excesses of colonization. Consider for instance the colonial atrocities witnessed in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, also referred to as the Amritsar massacre in 1919. A crowd of unarmed Indians had gathered at the Jallianw...

The hegemonic Singapore Anglo-Chinese have a servile relationship with Whiteness.  Everything White is a marker of desire here. Whiteness takes a whole new dimension in Anglo-Chinese Singapore, celebrated, held up on a pedestal, with the incessant desire for copying it at the cellular level. Here, you would think that the British haven't yet left, replete with the laboured copies of the accented tongue, the afternoon teas decked in the desires for Whiteness, and the preponderance of everything Raffles. Most of Singapore's elites go through the perfected drills of anglicization in schools of Whiteness, preparing for further credentialing of these elite Singaporeans in the British and American networks of Whiteness (Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, Harvard, Yale).  Among Singapore's Anglo-Chinese elites then, it is fairly common to see a British or American elite credential. Such credentialing is only an extension of the Whiteness that is drilled into the Anglo-Chinese schools. The he...

The COVID-19 Pandemic and Outbreak Inequalities: Migrants in the Margins Special Issue: American Behavioral Scientist Edited by: Satveer Kaur-Gill and Mohan J. Dutta ( Mohan Dutta ) Dear colleagues, American Behavioral Scientist is hosting a special issue on the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on migrants in the margins. We are calling for abstracts by authors studying outbreak inequalities among precarious migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic. For this journal issue, we are seeking data specific articles theorizing outbreak inequalities studied by migration scholars, health communication scholars, political communication scholars, and medical anthropologists from across the globe. Migrant struggles at the margins during the COVID-19 pandemic amid global lockdowns rendered visible the amplified migrant health disparities. Precarious migrants were/are afflicted disproportionately during the COVID-19 crisis in countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia, India, China,...

I will begin this blog post with a story crystallized from the ongoing fieldwork of the CARE team with racism in Singapore. The account offered here is derived from observations and narrative accounts shared by participants. Fatimah, Malay, 53-year-old, has struggled all her life with making a living. Her parents worked as cleaners in malls, precursors to the shiny ever-expanding structures of luxury that accentuate Singapore's skyline. The money that they made through the cleaning work supported the large family of grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. Then when Fatimah's father died from a severe heart attack, it fell upon her mother to support the family. As the elder child in the household, Fatimah started working as well, picking up cleaning jobs that her father worked in.  She has had a wide range of cleaning jobs over the years, mostly temporary and without benefits. In these cleaning jobs, she often felt a deep sense of shame, seen as the other. She never belonged t...

The summer (in the registers of the Northen hemisphere, the habitus of the National Communication Association) of 2019 was a revolutionary anchor for the discipline of Communication. I use the term revolutionary in the paradigm shifting sense (borrowing the terms of paradigm established by the #Whiteness of  the #PhilosophyOfScience #PhilosophyOfSocialScience reading lists). Responding to the #Whiteness reflected in the Distinguished Scholars in the discipline, the revolution started with scholars of colour, gender-disenfranchised scholars, scholars interrogating hegemonic assumptions of ability launching a sustained intervention into the discipline. Through various forms of activist interventions that ranged from social media performances to performative academic pieces, these scholars from the discipline's margins co-created registers for dismantling the discipline by excavating and dismantling its logics of #Whiteness. This disciplinary moment then created an opening for a wide ...