Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

<Notes from fieldwork> Working in a patriarchal Asian authoritarian regime where university structures were deeply complicit in the reproduction and circulation of a climate of sexual harassment, one of the emergent areas for CARE's work has focused on sexual harassment within Asian universities. Through face-to-face participant observations, digital participant observations, focus groups, in-depth interviews, and two cross-sectional surveys, our team of academics, community researchers, and activists have documented the various forms of sexual harassment in Asian universities. Much of this work within the university was shaped by the recognition of the urgency of social change within the university, with multiple accounts shared by students, graduate staff, non-academic staff and junior academic staff of experiences of sexual harassment that were not dealt with.  In CARE's work with the question of sexual harassment in Asian Universities, particularly salient was the dep...

The mobility of graduate education to the Professoriate can be attributed to a large extent to mentorship networks. Add to the mentorship networks the publication and teaching record, the performance during a campus visit etc. Add to these ingredients a whole lot of factors beyond our control, such as the jobs available the year of graduation, the search committee configuration, and plain-and-simple luck. The coming together of these many different factors play out in shaping the places in which academics end up. For academics of colour, these are constituted amidst disciplinary #Whiteness. We each learn to perform these techniques of Whiteness to survive in academia, working also hopefully to challenge it. Negotiating these countours of an already uneven discipline, Neha found herself in an Assistant Professor job in Community College. Graduating with her Ph.D. the year after 9/11 meant that the number of jobs available to a Brown woman academic studying imperial media were limited, w...

Singapore goes to vote today.  People, academics included, who read my critical writings on Singapore and dictatorshop, are often perplexed by my love for Singapore. I often say, as an itinerant migrant, Singapore will always be in my heart, as a very special place. What makes it so very special is that in the face of the dicatorship and its methods of control, bullying and repression, so many opposition politicians, activists, community members at the margins, migrant workers, everyday Singaporeans work toward change, toward the imaginary of a democracy rooted in people's participation. In spite of the huge cost they have to pay with their lives, so many brave activist friends stand up, with their heads held high and with great moral clarity. If the "Singapore model" is the model for authoritarian governance exported across the globe, Singapore-based activism and struggles for democracy offer templates for democratic struggles across the globe. There indeed is so much fo...

The Stiletto Project, a communication platform, co-created by an advisory group of transgender sexworkers, emerged out of an ongoing relationship between CARE and Project X, South-east Asia's leading transgender sexworker advocacy organization. The Stiletto Project showcases the role of participatory communication processes in creating openings for community voices at the "margins of the margins."  As an advocacy and activist intervention, the Project emerges from a culture-centered process that works with transgender sex workers (TSWs) in Singapore through advisory groups, in-depth interviews, focus groups, a community-wide rights-based health intervention,  a pre-post survey in the community, and a national-level pre-post survey to identify the problems transgender sex workers face with health, violence, ageing and other affected areas of their life, as well as to implement policy-based advocacy solutions to health and wellbeing. In 2014, the CARE team initiated a colla...

I will begin this blog post with a story.  This is the story of a Brown woman, Shilpa, who had migrated to the U.S. on a spousal visa, married to a newly minted Assistant Professor, Sanjeev, who had just started his job as an Assistant Professor at a Research Intensive University. Shilpa, an artist, who worked in a non-profit organization, making puppets and putting together puppetry exhibitions on themes such as caste violence and dowry and social change, gave up that identity as an art worker and a change worker to travel to a new land and make home. In over two decades, she reared her three children, who were now all gone to College. Pushpa decided that she wanted to turn to her art work.  With her three children away most of the time, this was the time for Shilpa to return to an identity and passion that anchored her journey the first twenty-three years of life.  She decided to look up for opportunities at the University where Sanjeev worked.  Browsing through th...