Thoughts on solidarity and supporting student activists to #EndSexualHarassment

A corrupt university system with administrators that are deeply complicit in perpetuating a culture of sexual harassment and faculty predatory behaviour surveils, hounds and punishes student activists for bringing the sexual harassment to light and for speaking up against sexual harassment.

For all its PR speak about remedies, it is this truth that we must hold close, and continue to agitate to dismantle the culture of sexual harassment. We must also organize to protect those, especially student activists, whose bodies are on the line.

A corrupt system that is deeply complicit in perpetuating sexual harassment blames me, the CCA, and CARE for teaching students to organise on sexual harassment. It gives us and the CCA too much credit.

And most importantly, deeply complicit in technocratic authoritarianism, it fails to see the agentic capacity of students.

It is the role of Ministry of Education and the Minister of Education specifically to protect student activists that bring sexual harassment to light from retaliatory behavior.

Parents and taxpayers must hold the Minister and the Ministry accountable for any retaliatory behavior.

Any administrator that retaliates against a student must RESIGN or must be made to step down.

Public activism and participation are vital to hold the state accountable to bringing about changes to cultures of sexual harassment. Parent activism as public activism is vital to safeguarding our future generation and in nurturing their right to voice.

It is vital that parents speak up and organise in the face of university repression targeting students. It is vital that journalists closely attend to instances of retaliation and build public registers to document these instances.

It is only with multi-pronged activism and advocacy that we will see change in entrenched cultures of sexual violence.

Zionist hate mongering, the race/terror trope, and the Free Speech Union: Part 1

March 15, 2019. It was a day of terror. Unleashed by a white supremacist far-right terrorist. Driven by hate for brown people. Driven by Islamophobic hate. Earlier in the day, I had come across a hate-based hit piece targeting me, alongside other academics, the University of Auckland academic Professor Nicholas Rowe , Professor Richard Jackson at Otago University, Professor Kevin P Clements at Otago University, Dr. Rose Martin from University of Auckland and Dr. Nigel Parsons at Massey University. Titled, "More extremists in New Zealand Universities," the article threw in the labels "terror sympathisers" and "extremist views." Written by one David Cumin and hosted on the website of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, the article sought to create outrage that academics critical of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid are actually employed by universities in New Zealand. Figure 1: The web post written by David Cumin on the site of Israel Institute

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit

Disinformation, Zionist propaganda, and free speech: Far right cancel culture

Thursday October 12, 2023. The settler colonial occupation had unleashed its infrastructure of violence over the Palestinian people over a period of five days. Gaza was being indiscriminately bombarded, with mass civilian casualties that Amnesty International noted " must be investigated as war crimes ." At 3:32 p.m., my office phone rang. I was occupied and the call went to the voicemail. "Dutta, you are a murderous, f***ing, racist c***. Go back to where you belong...I will see to your termination in New Zealand." A couple of hours before that, an email had gone out from the Zionist Dane Giraud to the email listserv of the Free Speech Union, performed as a supposed apology for attacking my academic freedom. In the email, Giraud referred to my earlier b log post on the interlinkages between far-right Zionism, attacks on academic freedom, and the free speech union, noting how he had been enraged by the following statement on my blog: "I was therefore not surpri

Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

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