Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

As the weekend rolls in here in Aotearoa, I am getting ready to have a weekend of much-needed sleep. This past week has been one of many late nights, staying up crafting a petition, collaborating with fellow academics, and gathering signatures in support of the academic-activist Professor Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt. Reshmi is being subjected to an external investigation by her employer for her social media posts.  You can read more on the petition here, sign on to it, and circulate it. When the Newsroom story, " Academics divided on their own freedoms ," made its way into my mailbox in the morning, I was looking forward to reading it. The story was behind a paywall, and I had to wait until noon, when a colleague kindly forwarded the text of the story for me to read. The story reported from a survey commissioned by the Free Speech Union and carried out by Curia Market Research. Curia boasts many clients including Pfizer, Microsoft, and National (the party ). In its opening page...

This last week, I have been largely preoccupied with organising solidarity for a beloved colleague, a woman of colour from the Global South, a vocal critic of the corrupt power grab by misogynist structures in universities, who is being targeted, surveilled, and harassed for carrying out this work. One of the key emergent lessons from this organising work and from similar such organising, including in working through struggles when I have been targeted by the corrupt surveilling structures of authoritarianism, is the vital role of legal infrastructures of solidarity. Infrastructures of surveillance that hold up power and control target justice-based scholarship through narrative anchors that communicatively invert calls for justice into threats.  The traditional forms of power and control in society that uphold colonial, patriarchal, cisnormative, racist, ableist, capitalist interests are threatened by academic voices that speak truth to power, rendering visible through explanatory...