Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

  As a social scientist studying the effects of oppressive practices on the health and wellbeing of communities at the margins, I am struck by the ways in which power organizes to silence our scholarship. Voices of communities at the margins articulating their experiences of health, situating these experiences of health in relationship to the organizing of oppressive structures, and organizing to resist these structures threaten both economic and political power.  Power, therefore, resorts to a wide array of strategies to silence scholarship.  It does so through a wide array of communicative strategies that include fabricating lies, planting erroneous artifacts as evidence, deploying communicative inversions, and weaponizing offline-online networks to carry out attacks on academics. In the context of the authoritarian regime, power is threatened when voices of households negotiating poverty or voices of migrant workers foreground the exploitative conditions of work and li...

One of the powerful transformations brought on by almost four decades of relentless pursuit of neoliberalism, followed by the ascendance of fascist politics across India as a form of late neoliberal governmentality is the rearrangement of desires in intimate spaces. From households to familial contexts to broader extended arrangements, affective registers have been reshaped by the relentless pursuit of more and more.  The ever-expanding spheres of individualized desires rendered as natural have organized the self around the relentless pursuit of greater consumer comfort.  This pursuit of consumer comfort is simultaneously reworked to extract from relationships the returns that optimize pleasure.  Simultaneously, the construction of dissatisfaction as the way of life forms the basis for the desire for the market. Relationships are thus defined by their use value in offering the greatest pleasure at the least effort. There is an underlying ideology of efficiency that shapes...