Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

(Photo credit: Image taken from  Manaakitanga – more than just hospitality - March 2021 - OnMAS ) Manaakitanga, a core Māori value, invites us to consider the ways in which respect, kindness, and collective responsibility shape how we interact with others.  In the context of how universities engage with international students, manaakitanga invites us to consider carefully our commitments to offering security, safety, and kindness to the many international students that come to study with us. As I have been observing with horror the mistreatment of international students in the US, the targeting of international students, the deployment of visa processes to silence and harass them, and the uses of techniques of migration-related violence to create a chilling climate, I am struck by how quickly universities in the US, many of them elite universities, have abandoned international students. As an American Indian who has benefitted from the scholarships and support infrastructures ...

The organized and accelerated forms of attack on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) across the far-right political architectures of the U.S. and radiating from the U.S. to global spaces where white supremacy has historically reigned, reflect white backlash.  White backlash, or backlash from historic and entrenched structures of white supremacy, is specifically crafted by white supremacists to silence and erase diverse voices of resistance witnessing the violence and hypocrisies of white supremacy.  White backlash is specifically designed to threaten and erase diverse voices from the margins that have been produced by white supremacy.  It is directed at the plural registers of excellence that are being built locally and globally by Indigenous, Black, and people of color communities rendering visible the workings of white terror and white violence.   Trace here the emergence of the anti-DEI disinformation and hate infrastructure as a reflection of the whit...

Muslim celebrations of Ramadan Writing this blog post on this first day of March 2025, I feel joyful about the openings for renewal and hope this time brings.  This year, the colorful Hindu festival of Holi crisscrosses Muslim celebrations of Ramadan.  Anticolonial syncretism Growing up in Bengal in the 1980s, in the cosmopolitan town of Kharagpur, in a family that traversed interfaith spaces in our everyday lives and relationships, both these festivals reflected invitations to love across difference, to connect, and to explore possibilities of mutuality.  Hindu celebrations of Holi This anchor to mutuality formed the heart of a decolonizing politics in the South Asian subcontinent, actively creating a register that resisted the colonizing whiteness of divide and rule strategies.  Against these violent strategies of manipulation created by the British through the careful study of colonized societies, anticolonial resistance sutured spaces of dialogue and building bri...