Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Whiteness is bad for science. It is certainly bad for #CommunicationScience. It is the original #BadScience. In its unequestioned privilege reified through publication processes and organizational structures of the discipline, it (re)produces bad science, emboldened in White mediocrity and laziness, propping up as normative concepts that have been put forth by White academics for decades. It is bad in its stagnancy. It doesn't move. Take up a Communication Theory textbook and look at what makes up #CommunicationScience. The same old Balance Theories, Dual Processing Theories, and Theories of Communicative Competence dominate. A disciplinary outsider might think that #CommunicationScience stopped developing right at its birth. In other words, much of what we know as the science of communication is based on White, middle-class samples, theorized by White middle and upper, middle-class scholars. It is lazy because you can do all your claims-making and posturing, protected in your Whi...

The irony of the current American university system probably becomes evident to anyone that cares to carefully observe the current trends within these universities. It was not that long back that University leaders and faculty members felt very comfortable talking openly about Chinese GRE scores, TOEFL scores etc., using these rationale to turn down competent students from China with stellar scores. It was not that long back that references to the English capabilities of the Chinese was somehow considered to be PC in a climate where most forms of talk are otherwise monitored by the PC-Police. It was not that long back that it was OK for faculty to discuss in meetings openly about the English capabilities of a student from China or Korea. The ability to speak English was used as the marker to strip students from elsewhere of their dignity. The pressures from undergraduate students and their parents was used as an excuse to carry out this act of stripping, with the logic that the instr...