Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

In reading Sirisha's post that poignantly addresses the pathologization of the Third in mainstream discourses in the West as epitomized in the Oscar winning productions "Born into Brothels" and "Slumdog Millionaire," I am reminded of a social gathering a few years back. "Slumdog" was released, was an Oscar nominee at this point, and was all the rage in the popular culture circuits. At this gathering, a colleague (you guessed it, Caucasian and male) walked up to me and asked if I had ever really visited a slum, because he referred to an NPR story that supposedly made the argument that it is Indians who haven't really seen the slums that have problems with the movie "Slumdog Millionaire." [Granted that the materiality in the frames of Slumdog do have a base in the deep-seated inequalities in contemporary India, the frames in the movie I would argue further perpetuate these inequities by participating in the circulation of a neoliberal readi...

The marriage of Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) with the Culture-Centered Approach (CCA) seems to be one that was destined to happen...the synergies between these approaches to the uses of clinical information are incredible. This brings me to the core point about CCA, the one about Structure, and one that puts it in opposition to postmodern approaches to critical theory that often get reduced to the feel-good elements of identity politics in multiculturalism. In foregrounding the localized voices of the margins, the approach continually seeks to engage with entry points for making truth claims in relationship to social structures. That hunger is a truth in the most salient rendition of it is something that is continually brought to the forefront in multiple CCA studies. If CCA is positioned in the quest for truth that is grounded in material evidence, the value of CER to CCA precisely lies in the quest for clinical evidence base for medical decision-making that is grounded ...