Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

The COVID-19 Pandemic and Outbreak Inequalities: Migrants in the Margins Special Issue: American Behavioral Scientist Edited by: Satveer Kaur-Gill and Mohan J. Dutta ( Mohan Dutta ) Dear colleagues, American Behavioral Scientist is hosting a special issue on the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on migrants in the margins. We are calling for abstracts by authors studying outbreak inequalities among precarious migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic. For this journal issue, we are seeking data specific articles theorizing outbreak inequalities studied by migration scholars, health communication scholars, political communication scholars, and medical anthropologists from across the globe. Migrant struggles at the margins during the COVID-19 pandemic amid global lockdowns rendered visible the amplified migrant health disparities. Precarious migrants were/are afflicted disproportionately during the COVID-19 crisis in countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia, India, China,...

In working with one of my graduate students on the history of communication theory, we were going through some of the seminal texts (Delia, Rogers, Glasser) that narrate the story of the discipline. When these texts are interrogated to examine the ideological assumptions, it becomes fairly clear that explicit in the narratives of these texts is the articulation of the superiority of Western American thought as the savior of the world. That America will lead the world into development and Enlightenment becomes the key thread in the early strands of the discipline, and somehow gets ingrained in the key thoughts of the discipline. So when one goes back to Lerner and Schramm and Rogers (and the list goes on), one learns about the fundamental assumptions they made in their understanding of communication in terms of rational processes and frameworks of persuasion (as defined by Ameri-centric criteria) that would remove darkness in the Third World. Of course, during the times when these aut...