Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

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...

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...

In a recent piece co-authored with an advisee, we decided to not present effectiveness data in critiquing an intervention. The choice to not present the effectiveness data was a strategic choice situated in the critical impetus of CCA, based on the argument that the mainstream articulations of campaigns narrowly focus on effectiveness without attending to the dimensions of power, co-optation, and oppression that are often played out by the very same campaigns. Therefore, in our piece, we issued a call for the foregrounding of alternative criteria that question the very paradigm of effectiveness, the ways in which it is measured and reported etc. In one of our reviewers, a reviewer insisted that this was an unethical choice because the manuscript did not present the evidence that was available. What intrigues me about this argument made by the reviewer is how situated amidst ideology this specific evaluation of ethics is. Why is it that discussions of oppressive ideologies perpetrated b...

Just heard of one of these social scientists (who is known for making blanket statements) making some claim in a class that "there is no such thing as culture." This bright young mind (who truly believes he is a scientist in a lab coat and can measure things like skin color to predict social behavior) noted that culture doesn't exist because it can't be defined. In terms of epistemology, this raises a vital question regarding how social scientists think of the legitimacy of the science they do: To the extent they can define something, lay it out (they call it operationalization), and come to an agreement about it (which is mostly some privileged white men and women sitting around a table/journal/conference panel/review panel), the thing comes to existence. So from this standpoint, having some privilege and then using the privilege to come to an agreement is what constitutes the valdity of a concept. What I find insightful in this logic is the agenda of neocolonial...