Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

  As a social scientist studying the effects of oppressive practices on the health and wellbeing of communities at the margins, I am struck by the ways in which power organizes to silence our scholarship. Voices of communities at the margins articulating their experiences of health, situating these experiences of health in relationship to the organizing of oppressive structures, and organizing to resist these structures threaten both economic and political power.  Power, therefore, resorts to a wide array of strategies to silence scholarship.  It does so through a wide array of communicative strategies that include fabricating lies, planting erroneous artifacts as evidence, deploying communicative inversions, and weaponizing offline-online networks to carry out attacks on academics. In the context of the authoritarian regime, power is threatened when voices of households negotiating poverty or voices of migrant workers foreground the exploitative conditions of work and li...