Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

COVID-19 pamphlet in Bangla targeting migrant workers in Qatar In a piece published in Communication Theory in 2007, titled " Communicating about culture and health: Theorizing culture-centered and cultural sensitivity approaches ," I had outlined the hegemonic forms of co-option of culture into health communication. The dominant approach to health communication, embedded in the individualizing logic of whiteness, turns to cultural essentialism to target diverse cultures with messages that are supposedly aligned with cultural values. In this essay, I argued that this form of incorporating cultural values props up and reproduces the hegemony of whiteness, keeping intact its individualizing logics.  The dominant approach to health communication  addressing health disparities falls within this cultural sensitivity framework. Cultural characteristics are extracted and then turned into the sites of targeting through communication messages that are designed to respond to the cultur...

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 Jallianwala bagh masaacre The racist effects of White supremacy we witness across the globe today is supported by the ideology of Whiteness that takes as normative White constructions of organizing societies that are historically intertwined with the processes of othering, the active production of the other as the margins. The universality of norms propped up by Whiteness is tied to the ongoing erasure and marginalization of colonized peoples, slaves, and communities of colour exhumed from their spaces of livelihood by White colonizing processes. Whiteness and its normative ideals are therefore inherently racist. Consider for instance White notions of justice. The appearance of these notions of justice on the colonial register takes place alongside the gruesome excesses of colonization. Consider for instance the colonial atrocities witnessed in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, also referred to as the Amritsar massacre in 1919. A crowd of unarmed Indians had gathered at the Jallianw...

How often is it that people of color negotiate with racist frames directed at them and couched in the form of evaluations? These racisms that one experiences are furher nuanced when one is a foreigner, with the foreignness marked on the skin/name/last name! One of these instances happened very recently with the Tippecanoe County School System. Speaking to one of the school staff, I was appalled when she told me that our child grew up in an "English as a Second Language" (ESL) home. Her assumption was that we were Indian, so English was our second language. I went on to use this opportunity then to tell her that what she said was racist because her biases were based on assumptions she made about what happened inside our home by looking at my child's last name and by perhaps assuming that we came from someplace else where people didn't speak English. I then told her how I made my living teaching White kids from Americana how to read and write in English...

Whiteness, academe, silence Doing good, openness, equal opportunity Diversity, equity, justice Talk, all talk Talk that sounds good And gives me the reassurance that academe is somehow opening up To difference. And yet The talk is far from the truth Whiteness carries out in the actions of the benevolent White man and woman Who believes she has taught the world The logics of empowerment And takes it on herself To save the downtrodden and the oppressed From the Third. Whiteness and its specters Couched as doing good Couched as altruism and progress Telling me that I am backward That I have to refer back to the games of Whiteness In order to qualify as a participant. Whiteness and its specters Telling me That the knowledge of my culture is primitive So she is going to send her missionaries and mercenaries and democracy promoters and war mongers and public health professionals To teach me to behave To pick up the language So I could be empowered under her Imperial guises.

When you Right Over my Body Your Writings Soaked in the privilege Of your Whiteness That tames my savage maleness And teaches it The lessons of civilization I sit here In Silence As I think about The words I would use And the phrases And metaphors That would bring your Empire down!