Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

 Community voices at the "margins of the margins" threaten the hegemonic status quo. The status quo works through the ongoing erasure of community voices, creating and circulating logics of power and control that retain power in the hands of the elite. The communicative act of erasure of subaltern voices is deeply intertwined with the maintenance and reproduction of power and control.  The state, private capital, an d the professionalized non-profit sector profit from the everyday erasure of the subaltern voice. Through its control over funding flows, the state reproduces its oppressive structure, reified through civil society that must rely on state patronage to sell the subaltern to the market. State bureaucrats, educated in the techniques of producing discipline, on one hand, perform the narrative of addressing the needs of communities, while on the other hand, cultivating networks of professionalized NGOs that whitewash the strategies of power and control to serve the pre...

Lifted by the unfettered hubris of helium, a balloon rises ponderously, meeting little resistance in its upward ascent... The smallest needle, with the slightest prick to the taught rubber membrane and... Pop! “What do you get out of this? School credit or something, right?” asked Roy toward the end of our interview. We were sitting outside a building on campus on an unseasonably warm and sunny day. The trees were all blooming pretty white flowers that smelled like decaying ass. “Yeah,” I replied matter of factly, “I do get credit for the course, and gain experience in doing interviews from talking with you about these kinds of things. But...” and I briefly went into the longer-term objective of the food insecurity project to help develop solutions with problems in getting food to the hungry. As I described this I felt the stinging discomfort from his probing of my academic motives fade away, and wondered if this was a sign of working through my positionality or the a...

1.) What are the various facets of resistance that are discussed in this week’s readings? How do the insights from these readings help us to approach and understand the contours of mobilization and resistance? 2.) Kahn critiques many past attempts to research peasant ideologies and resistance as being detached from the immediacy of the localized contexts being studied: “the longer-term evaluation of the academic texts tends to have very little to do with peasants or, perhaps more accurately, the participants in the concrete struggles in which peasants are involved” (71). In what ways does the culture-centered approach address this issue? Is the abstraction or generalization required by theorization inherently distancing?

One of the key elements of the CCA is the concept of structure (Dutta, 2008). Structures refer to forms of social organization that create as well as constrain access to a wide range of resources. These resources not only include basic necessities such as food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, education etc., but also the communication infrastructures necessary to participate in the dominant public spheres. Based on empirical evidence documented in health communication scholarship for instance, the CCA notes the correspondence between the absence of communication infrastructures and the lack of health infrastructures. These correlations narrate an underlying economic dimension where being poor gets constituted in the realm of being unable to secure access to a plethora of resources necessary for life. Having noted this economic base of structures then, CCA raises questions about the role that communication scholars could play in challenging and transforming structures. In other words, no...

Wilkins (1999) says that "development communication refers to the strategic application of communication technologies and processes to promote social change" (p. 197) and that all future trends in this field needs to focus on the issues of power - both in theory and in practice. Wilkins says that power as a variable should be central to policy developments, and that it is imperative to understand how the power framework effects social change. Using Simmel (1986) and Foucault (1986), Wilkins says that "power is unevenly held but established through interaction within existing networks" (p. 198) and institutional discourse helps promote agency in people and cannot be apolitical. Governments and other agencies try to promote social changes using political, economic and ideological power and institutions. However, such policies/programs look at interventions in a sort of us versus them way. It is more of a foreigner perspective on things local. This links well with the ...

Marginalization and related articulations comes across strongly in this week's readings. Dutta (2008) writes marginalization as" being at the periphery of a dominant system and that marginalization is embodied in the position of being under, of being silenced, of being without a voice and of being without resources". Marginalization can be caused by poverty, ignorance, location, access, positionality in the societal and economic system (pecking order!!) and in God's own country, insurance!!  From a critical cultural perspective, marginalization occurs from basic structural deprivations, created and sustained by structural inequities and unequal distribution at resources, further created and sustained by unhealthy practices which are in turn created and sustained by those in positions of power (Dutta, 2008). True, and I feel this is ingrained in our lives. The principle and declaration of human rights (1948) say "all human beings are equal...etc...". There ca...

Once again we see and read about the necessity of putting the participant voice in decision making, especially on issues related to health outcomes. The narratives of the Santali lives and views on health was immensely powerful in describing the above need. Academicians and policy makers tend to make marginalized populations as the subjects of health interventions designed by them, primarily from Eurocentric and post-positivist ways which do not seem to answer the question of essence properly. And yet, most research found on health issues and policy developments are designed by people who do not participate in the living experiences of the group being worked on. Here lies the key - policy makers are working on the people and not with the people whose voices are absent from the main stream. It is foreseeable that an all White group of policy developers may not be able to realize how the tribal population of Nepal (for example) negotiate their beliefs of healthy living. Many studies have...