Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

1.) How do Dutta’s overview of performing for social change and Drake’s in-depth discussion of her involvement in the sustainable food movement allow us to understand the significance of the symbolic and aesthetic dimensions of resistance, mobilization, and social change? How are the contours of agency (for all persons and parties involved) defined through such symbolic and aesthetic practices? What are the dialectical tensions and dialogical possibilities between aesthetic/symbolic practices and political-economic structures? 2.)   Considerable attention in these chapters is paid to the role of the scholar in communicating for (and against) social change. What are the potential pitfalls of academic intervention in movements for change? How do the authors reconcile these potential dangers and justify spaces for the expert scholar? What do these points tell us about reflexivity or the position of the scholar either in research and/or activism roles?

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?

Mahuya and I just heard today that our piece "Dialog theory in marginalized settings: A Subaltern Studies approach" has just been published as the lead article in Communication Theory . This is a piece that took a great deal of love, care, commitment and honestly, work. We started working on this in 2007, three years ago, and the piece went through many iterations to get to its current form in Communication Theory. As the piece evolved, it also tracked our trajectory as writers/thinkers/collaborators. As we grappled with the piece, we wondered: what really are the possibilities of participating in dialogues with the subaltern sectors, especially when the discourses of possibility, participation, empowerment, and democracy are so often co-opted into the neoliberal framework. The one thing that amazes me the most these days is the gross appeal of terms such as participation and democracy, which have simply become ways for co-opting the subaltern into the profit making agendas o...

  This week's readings and the BLOG were a bit challenging for me in the sense, I had not thought of sexuality in this sense and understanding sexuality and relating it to the readings took me some time. Of course, culture and sexuality are related and intertwined. Culture is a meaning making enterprise and so is sexuality, the way we identify ourselves in relation to sex, gender. As a human being, your sexuality is a part of your physical, emotional, intellectual, and social self. It very much influences how we think of ourselves, how we relate to others and our meaning making process in the society. As all of us are different, there is no normative "sexuality but it is a product of the interaction of our gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, identity creation, values and persepectives (again leading towards epistemologies and the cosmology we access in the meaning making enterprise). This manifests in our expectations of how we think a man or woman should behave and...