Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Raksha Mahtani Raksha Mahtani is currently a teaching assistant in Communications and New Media. Before this, she served as a Research Assistant at the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) and at the Asia Research Institute (ARI). Raksha’s work on academic-activist collaborations explores the ways in which social impact can be theorized, measured, and evaluated. 1.       Please share with us your CNM journey. You know, I first came to CNM in 2008, during my sabbatical from Purdue University. This was a way for Debalina and I to be together for the first time as a family in the same space because of the US immigration laws that meant that she had to wait before migrating to the US. Then head Milagros Rivera was building a department that was truly inter-disciplinary, bringing together computing scientists, interactive media designers, artists, social scientists and humanities scholars to generate a creat...

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?

Increasingly, a new generation of health communication scholars are drawing our attention to the performative nature of health communication. In our experiences of health and illness; in our interactions with our loved ones in a variety of health contexts; in our interactions with healers and health care providers; in our sharing of our stories of health, illness, healing, and dying with others in our communities; in our participation in social and political processes that seek to address issues of healthcare, we continually perform ourselves. Performance in this sense is both public and private. We perform our selves in health communication interactions; and perform often for others, for the purposes of understanding, sharing, creating community and bringing about change. It is through our performances that we co-construct stories of health that articulate the violence inflicted by oppressive social structures, and suggest avenues for social change.