The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

 By Mohan Dutta, Self-Appointed Chronicler of the Absurdity of Hindutva uncles [Disclaimer: This piece is satire. If you find your BP climbing while reading this piece, please forward this to 10 people to restore your karma. Or just have a samosa and relax.] Alright, folks, buckle up for a wild ride through the land of saffron flags, WhatsApp forwards, and the ever-elusive “Hindutva chutiya.”  Now, before you clutch your pearls or your sacred threads, let me clarify: this is a tongue-in-cheek jab at the absurdities that sometimes parade under the banner of ideology. No cows were harmed in the writing of this blog, but a few egos might get a gentle nudge. So, what’s a “Hindutva chutiya,” you ask?  Picture this: a guy (it’s usually a guy, let’s be real) who’s watched one too many YouTube videos titled “India Was a Superpower Before Aliens Invented Taxes.” He’s got a WhatsApp University PhD in revisionist history, a tilak the size of a small planet on his forehead, and an ...

Figure: A screenshot of a comment in response to my analysis of whiteness of NZ media. I often receive similar commentary on my social media. This blog post is written as a critical response to the ongoing discourses and taxpayer dollars that are deployed to target the critical humanities and social sciences. In this post, I turn the ongoing extremist discourse around "taxpayer dollars" on its head, interrogating the "use value" of Business Studies, the love child of right-wing extremists who would love to redo the University as an extension of Business. Universities, once envisioned as sites of critical inquiry and emancipatory knowledge, are increasingly co-opted by the logic of the market. Nowhere is this more evident than in the proliferation of business studies programs—management, marketing, finance, entrepreneurship—that dominate academic landscapes worldwide. These disciplines, draped in the rhetoric of "use value," promise practical skills, employ...

  A community advisory group of ageing community members in the Whampoa community in Singapore developing culture-centered community-led ageing solutions, Partnership between CARE and Tsao Foundation By Mohan J. Dutta In an era marked by rapid globalization, technological advancements, and complex socio-political challenges, effective communication lies at the heart of effective public administration. As a scholar who has dedicated decades to understanding the role of communication in fostering social justice, health equity, and democratic participation, I argue that governments must invest in competent communicators who can shape how government policies and programmes navigate the intricate dynamics of governance, build trust, and co-create solutions through partnerships with communities. Drawing from the Culture-Centered Approach (CCA), which emphasizes the agency of marginalized communities in shaping communication processes, I contend that effective communication professionals ...

Taken from OpenVers e The Astronomer crisis , circulating on digital platforms, based on an alleged affair between the CEO and the Chief People Officer (the irony of that title!, the one in charge of implementing organizational norms) of a global technology corporation caught on screen at a Coldplay Concert depicts the sociopathy that is normalized through the structures of global platform capital.  That Andy Byron, with poor judgment and character, could climb the organizational ranks to the position of CEO, and that the ethically inept Kristin Cabot similarly could climb the ranks to the position of CFO (the one in charge of developing and implementing organizational culture!) speaks to a core feature of global tech: its moral rot, albeit replete with narratives of company culture, sustainability, effective governance, and stakeholder accountability. Sociopaths usually climb to organizational leadership positions in contemporary neoliberal organizations because these organization...

Image of the Sameshwari River in Shushong Durgapur, now a part of Bangladesh As a practicing Hindu, a part descendant of a Hindu Bengali family who migrated from Bangladesh amidst the violence of partition driven by British colonialism, I am intimately aware of the loss, trauma, and struggles with identity that are shaped by the intertwined processes of expulsion and displacement.  This expulsion at the root shapes the yearning for the land that is lost on the other side of the partition, the soil, the cultural textures, and narratives of belonging.  Land loss forms the infrastructure of colonial violence, reflecting its white supremacist ideology, carving out lands into property and nation to uphold the extractive practices of racial capitalism. Lost stories and a lost land I, like most of our family in my mother's side, live everyday with stories of loss, of being disrupted from the land that roots us.  This land is now marked as alien land, on the other side of the bor...