The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  Four Moves: Reading Joseph Mooney's Reply How a National Party MP's "personal opinion" defence reveals the global far-right playbook now operating in Aotearoa In September 2025, a sitting Member of the New Zealand Parliament publicly told a named professor at a named university that I "should be seeking alternative employment." The MP is Joseph Mooney , National Party representative for Southland. The professor is me — Dean's Chair Professor of Communication at Massey University. The provocation was a tweet in which I described Charlie Kirk as "a white supremacist far right figure," and pointed out that the National-ACT attempt to record a parliamentary tribute to Kirk would itself reveal who in our mainstream politics aligns with the far right. The original post and the documented harassment campaign it triggered — including calls for my deportation, demands that Massey be defunded, and threats that prompted me to call the police — are...

  The Anxious Fig Leaf of the Free Speech Union: How a Right-Wing Pamphleteer Performs the Communicative Inversions of "Academic Standards" By Mohan J. Dutta Dane Giraud — a self-styled Free Speech Union board member who has previously called my employer to demand I be sacked, who publicly admitted as much on the FSU's own blog, and who now parades the resulting Substack post as evidence that my scholarship "cannot be referred to — in anyway — as academic " — has gifted us a near-perfect specimen of what the culture-centered approach (CCA) describes as communicative inversion : the strategic deployment of the language of rigour, freedom, and standards to do the precise opposite work — to erase, to silence, and to police the boundaries of who is permitted to speak as a knower. This response is not a personal squabble. Giraud's piece is a textbook articulation of a transnational pattern in which racialised scholars who name white supremacy , Hindutva , ...

  What does it mean when scholars say the far right has been "mainstreamed" in policy? From Trump's deportation orders to attacks on the Treaty in Aotearoa, exclusionary politics is no longer at the fringe — it is writing the legislation. A culture-centered guide to how it happened, and what it means. By Mohan J. Dutta 10 May 2026 When a Deputy Prime Minister tells a public broadcaster how to do its journalism, when a coalition partner runs ministerial portfolios on a platform of disestablishing the Treaty principles, when an Australian senator announces from the Senate floor that the country is being "replaced," when an Indian Home Minister describes Muslim migrants as "termites," when a US administration designates "antifa" as a terrorist movement while pardoning the Capitol rioters — we are not looking at fringe phenomena. We are looking at the architecture of contemporary government. The far right is no longer banging on the door of t...

  How a Far-Right Network Took Down New Zealand's Broadcasting Watchdog The disestablishment of the Broadcasting Standards Authority is not a routine piece of regulatory tidying-up. It is the visible end-state of an organised communicative campaign that began with a single complaint, travelled through a tightly coordinated far-right media ecology, and walked into Cabinet as policy. To understand what has happened, we have to look at the infrastructure — and at the template it imitates. The complaint that lit the fuse In July 2025, a listener of The Platform — Sean Plunket's online talkback operation — heard something they considered unacceptable: comments they described as racist, made on a programme that broadcasts continuously to a national audience over the open internet. They complained to the outlet. The outlet's reply, recounted in the Broadcasting Standards Authority's correspondence , was as instructive as it was crude: "You Plonker we aren't subje...