Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Last evening, Debalina and I had a wonderful time having dinner with our friends Shaunak and Zhuo. At the end of the evening (which usually rolls into late nights as conversations get more and more interesting), as I was getting ready for bed, I felt very grateful for our friendships and for the privilege that academe offers us to do the work we choose to do, to converse about this work, and perhaps to have the opportunity to continually evaluate the value of this work. You see, Shaunak and Zhuo are also my students and advisees, and they just returned from India and China respectively after having spent their summer doing CCA fieldwork for their dissertations. Shaunak spent time in India amidst conversations with truck drivers along truck routes around the issue of HIV/AIDS, and Zhuo spent her time in China conversing with workers on factory floors and living in a local church that housed the workers, conversing about issues of worker's rights in the backdrop of globalization po...

Today we had one of our Hunger Coalition meetings in Tippecanoe county. The meeting went extremely well, much along the lines of how one might expect a community-grounded CCA process to unfold. The food insecure participants who experience hunger in their everyday lives came together today to lay out the steps of the coalition as well as the objectives of the coalition. I was incredibly impressed by how fast this project seems to be moving toward accomplishing multiple tangible goals. But I am going to spend my blog today about an event that happened toward the end of the meeting. As we were wrapping up the meeting and I started packing my bag, Sara (we will use her pseudonym here) walked up to me in trepidation and stood by me as other community members were leaving the room. I felt she needed to share something with me. When I looked at her, she walked up somewhat nervously and asked me if I would not be offended to accept a Bible written in Arabic (now I can't really read Arab...

Reading Carol Warren’s chapter on Qualitative Research brought back to mind a comment a senior colleague once made to me when I was a journalist in California. Speaking about feature stories – personality profiles, in particular – he pointed out how interviews often revealed that people rarely overcame their roots, their childhood experiences, their pasts, no matter how far they went in life. I recall, we agreed unanimously that people’s roots indeed had the greatest influence on their worldview and their philosophy in life. At that time, though, it never crossed my mind, to what extent my own roots could be coloring what I heard in the numerous interviews I did throughout the day as a reporter. Being the “objective” journalist – that I presumed I was – I was oblivious of the fact that the discursive space of an interview was an arena where both my interviewee and I were engaging actively and simultaneously in the act of meaning-making; and that I, as the interviewer, was participating...

In preparing for my Communication Theory undergraduate course that I will teach this coming Fall, I am struck by the the whiteness of the theories presented in the text I am using in class and by the limitations in seeking to offer alternative worldviews that open up the spaces of pedagogy to imaginations of communication from elsewhere. What is most important to note here is that irrespective of the paradigm of the theories one picks from, the theories are essentially white in terms of where they have been picked from, which theorists talk about them and cite them, the political agendas of these theorists, the ideologies written into the theories, and most fundamentally, the location of the theories within the neo-colonial sites of knowledge production that reestablish the hegemony of whiteness. Inherent in the articulation of the theories in the pages of the texts is an assumption about the superiority of whiteness as the legitimate producer of knowledge. Simultaneously, written into...

I have increasingly thought about the number of times that I have heard Indian parents talk about the success of their kids, planning for a good career, and finding the right kind of enabler/ladder so that the child would adequately climb to the established measures of success. This quest for the child's success among parents on one hand is understandable. Every parent wants their child to do well, to have a secure future, and to have the resources they need to live a comfortable life. The desires, on the other hand, often singlehandedly play out in a linear narrative, and this is the part that needs to be deconstructed critically...the career path to success seems to be utterly narrow and well laid out: get an engineering degree, and after you get an engineering degree, get an MBA. This to most Indian parents seems like the easiest route for their child to be successful. Education, thus narrowly defined, is initially loaded up with the emphasis on the sciences, followed by the eng...

Shifting my focus from policy-related books, I’ve devoted my attention this week towards absorbing information in the academic literature related to experiences of food insecurity. Broadly, I’ve learned that the experience of food insecurity is collectively shared. While I dislike making generalizations across geographic locations and communities, it is easy to see that those facing hunger in the rural communities of Oregon and Appalachia are quite similar in their perceptions of the experience to those we’ve interviewed as part of our Voices of Hunger project. In De Marco, Thornburn, and Kue’s (2009) analysis of the experiences of the food insecure in rural Oregon, similar contributors to food insecurity were noted, including a lack of health insurance and foregrounded requirements to pay for bills and rent, as well as the administrative hurdles potential recipients face in determining their eligibility for national safety-net programs. I was particularly intrigued by their discussion...

In moving forward with my food policy readings, I’ve spent the last few days absorbing “Sweet charity: Emergency food and the end of entitlement” by Janet Poppendieck. While she hasn’t been as straightforward in declaring her positionality on the food insecurity issue as was Winne, I have really appreciated her writing style as a member of academia, a sociologist specifically, who is consistently able to blend her scholarly understanding with practical sensibilities. She spends a brief portion of her introduction detailing her methodology, which included participant observation, interviews, and archival analysis at food pantries, food banks, food rescue programs, and soup kitchens in nine different states across the span of 7 years. From the start, I was drawn into the book per my sharing of Poppendieck’s most notable fear: we are becoming attached to our charitable food programs and increasingly unable to envision a society that wouldn’t need them. As she suggests, we are so busy buil...