Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

What should be the commitment of the humanities and social sciences in Asia in covering concepts and ideas rooted in Asia? How should these commitments play out in the composition of research and teaching faculty in Departments located in Asia? How is the project of de-Westernization to be accomplished when the majority of the teachers and researchers that inundate the Asian academe happen to be from the West or are trained in the West? How is the project of de-Westernization to be accomplished if the majority of the decision-makers who offer leadership are from the West? In other words, How does the question of representation play out in the composition of Departments and Faculties of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences located in Asia, and in the composition of leadership roles and structures within Departments, Colleges, and Universities?  What is the desirable composition of a Department of say Communication located in Asia? And what are the implication...

A number of my friends have shared with me their wonder at our decision to move to Singapore. They have shared their surprise as well as their inspirations. I had a pretty solid appointment at Purdue in a leadership role and Debalina had promises of a tenure track career at one of the leading communication departments that also has a lot of history in the discipline. Moving to Singapore and to NUS had a number of underlying reasons, a lot of them personal, and some really important ones that were professional. One of the most salient reasons for the move was what I thought was a truly transformative opportunity for putting my commitments to de-Westernizing communication to action. Of course, one could make the argument that the process of de-westernization needs to happen at the very heart of Empire. Through deconstructing and critique, the workings of power can be carefully examined within spaces of belonging in the Western academe. I had been doing that, sometimes successful...

As a Professor of Communication teaching in Singapore, I have often been struck by the absence of introductory or advanced texts that are grounded in Singapore or in the broader context of Asia. I find myself having to cover Western concepts of Perception , Stereotyping , or Media Structures as the fundamentals of communication and new media theorising, modifying then the readings in the texts to "fit" my students in Singapore by drawing in examples or cases from Singapore. As I pick an international version of a much-used US-based text, I am left wondering what it means to have an "international" version of an introductory text, where most of the concepts are US-centric. Singapore emerges in my pedagogy as a source of case studies, built into a comparative frame where the foundations are covered in a required US text. I remain dissatisfied with this strategy of adapting a fundamentally US-centric text to the Singapore context of my students (I am not even s...

Science. Your tools that are named as sacred forces seeking truth and justice. Immersed in the farce of your Whiteness. Science. Made up by your games by your rules by your desires to Control the Coloured Body That waits to be invaded. Science. Your tools of oppression that you carry out everyday in the name of Truth The games you play in the name of Justice. Science. How you justify your senseless violence as the message of peace. Even as you build walls and kill and deny the basic rights of access. Science Your violence and Injustice Your methodology and its instruments Unjust Violent Oppressive Imperial Couched as always in the farce of Objectivity.

The recent victory of the Aam Admi Party in New Delhi has been received with much jubilation among the middle class in India. The newspapers are inundated with celebratory stories of the everyman who has stepped into politics. Celebratory Facebook posts and twitter feeds speak about the arrival of the every man. The victory is celebrated as a historical victory, as a harbinger for the appearance of the aam admi, the everyday man on the political stage. This narrative strikes me as appealing to the middle class in India precisely because of the apolitical politics of the Aam Admi party. There is no specific ideology to root the politics in. There are no macro stories for the party other than the story that the party represents a fight against corruption in the political structures in the country. That the political structures need to be fought is indeed a relevant and much-needed political conversation. And yet, the aam admi's political participation stops at looking at c...

One of the threads that runs through elite discourse on social welfare is an anxiety about the laziness of the poor. Much of the focus of such discourse is on equating social welfare policies with laziness, with the implicit suggestion that somehow policies of social welfare that provide for the very basic capacities of life such as access to health care and a minimal standard of living would prompt the poor to become lazy, to become dependent on the limited taxpayer resources and on the state. Also, carrying an almost moral thread, this line of thinking suggests that social welfare programs should not breed immoral behaviour among the poor, manifest in laziness, lack of work ethic, alcoholism, unsafe sex etc. The cautionary tale therefore regales us with a moral warning about the potential moral hazards of social welfare. Yet, most of our research on the culture-centered approach to health communication with communities living at the very margins suggests that such elite discou...

The phone rings: "Professor Dutta, you are Bengali, so did you grow up in Bengal?" I am told by my secretary it is Prof. De on the other end of the line, an Indian academic who wants a job in my Center here in Singapore. He assumes a sense of familiarity with me. A point of connection that he presumes is shared in our Bengali roots, given away by my last name. He asks me if I am familiar with such and such name, and the other name (Chatterjee, Mukherjee, Sen, Basu, Dutta). I learn about his networks of Bengali intellectuals in Delhi and Kolkata that he is connected with. In his assumed sense of connection with me, there is an implicit sense of solidarity and a presumed desirability of networking me in with other Bengali intellectuals. (Note the assumption that I am an "intellectual," let alone the assumption that I belong to the highly elite breed of "Bengali intellectuals") He tells me that he is part of the "Center for Critical Develo...