Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

In most of my own writing as well as in the writings of scholars seeking to understand the financial crisis, the trope of neoliberal governance offers a lens into the workings of the "free market" logic that played out in the financialization of global political economy, in the large scale inequalities across the globe, and in the dissolution of regulatory mechanisms to keep in check the behaviours of financial firms. This macro-level analysis offers a big picture, an understanding of the absence of government structures and processes that would keep in check the behaviours of financial organisations. However, what this analysis does not do is offer an insight into the everyday workings of the people that inhabited  these transnational organisations, the values they embody, the goals in life they aspire toward and the meanings they make of their professions. The macro analysis also does not offer insights into the frames of reference through which the actors working in and...

Each time I am in the field, conversing with disenfranchised communities about projects of social change and finding entry points to collaboration, I hear a consistent narrative. This narrative is utterly sceptical of NGOs and the work done by NGOs. Consistent in this narrative across geographic spaces of marginalization is a consistent suspicion of the middle class NGO worker or the elite foreigner who comes in for occasional visits, may be once a year or once every two years. Like one community member shared, "NGOs are bastards." She noted how NGOs come and go, with their own donor goals and absorbing most of the donor monies to support their own goals and agendas. In the voice of another community participant in a disenfranchised Santali community, "The NGOs will do whatever they can to help themselves. So the fancy car, the fancy trips with foreigners, and the fancy life. You ask, how much of this money actually helps us?" In these narratives, communi...

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...