Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

They say they tap on the roof. The sound that warns of the impending doom. They say run with whatever you have. We show you mercy. They say this is civilization, a fair warning to collect all that we have and run to save our lives. They say the children are human shields placed amid security threats that must be bombed. So in the darkness as the bombs drop from the skies, We wait for the tap. The children huddled on my lap.

Imagining today a world where many voices come together in standing witness to injustice. Where many voices come together in the faith that truth shall prevail where injustice will be erased by stories of justice. Where many voices speak unchained that which is truth challenging what we see on TV and read on paper stories. Where many voices sing together the songs of freedom Standing together witnessing, accounting returning the gaze.

A salient liberal response to the ongoing Israeli attacks on Gaza is a call for dialogue. Dialogue is a key tenet of the CCA, as an avenue for disrupting the silences and marginalization that are perpetuated by dominant power structures. I will reflect here on the concept of dialogue in CCA. More specifically, in this essay, I will draw upon a piece that Mahuya Pal and I wrote in Communication Theory , "Dialogue theory in marginalized settings" to suggest that dialogue is impossible in the face of colonial violence. Here is a link to that piece: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2010.01367.x/full There are two intertwined ideas I will put forth. First, dialogue is "constituted in" erasure and is "constitutive of" erasure. Second, colonialism, as the systematic erasure of the sovereignty of a people, is intrinsic to the conceptualization of dialogue. Inherent in the idea of colonial violence is the fundamental erasure of the ...

When we interact with individuals, households, communities in our fieldwork, we do so as social scientists. The traditional framework of the social sciences have taught us to name the people we converse with as participants or respondents in our social scientific projects. The participants are sources of data. Data that we can then plug into our excel files or NVivo coding sheets for the purposes of sense making. In the confines of our labs , we then run our analyses, often through software packages such as SPSS and NVivo, seeking to glean patterns of thought, emotions, and behaviors, and correlating these patterns with other patterns. We observe the correlation between social class and health information seeking, the patterns of experiences among foreign domestic workers, the remittance patterns of male construction workers that have migrated from China etc. We then write up these results in our discipline specific journals in disciplined language, giving a seemingly objectiv...

Only in the heart of the Empire does one witness such grotesque celebration of violence. Violence as a way of life. Violence as sacred. Violence normalized into everyday stories, and violence exalted to a powerful cultural story. Violence in the guns that are sold openly, guns that are carried by everyday people as an expression of some fantasy of liberty, guns that are weapons in the hands of a killer that turns to violence to express her or his angst, and advanced weapons that are the symbols of liberty in the killing fields in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya. The cultural affinity for violence is manufactured in the valorization of soldiers. The celebration of heroes of the many wars that the US has waged in the name of freedom, the celebration of fallen martyrs who are framed as the protectors of the freedom, the commemoration of the courage of soldiers, the memorial day and the veteran's day: these are all expressions of  violence that elevate violence as a cultura...

In the tears that witness in silence The longings of separation. We will hope And plant the seeds of Imagination. In the tears that remember in silence The stories of loss and suffering. We will imagine the beginnings of change And transformation. In the tears that recount in silence The stories of unpaid work. We will create the inspiration for joy And resolution. In the tears that remember in silence The child left behind. We will join our voices together Singing the lullabies of Freedom. In the tears that fight in silence The memories of abuse. We will come together To hope for new beginnings.

For the many professional Indians that live abroad, the struggles for a green card are integral to the journey of economic progress, of making a life abroad. Making a life for oneself abroad provides many opportunities and most importantly, a ladder to succeed economically. This is the premise of many an immigrant dream, the ultimate rendition of the IIT-IIM fantasy. I myself have pursued this dream, and understand the anxieties that surround the processes of securing a visa, getting a green card, securing permanent residence, and ultimately may be, securing a citizenship. When going through the reams of paperwork, it certainly is overwhelming to fill up document after document. The anxiety around the immigration process occupies the dinner table topic of many an immigrant conversation, sharing in stories of an unfair immigration system. In the sharing of the anxieties, professional immigrants often share their lack of understanding of what seems to them to be a racist syste...