Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

During my recent talk on decolonization, I was approached by one of these White men, who with a smirk on his phase, reminded me, "You know, an example like ISIS also uses the same language of decolonization that you are talking about." He then went on to educate me about the need to delineate between the good and bad kind of decolonization, offering a lesson that this talk about decolonization is fine as long as it is palatable to our White Master. I suppose, he wanted to be the gatekeeper in theorizing about which kinds of talk of decolonization would be acceptable. The parallels offered between decolonization struggles and ISIS when talking about decolonization asserts the dominance of US/Western hegemony even as it hypocritically ignores the history of violence that is integral to the narrative of Western (un)civilization. I see such parallels drawn between ISIS and conversations on decolonization to be heuristic devices that distract attention away from the broad h...

My opening keynote at the International Communication Association regional conference in Brisbane titled "Communicative Transformations, Communities, and Imaginations: A Decolonizing Agenda" explores the possibilities of democratic politics in the global South. The talk seeks to engage with openings for decolonizing the "communicative inversions" that lie at the heart of the imperial project that constitutes liberal ideas, and at the same time offers opportunities for engaging with articulations of democratic politics that emerge from social change processes in the global South. I argue that these social change processes need to be strategically read as exemplars of the politics of decolonization in the global South, resisting the imperial reading of these processes as exemplars of the diffusion of the modernization framework of "democracy promotion." As observed by Partha Chatterjee in his discussion of everyday politics in the global South, the part...

Increasingly as we have witnessed across the US and in spaces around the globe, communication on new and social media has been targeted by power structures as an object of censorship. Through various human resource decisions, organizational policies, as well as national level policies, those in positions of power have sought to silence discourse on social and new media. Censorship in most of these instances is performed through top-down human resource decisions which are framed as personnel decisions. In almost all these instances, the decision is not informed by the social scientific study of communication. Instead, the decisions are mostly guided by donor pressure, foundation staff, human resource staff, and people who have been hired to perform management functions within these organizations. Rather, in most of these instances, the attempt to silence discourse is justified by an apparent commitment on behalf of these power structures to some invisible standard of civility. I sa...

The Board of Trustees at Illinois voted 8-to-1 to dehire Professor Steven Salaita. Recordings of the meeting and interviews with reporters depict the smugness with which the Chancellor and the Board responded at the meeting and in response to questions about the decision. These leaders had an opportunity to perform the meeting with civility, a concept they have offered as a core pillar of commitment for the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. They had the opportunity to demonstrate the ethic of care and openness to dialogue that the idea of civility depicts. They had an opportunity to foster a space for humility and acceptance of diverse worldviews and ways of being, commitments that the Chancellor has so often used as a branding strategy in the last few months. They had an opportunity to foster a space that opens up to diverse interpretations and worldviews. Most of all, the Trustees had an opportunity to correct their past actions clouded in opaque deci...

That day in the simmering cloud of dust. When the images of the crumbling towers inundated your TV screens. I sat in silence, sharing your pain and feeling ashamed of my brownness. That day when you looked at me with the assumptions, you wondered, do I come from the Middle East? You tried to decipher my accent. My brown body evoking your suspicion. That day when you walked in anger and declared your Operation Freedom to hunt down the terror. At home and abroad My brown body became marked once more. That day How could I forget. When you declared your commitment to make a hole in the place of Afghanistan. I shivered in pain knowing that many brown bodies like mine, Will pay the price.

If there is one element in the Salaita affair that is most striking, it is the use of diversity as a rationale for the firing of Professor Salaita. Chancellor Wise noted this in her blog post and this has been widely shared by those that support the firing: it is not the content of Professor Salaita's speech but the style of his twitter posts which called for strict action. His style, according to the Chancellor and the Board of Trustees, was uninviting of civil dialogue. The question that becomes relevant here is the following: What is civil communication? What are the criteria that are applied in the evaluation of the civility of a speech act? In appealing to diversity as the reason behind the firing, the Chancellor privileges a narrowly construed definition of diversity that serves the White mainstream and leaves its powers intact. The formulation of an openness to diversity as the underlying reason for firing Professor Salaita is reflective of a power structure that go...

Board of Trustees University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign Dear colleagues on the Board of Trustees, I am writing this letter to respectfully request you to reinstate Professor Steven Salaita in the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. I am not an alum and not a donor, but a humble Professor of Communication who has been touched in some of the most fundamental ways by your esteemed University. As a student-scholar of Communication, I hold the UIUC in the highest of regard as one of the oldest institutions that served as a springboard for the scholarship of Communication. Professor Wilbur Schramm, acknowledged as one of the founders of the discipline, invested his time and energy at UIUC in building some of the most vital roots of my discipline, and in articulating key principles of free speech. The Department of Communication Studies at Illinois is home to some of my most valued and productive colleagues, and has p...