Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

University of Michigan Professor of Communication Susan Douglas has come under attack from the political Right for a column in the magazine In The Times. In her column titled "It's okay to hate Republicans," Douglas opens with a rhetorical attention grabber "I hate Republicans," beginning with "I can't stand the thought of having to spend the next two years watching Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Ted Cruz, Darrell Issa or any of the legions of other blowhards denying climate change, thwarting immigration reform or championing fetal 'personhood'," and drawing the attention of the reader to the climate of intolerance that is promoted by the conservatives. Professor Douglas' essay, read in full, attends to the underlying principles of aversion to social change and acceptance of inequality that form the core of the conservatives. The political right, including a Republican member of the Board of Regents of the University...

The accelerated corporatization of University structures breeds new forms of vulnerabilities within Universities, essentially altering the mission, vision, and organizing structures of Universities. Universities, having had to raise funds in the face of reduced state funding and public support, have to increasingly depend on donors to carry out their vital functions. Moreover, in order to participate in this continually reinvented game of branding and unique selling propositions, which in turn are essential to further fund-raising, Universities have to keep generating the perceptions of speed, innovation, and change. To sustain the brand image of the university, new programs must be introduced, new buildings must be built, new initiatives must be launched, and new labs must be built. The glamor and appeal of the university are maintained through the deployment of an army of mid-managers who implement newly borrowed metrics, come up with new set of indicators, and introduce eve...

This past summer, the months of July and August in 2014, witnessed gruesome attacks carried out by Israel on Gaza. As the social media reverberated with images and protests against these ghastly and uncivil acts of violence carried out by a powerful nation state with its imperial backing, civility on social media emerged as the metric of conversation, operating strategically to silence dissent. As I have blogged in earlier posts, Professor Steven Salaita, who had secured an appointment at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, was de-hired from his job apparently because he had violated some unspoken civility code. In speaking about the decision to de-hire Professor Salaita, Chancellor Phyllis Wise of the UIUC cited personnel reasons while ironically parroting her well-practiced speech on her commitment to diversity, multiculturalism, safe spaces on university campuses, and academic freedom. Later in the summer and through the early Fall, several University leaders across t...

Culture-centered projects of social change intervene in the elite world of theorizing by seeking to co-create spaces for subaltern theories. A key element of this intervention is the actual creation of material and symbolic spaces for subaltern articulations in conversations with subaltern communities. Subaltern theories emerge through conversations among subaltern communities, activists, and academics. Empiricism, attending to the expressions of materiality in everyday lived experiences, is integral to the formulation of theories within the meta-theoretical framework of the CCA. Emergent theories voiced through articulations of lived experiences by subaltern communities, are grounded in the everyday understandings, interpretations, and actions negotiated by community members. The CCA thus is a constitutive framework for method and theory. Culture-centered projects seek to contribute to subaltern struggles with material resources by creating material interventions. ...

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...