Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

I visited Singapore first in 2008 when a dear friend, then a professor at the Wee Kim Wee School put me in touch with another dear friend, then the Head of the Department of the Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. I was on sabbatical from Purdue University in the US and this was the first time that my spouse, who was then in India, and I would spend time together starting our family. These were six months of joy and wonderment. Six months of experiencing cultures, diversity of voices and traditions, and confluence of ancient traditions. We were expecting our first child then, and the six months flew by in a flurry. I cherished every bit of those six months in Singapore. I fell in love with the city, its Chinese New Year and Hari Raya and Thaipusam. The colors, aromas, and confluences of Singapore felt a welcome break from the monolithic culture of the US where I never really fit in, after having spent a decade there. Singapore and it...

Multiculturalism is a performance of Whiteness in neoliberal times. Multiculturalism is a performance of Whiteness for neoliberal times. Multiculturalism is a performance in the service of neoliberalism, establishing the neocolonial hegemony of Whiteness through the codes of appropriate speech in the service of democracy and the market. A performance that works through the norms of civility, decorum, and speech code to silence difference. The image of multiculturalism thus established at the global sites of neoliberal articulation is based on White ideas of acceptable speech, constituted in relationship to the market. A performance that works to uphold a neocolonial narrative that justifies violence, torture, and imperial invasion under the guise of democracy and promotion of freedom. As the multicultural narrative works to reproduce imperial power by paradoxically marking symbolic articulations of cultural voices as inappropriate and therefore unacceptable, it reproduces...

[Drawn from Lydia Wilson's "What I discovered from interviewing imprisoned ISIS fighters" published in The Nation and retrieved from http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-interviewing-isis-prisoners/ on November 15, 2015] Listening to the voice of a young brown body all of 26, married, two children, with a large family to support. Listening to the voice of a young brown body all of 26, a lost adolescence, to the occupation that brought Freedom. Listening to the voice of a young brown body all of 26, wrapped in faith, love for family, lost for meaning. Listening to the voice of a young brown body all of 26, that lost a father, disappeared, murdered, jailed, perhaps in one of your Guantanamo camps. Listening to the voice of a young brown body all of 26, in search of faith, in search of meaning, in search of dignity.

The acts of violence on the streets of Paris depict the ongoing role of religious extremism as a site of terror. As my Facebook wall is inundated with the flow of emotions showing support for the people of Paris, I am struck by an all-too-familiar narrative that emerges in a global network of emotions mediated through new communication technologies. At the heart of this network of emotions is the framing of the world into a binary, parsing out "freedom loving" spaces and spaces that "threaten freedom." The freedom loving spaces are White, cultured, and democratic, juxtaposed against the brownness of the primitive bodies that inhabit the freedom threatening spaces. The Facebook narrative of 13/11 invokes the 9/11 archetype. When Hollande promises us a "pitiless response," I am eerily reminded of George Bush's promise: "America and our friends and allies join with all those who want peace and security in the world, and we stand t...

The best of my teachers pushed my comfort zones and tested my ability to learn, stretching my imagination and my intellectual capacities, and emboldening me to be open to experimenting. The classroom as a site of experimentation and new learning however is increasingly becoming rare, ironically in a global environment that has latched on to the buzzwords of innovation, creativity, and experimentation. An increasing threat globally to the spirit of education as experimentation and new learning is the reduction of education to the dictates of a homogeneous mass market. A mass market-based logic conceptualizes education as a commodity measured on fairly homogeneous sets of criteria applied uncritically. Excellence, innovation, multiculturalism, global outlook—these are the buzzwords for most universities catering to a global market, with little room for differentiation. Each of these terms, excellence, innovation, multiculturalism, global outlook, otherwise admirable m...