Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Social impact has secured its legitimate place in University conversations across global spaces. In the face of the global challenges we face, Universities both feel the pressure from taxpayers as well as see an opportunity in generating knowledge directed at addressing social impact. Some form or the other of the rhetoric of social impact is a part of the branding strategy of most Universities today. Yet, I worry that the conversation on social impact often ends up in empty sloganeering, devoid of accountability to the various stakeholders that a social impact conversation would hold the University to. Slogans such as "We change the world," and "Making a difference" are so widely used that "change" and "difference" have become commonplace words, devoid of meaning and value, and devoid of mechanisms for holding Universities accountable to these slogans. In other words, like bad advertising campaigns, they have become selling p...

When your White status quo Wants to internationalize Under your oh so Progressive banner I shudder. At the thought of Your pox, malaria, syphilis, cholera That you will bring With your civilizing mission.

As a faculty member who has been teaching for almost two decades, I recall the many times I have felt so lucky to have the mentorship and support of senior colleagues. Senior colleagues have thoughtfully provided feedback on my paper, with line-by-line edits, the paper entirely marked by notes in pencil. Senior colleagues have observed me teach, make mistakes, built up my spirit, and shown me strategies of teaching large and small lectures. Senior colleagues have taken me aside and given me advice on various aspects of academic life. To all these senior colleagues, I owe much of my academic survival. That I survived in the academy and did so somewhat well is a product of the countless hours and unpaid labour these colleagues put in. They did all this with a smiling face, with compassion, and with care in their hearts. The increasing privatization of the University in recent years and the ascendance of the privatized logic however is breeding a different kind of self-serving ...

The Cyber sprawl of Yuppie hi-tech Cities across India is intimately marked by violence. Cities such as Noida, Ghaziabad, Cyberabad, and Bangalore narrate stories of violence, both in the expressions of everyday forms of violence that are narrated in the mainstream, and more powerfully so in the everyday forms of violence that remain hidden, tucked away under the glossy images of smart, green cities advertised in the brochures seducing non-resident Indians (NRIs). Often these sordid stories of violence narrated in the Yuppie media and shared in Yuppie networks, scripted as tales of rape, robbery, and murder obfuscate the violence of class, caste, and displacement that remain hidden from the everyday narratives of a Yuppie culture and the mainstream media that caters to this culture. The enunciation of violence, what gets talked about and what doesn't, is a reflection of the overarching violence of social class and inequality written into the Yuppie City. The telling of the...

A normative response that often seems to circulate within our discipline when referring to brown critical feminist scholars is: "She is difficult." The "She is difficult" trope works to signal the potential trouble a department might be inviting when it hires a brown critical feminist scholar. The trope works as heuristic universal, as a signifier to mark the body of the "unruly brown woman." It does so by circulating norms of civility constituted in White privilege. Communicative processes and forms that thus challenge this white privilege fall outside of the norm, as the abnormal. Incivility, as a tool of the oppressor, works fundamentally to shut out interrogation of the Whiteness of the structures we inhabit. Rather than interrogating the structures of White privilege that reproduce this privilege, norms of incivility often work unequally on the bodies of brown women. More so, these norms work on bodies of brown women who question the o...

That unregulated globalization processes have produced large-scale global inequalities in the distribution of resources and opportunities is empirically documented. These inequalities are so dramatic and the disaffection produced by them are so widely registered that elites and their mouthpiece pundits can no longer ignore the level of inequalities. Having acknowledged the inequalities though, particularly in the backdrop of the financial crisis, elites fall back upon propaganda to justify and perpetuate the neoliberal status quo. Rather than look at the inequalities as the product of unmitigated globalization processes that privilege those with power, experts offer theories that render as natural the state of inequalities. One such elite explanation suggests that the large-scale inequalities we are witnessing today are the product of the "fourth technological revolution." Without any data to back up their claims, these elites therefore prescribe smart strategie...

The social sciences offer insights into social, cultural, political, economic phenomena through empirically-driven work. The quest for empiricism essentially means that the social scientist has to pay close attention to data in drawing her conclusions. Good social science is not simply about running an equation or generating a simulation on the basis of assumptions, but actually putting these observations and assumptions to test. For instance, mathematically drawing out how two players may make specific choices in a game based on a rational actor model is perhaps irrelevant unless tested through empirical observations. The observation of social phenomena thus is grounded in a commitment to generating truth claims, however contingent and incomplete. It is possible that some or many of these truth claims that emerge from honest social science scholarship disagree with the broader assumptions or foregone conclusions of the dominant power structures in a given social-political-eco...