Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

The culture-centered approach (CCA) outlines a conceptual framework for communication for social change, developing empirically grounded tenets that map out key concepts of communication within the broader ambits of social change. As a meta-theoretical framework for communication for social change, the CCA explores the ways in which culture, structure, and agency constitute spaces for meaning making and sites of participation for communities at the margins of social systems. Social change in the context of marginalization specifically attends to the co-creation of communication infrastructures, communication tools, and communicative spaces where the voices at the margins of societies are heard. From the question of systematic erasure of subaltern subjectivity, the CCA theoretically grapples with the work of communicative processes in disrupting these erasures, the role of communication in struggles for voices to be heard, and the array of communication strategies that open u...

2008. During our trip to Phuket, Debalina and I were inundated with images of White men, mostly middle-aged and above, roaming the streets of Phuket with women that seemed to barely have crossed their teens or just beyond their teens. This sight, of the "old White man" with a young Asian woman, often old enough to be his daughter, is a fairly common sight across East and Southeast Asia. The image is so common that it is naturalized as part of the scenery, a normative element of the "unique selling proposition" of Phuket, Bangkok, Bali. The liberals and Asian apologists of cultural tourism have often responded with the concept of consent, noting that the women participating in these "relationships" offer their consent in participation, that they are fully aware of the consequences of participating in such relationships, and therefore, make active choices. However, consent and participation are never devoid of power. To construct some elaborate...

Figure: The activist Samarendra Das organizing the Foil Vedanta campaign in the backdrop of the Vedanta mining operations in Zambia. Culture-centered processes of social change, grounded in the voices of the margins within local contexts, explore the ways in which communicative spaces can be co-created through collaborations with those at the margins. In the co-creation of these communicative spaces as well as resulting from these communicative spaces, a plethora of communicative strategies emerge. For those at the margins, these strategies become ways of securing access to resources that are mostly erased or absent. While in many instances, collaborating with(in) institutional structures to shift normative expectations prove to be effective, in many other instances, an antagonistic strategy is necessitated to create the grounds of claims-making. A monolithic focus on collaboration with institutional structures often ends up perpetuating the status quo, without creating t...

Much of the left-posturing academic circuits is an incestuous power game, especially so when one considers the Left circuits within Asian academe. The postcolonial Left, often born within elite English speaking families with networks and inbuilt connections, reproduces the same old colonial structures. To elucidate this point, I will draw upon a recent experience that travels through Facebook. The last two years, I have served as an external reviewer on a graduate committee where a Nigerian student had been struggling and the rest of the committee wanted to decline the student a degree after all the work the student had put in. I was struck by the lack of mentorship and access to structural resources to the student. This is what I had written on my Facebook wall on August 10, 2017: "academicwhiteness # colonialbullshit Calling out the racist bs that makes up much of European academe. After much thought, just got done with writing a minority evaluation letter to a Europ...

In reading the names that have formalized and given voice to the hushed conversations about sexual harassment by radical-posturing academics in Raya Sarkar's List, one is struck by the repeated appearance of a particular kind of elite, the highly networked Kolkata elite. This elite, inaugurating the posturing conversations of postcolonial and Subaltern Studies, occupies a radical space in the Kolkata imaginary, and by extension, the desi imaginary. One striking feature of this elite class is its access to spaces of radical posturing simply by virtue of being born in upper middle class, highly mobile, Convent-educated Kolkata families, with an ancestral history of prostrating to their British colonial masters. Often educated at posh Kolkata English medium private schools that afford access to the art of language trapeze, networked in by parents working in Ad agencies and multinationals, offered pathways by parental connections into elite Kolkata universities, and groomed i...

When you come home mother, You with your power and glory, and blessings and grace. These saffron-wearing thugs, bandanas on their heads, tridents in their hands, the asuras of the Hindu-rashtra, run in fear for their lives. When you come home mother, You with your love and anger, and strength and justice. These hate-mongering chanters of Ram-naam, with hate in their hearts, the desecrators of your name, go into hiding. When you come home mother, You with your joy and rage, and care and force. These miscreants that plant the seeds of violence, threaten to turn your land into Gujarat or Ayodhya, evanesce into the ether. When you come home mother, You with your power and glory, and blessings and grace, Your children, Hindus and Muslims, come together in united resolve, To keep these mandarins of hatred and violence Out of your land.

When working on culture-centered projects of social change, our research team is often approached by academic partners wanting to adopt the culture-centered approach or wanting to secure an entry into a collaboration with a community partner. While in many instances, these relationships result in mutual learning experiences, and bring new insights into the work of the CCA, in some instances, academic partners in culture-centered projects have not really imbibed the basic principles of the CCA before approaching collaboration. Some partners are eager to get a publication out on this or that marginalized community. The work of our team then becomes one of building the ethos of patient co-learning. That this or that publication is not what one is targeting when embarking on a culture-centered project is the first lesson. Academic partners are sometimes too eager to take this or that element of the CCA and market it as their own contribution. You forget that the hard work of c...