Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Having watched the long six hour exchange that seemed like an interrogation of the scholar PJ Thum, I felt a sense of sadness. Academics are often called upon as experts to offer their knowledge in policy making processes. However, I had not personally witnessed anything like this in any other part of the developed world. Here we had a politician, a representative of the state, performing what appeared to be an interrogation of an academic under the framework of a select committee, carrying out a performance that begun and ended with the scholar's integrity and academic credibility being brought under scrutiny. The performance, I worry, if not interrogated for its quality and tenor, will send out a chilling message to academics in Singapore and elsewhere working on Singapore-related issues, especially when the findings of their work don't align with or even interrogate the state-sponsored line. [Now even writing about this, while sitting here in Singapore...

A critical component of the social justice work of CARE is the work of communication in imagining and working toward structural transformation. Structural transformation in political, economic, social, and cultural formations is explicitly intertwined with the work of co-creating communicative spaces in working with the margins. To work toward co-creating these communicative spaces is to perform "embodied risk." The formation of communicative structures at/with the margins embodies risks to the material and symbolic formations of CARE work. These risks, expressed in the form of various strategies of repression directed at the work of culture-centered approach, are indicators of the very transformative nature of culture-centered projects. Because and when the work of CARE co-creates infrastructures of participation at the margins, various forms of power and control are directed at the work. These risks, experienced on the body as the corpus of social justice work,...

The turn to "culture" as a legitimate tool for measurement, evaluation, prescription, and implementation is intertwined with the incorporation of culture into sites of state-market control. Culture, as the handmaiden of the neoliberal transformation of societies, is incorporated into the logics imposed by the state toward the transformation of human lives under the overarching logic of the market. The cultural subject is an individualized self-interested consumer, participating through the state-controlled techniques of hyper-engagement to generate revenues for the market. The authoritarian techniques deployed by the state mechanize the terms, textures, techniques, and possibilities for cultural participation. The message, "the market rules," is incorporated into a wide range of cultural artefacts that consistently sings the song of the market. Cultural consumption, mediated through the market logics, is turned into points of profiteering, simultaneou...

The circulation of the "fake news" discourse reinvents the Cold War narrative of geoinsecurity to reinforce the power and control of hegemonic power structures globally. In the hands of the global elite, "fake news" is the new instrument for reproducing elite power and control, recycled as the weapon for silencing difference, working through the role of the state in carrying out techniques of social media governmentality. The manufacturing of threats serve the strategic purpose of introducing greater and newer methods of repression. Similar to the strategic manufacturing of the "Red threat" as a basis for authoritarian control and repression during the Cold War, the manufacturing of the "fake news" agenda serves as the pretext for the reproduction of draconian laws that fundamentally threaten free speech and freedom of expression. As in the instance of the "Red threat," the paradox of the "fake news" trope is its re...

Universities, as modern capitalist organizations, reproduce practices of exploitation that are often obfuscated by the gloss of projected images. Metric mania, the drive toward simply counting in the game toward rankings, is reflected in the blind allegiance in such Universities globally to measuring dollar values of grants and numbers of publications in varieties of tiered journals (tiering itself is a form of categorization that reproduces exploitative practices). One of the effects of this neoliberal obsession with metrics is its role in (re)producing cultures of academic practices that threaten the very nature of academic work. Academic integrity is sacrificed to the accelerated quest for numbers. One such threat to academic integrity is reflected in rent-seeking behaviors of senior academics. What is projected as the academic culture of collaboration driven by faculty in senior ranks within institutions is often driven by practices of exploitation (Of course, there a...

In the many culture-centered projects implemented across the globe, the development of habits of participatory communication in local cultural logics and in ongoing relationships with structures is integral to the co-construction of social change interventions. Communication as advocacy emerges from within the infrastructures of participatory communication grounded in community life. For instance, the understanding of racism as a chronic determinant of cardiovascular disease among African Americans emerges as a site for participatory politics that seeks to transform the unhealthy structures of racism. In doing so, advocacy directed at transforming racist structures is fundamentally grounded in local participatory logics of community life. Movements such as the #BlackLivesMatter movement emerge as grassroots-driven, community participatory spaces directed at transforming the structures. The understanding that health is constituted in the organizing of local-global structures i...

One of the well-rehearsed strategies of authoritarian control is surveillance. While technologies enable new modes of surveillance, the power and control of surveillance is reproduced through human participation. Mechanisms of surveillance are perfected and reproduced by willing subjects that participate in the reproduction of surveillance (Andrejevic, 2002, 2007; Dubrofsky, 2011; Fuchs, 2017; Owen & Imre, 2013). Those that participate in these mechanisms are led to believe that they will somehow be rewarded by the structures. With each new technology, authoritarian powers invent new mechanisms of control. The power of authoritarianism lies precisely in the threat that one will be found out if they did or said anything that challenges the control of the structure. Surveillance works toward silencing critique through the culture of fear it reproduces. Inherent in the reproduction of this culture of fear is the prevalence of mechanisms of surveillance. Everyday interact...