Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

It was summer. A summer when the violence escalated. In those months, when the repression accelerated from polite threats to sit down meetings to direct threats to the accusations, I was writing this encyclopedia entry on Power and Control for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Witnessing power work through the cells of my body, feeling my body respond to the repression from bouts of throwing up to losing consciousness, disrupted my understanding of power as communicative, anchoring the discursive sites of power in material articulations. I felt the brute effect of power even as I was writing about it. My readings and re-readings of Marx, Adorno, Gramsci were intimately intertwined with my experiences with power, resisting it, and negotiations of it in an ever-contingent space of (im)possibilities. In this Review, I explore the interplays of the discursive and the material in the production of power and control. Power is both a force that perpetu...

Much of the terms of internationalization of Communication as a discipline driven by the International and National Communication Associations are juxtaposed in the backdrop of the proliferation of the Communication discipline outside of the U.S. Across Asia, from China and India to Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Bangladesh, communication programs have proliferated at an exponential rate. The growing communication sectors across Asia call for pedagogical opportunities that train the next generation of communication practitioners across Asia. Communication training in many parts of Asia is driven by practical industry needs for communication skills. Programs therefore focus on teaching the basic skills of journalism, marketing communication, advertising, and public relations. Although the nature of communication training varies across sub-regions and nation states within Asia, the overarching emphasis on skills training for the professional communication industries is ...

Much of the work of authoritarian regimes is on deploying the power of totality to silence voice(s). The capacity of voice to disrupt the power and control of the regime perhaps is one of the most fundamental fears that drive regimes. Regimes, obsessed with power, operate on the perpetual fear of the loss of power. Inherent in the workings of the regime is a deep-seated anxiety about the threat to the exercise of power and control that constitutes its everyday legitimacy. Regimes therefore invent a variety of techniques, from forced disappearance and murder, to arrests for threatening national security, to police investigations for scandalizing the legitimacy of existing power structures, to criminal defamation suits. Although the degree of violence and force differs across the techniques, what is common to them is the deployment of state structures to silence voice. The state, rather than being a resource embedded in democratic norms, is mobilized to silence differenc...

Professor Mohan J. Dutta will deliver the keynote titled "Decolonizing the rural: Rural economies and radical democracies in sustaining futures" at the " Rural Socio-Economic Transformation: Agrarian, Ecology, Communication and Community Development Perspectives" Conference held at the  IPB International Conference Center Bogor, West Java , INDONESIA on November 14 and 15, 2018. He will be joining the  Minister of Village, Development of Disadvantaged Regions And Transmigration, Republic of Indonesia, in the Opening Plenary. Here's the details of his talk: Decolonizing the rural: Rural economies and radical democracies in sustaining futures The rural has been conceptualized in top-down expert/elite driven interventions emerging from the global centers of power as passive sites of interventions. Expert interventions serving capitalist and colonialist agendas have systematically targeted the rural as the primitive "other" to be saved through mar...

"Being strict" if often a code for abuse in academia. "Being strict" produces and enables cultures of abuse by legitimizing abusive faculty behaviors. The guise of "being strict" justifies faculty behaviors that target students, making them acceptable, almost desirable to the university, as behaviors that protect and uphold the standards of academe. Moreover, "she is only being strict" is often the justification that enablers of abuse in faculty cultures use to support perpetrators of abuse, while at the same time retaining their pretend-radical, privileged positions as so-called voices of societal conscience. I can turn the other way and not say anything about ongoing abuse in my department as long as I can tell myself "Oh, she is just being strict." Imagine a Full Professor that systematically abuses graduate students, berating them publicly, going off in a fit of rage without any reason and attacking their competence. ...

When I was trained as a health communication scholar, much of my learning was based on the model of individual behavior change, defining communication as messages directed at raising awareness, changing attitudes, and promoting healthy behaviors. This line of health communication scholarship has had a long history, having been applied to create and strategically disseminate health messages to target populations. My ongoing journey in collaborating with communities at the margins taught me that the problem of health inequalities that I was grappling with were much more to do with existing structural inequalities that constitute health than to do with the absence of knowledge, attitudes, and individual behaviors. Although communication as message could indeed be directed at target populations, such a narrow framework of communication did not really address the larger structural inequalities, the inequality in income distribution, the absence of structural resources, the poverty of...

Pakeha claims to merit often obfuscate the structures of Whiteness that make invisible Pakeha mediocrity, inverting Pakeha mediocrity as merit. The ability to erase the sources of its privilege is fundamental to the reproduction of privilege. Pakeha privilege reproduces itself by bringing forth the question of merit, articulating that merit ought to serve as the basis for evaluations, appointments, and mobility. The language of meritocracy on the surface appears committed to equality and claims to offer a level playing field. Commitments to addressing deep-seated racist inequalities are then projected as anti-meritocratic. Yet, what this discourse of merit strategically erases are the fundamentally racist inequities in how structures are constituted that underlie access to the playing field. The rules of the game are dictated by the White majority culture, embedded in its logics of White norms. Moreover, the claims to merit often work to hide the lack of merit in mainstrea...