Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Why White supremacists support free speech? For the White supremacist and the collaborators of White supremacy (including Zionists that support various forms of White supremacy, more on this in a later blog), the instrument of free speech is a powerful tool. You will often hear the White supremacist rallying behind calls for free speech. Such so-called higher order defense of free speech that White supremacists often jump to is to make space for far-right White supremacists to attack the dignity and human rights of communities of colour. White supremacists placing themselves behind the freedom of speech agenda is an effort  to prop up White supremacy. The underlying agenda of the White supremacist is to uphold White supremacy as the normative structure of society. How then do White supremacists attack voices of colour? This therefore also means that the White supremacist simultaneously must silence the freedom of speech of people of colour, especially the voices o...

The culture-centered approach (CCA) roots itself in the methodology of listening as the basis for co-creating transformative practices. Listening as a methodological tool in the CCA is tied to the work of building communicative infrastructures in solidarity with subaltern communities. The voices of the subaltern margins, emergent through method, disrupt the oppressive forces of colonialism, capitalism, and feudalism that violently erase subaltern voices. The presence of subaltern voices in hegemonic discursive spaces dismantles the structures of erasure and oppression. The work of solidarity is one of walking alongside subaltern communities to address the political economy of oppressive structures that consolidate power in the hands of the ruling classes. In this journey of walking together, culture-centered processes bring to reality communicative practices that seek to dismantle oppressive structures. The CCA, as a meta-theoretical framework therefore, is in direct oppos...

(A note of love to family) You say, be careful, Be careful or else, They’ll come after you. You say, watch out, Don’t raise your voice, Don’t speak up so much. Don't join the protests, Don't post on Facebook, Get off Twitter, Be careful or else They'll come after you. I turn to you, Look you in the eye, And ask, Do you remember? When I said to you In the times of love, "You are cheering for the fascists. What you are playing with Will turn this place Into the valley of death." Do you remember the times? When I said, "All your cheering and hate-mongering Will one day consume us all." So let the fascists come, Let them turn  the streets into piles of bodies Let them fill  their jails with our bodies. Let them make up False charges and  made-up stories. Our voices and bodies Are all we have. Because these voices we have Will witness, These voices we have Will remember There was...

Neoliberal organizing actively makes place for the politics of hate. One might even argue that neoliberal transformations are integral to the production of wholesale hatred, while at the same time, surviving on hate to fuel further reforms. The majoritarian politics of hate that forms the backdrop for the hegemonic emergence of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-linked Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the broader climate of hate targeting India's Muslim minorities, and the active political-institutional support for policies such as the National Registry of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) that are directly targeted at India's Muslim minorities thrive on the ongoing neoliberal reforms across India, especially the privatization of public spaces and the normalization of individualized greed as the basis of identity. The reforms have been at the core of the production of the upwardly aspiring Indian, structured on the values of self-centeredness, gre...

Figure 1: The #NoSingaporeansLeftBehind campaign created by families living in poverty in Singapore Across culture-centered interventions, the co-creation of voice infrastructures in partnership with communities living in poverty results in the ownership of decision-making processes in the hands of the poor. When the poor own the communicative platforms, make decisions on these platforms based on information they seek out in partnership with community organizations and researchers, and own the frameworks of evaluating the interventions they develop, the nature and quality of decisions become anchored in their everyday lives. As opposed to experts from the outside making decisions that are not grounded in the lived experiences of the poor, the culture-centered interventions developed and owned by the poor address the various underlying conditions causing poverty by being created by the poor. That experts often make decisions based on poorly informed, empirically empty ideolog...

"No Singaporean Left Behind" (NSLB) campaign in Singapore Between 2012 and 2018, the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) was housed at the National University of Singapore. Based on the theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach (CCA)  (Dutta, 2008), that conceptualizes communicative inequalities, inequalities in distribution of communicative opportunities, as intrinsically tied to structural inequalities, inequalities in the distribution of material resources, the Center co-created an array of communication interventions in partnership with communities at the margins in Singapore, India, Bangladesh, China, Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia.  Culture-centered interventions build voice infrastructures for the margins based on the theoretical argument that the erasure of voice infrastructures forms the basis of marginalization. The impact of these interventions are evident in the creation of material resources that...

In what is a watershed moment in Communication Studies, recent conversations on what constitute diversity and excellence have created an opening for articulations of the problem of racism in the discipline. That Communication Studies as a discipline has historically operated on and reproduced racist norms emerged as the site of organizing. The long-hidden racist codes of the discipline, which so many of us at the margins struggled against and were all too aware of in our individual struggles, became visible. The intuition that disciplinary and sub-disciplinary awards, modes of recognition, and pathways for progress are racist was crystallized in the sudden-visibility of documents that have otherwise been hidden behind opaque structures and processes meant to evaluate merit. The normative constructions of Whiteness that are systematically written into the everyday structures of the discipline, tucked away under the polite language of diversity and inclusion, were rendered vis...