Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

The hyper-precarity of the migrant worker, expelled into the spaces of discardability in neoliberal economies, is constituted by a politics of communciative erasure.  Yet, even as these grotesque forms of organizing that constitute discardable migrant bodies become visible, everyday forms of communication in hegemonic systems work to erase and render invisible the accounts of exploitation, extraction, and oppression. The grotesqueness of the otherwise normalized politics of "use and throw" is carefully tucked away from discursive spaces through various forms of communicative strategies to erase the voices of low-wage migrant workers.  Amidst their suffering and the negotiations of violence written into neoliberal societies, amidst the violence brought on their bodies by COVID19, workers speak up.  These very acts of speaking up must be violently shut down to keep intact the neoliberal narrative.  One such strategy, deployed by civil society organizations, state propa...

Recent years have witnessed conversations in communities of scientists and a certain strand of social scientists (particularly psychologists) on the "crisis of replicability." These conversations point to the problems with replicating studies, often noting that the processes of replication do not produce the same results (the replication success rate in many instances hovering between 30% and 40%).  The ideology of post-positivism that anchors the dominant strands of the sciences/social sciences (including in Communication Studies) sees this as a crisis. Any form of crisis-making is political work. We should be therefore asking, for whom is replicability a crisis? For what reasons is replicability a crisis? It is a crisis because the framework of hypothesis-making that dominates the sciences/social sciences works on the ideology of generalizability. This impulse of generalizing forms the colonial infrastructure of White knowledge systems that legitimize themselves through the...

And he stands  at your gates holding a placard with a smiling face, standing in peace as an invitation, a stand that threatens your house of cards, built on its  repressive rules, and tools to silence.

Courtesy CARE's "Respect our Rights" campaign One of the powerful lessons emergent from my ongoing dialogues with low-wage migrant workers in Singapore is the palpable sense of fear many workers feel.  This sense of fear is material. It is visceral. It is embodied. It is real. It is tied to and directly a product of the ways in which migrant work is organized in Singapore, the structures of employment in the industries that hire low-wage migrant labour, and the structures of the state institutions that regulate low-wage migrant work. Low-wage migrant work is temporary. Low-wage migrant work is constituted amidst tremendous power inequalities between the worker and the employer.  Last night, I was speaking with Jamal bhai.  We have been speaking often over the last month, his voice serving as an anchor that guides our ongoing work at the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), the directions of our research methodology, and the processes thr...

Aotearoa New Zealand is celebrating this week the effectiveness of the policy measures taken by the leadership in curbing the spread of COVID19. Globally, and at home, the Prime Minister has been celebrated for her strong response that is grounded in compassion. Her social media presence, supplementing a sequence of strong public health measures reflect leadership anchored in empathy. This does not however mean that the New Zealand public health response has not been criticized. Or that there can be no criticism of the New Zealand response. For instance, a number of my Māori colleagues have said that we should not get carried away by the "Jacinda Magic," as CARE graduate student and researcher  Christine Elers  puts it. A number of my Māori students and community organizer colleagues have educated me about my own blinders that limit my ability to see the entrenched inequalities in the COVID19 response in New Zealand. They have challenged me, educated me, and in...

In response to the World Health Organization (WHO) celebrating Singapore's COVID19 response, I had noted in an earlier  post  that international organizations play important roles in foregrounding the vitality of democracy to the prevention and management of public health crises.  Citing   Singapore  as an exemplar of COVID-19 response, WHO Director General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom, linked to the speech of the Prime Minister of Singapore, Mr. Lee Hsien Loong as an exemplar of pandemic response.  Attack on communicative equality and neoliberalism In my earlier blog, I had drawn on the key theoretical tenets of the culture-centered approach (CCA) to argue that the absence of communicative equality in the "Singapore Model" threatens the health and wellbeing of communities, and particularly of communities that exist at the margins of Singapore's extreme neoliberal economy. The "Singapore Model" is the ultimate seduction for neoliberal market...

Image courtesy Julio Etchart as part of CARE's "Migrant Worker Rights" campaign (with Thanks to Monishankar Prasad, Julio Etchart and Abdul Rahman) Epidemics render visible the grossest forms of inequalities that constitute and reflect the societies we live in. In Singapore, the record number of single-day cases, with the largest concentrations in dorms housing low-wage migrant workers, makes visible the political, economic and social organizing  that render legitimate these inequalities. The plight of low-wage migrant workers, often tucked away by carefully crafted public relations narratives mainfests the deep inequalities that constitute Singapore. The poor working conditions, eevryday racisms, workplace abuse, and poor living conditions experienced by migrant construction workers in Singapore is juxtaposed in the backdrop of their labour that forms the foundation of Singapore's "smart" urban infrastructure. The techno-seductive appeal of a sus...