Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

What would it take to create a climate for supporting empirically-grounded socially impactful social science scholarship in Singapore? This is a question that has surfaced over the last five years, including generating substantive discussions in media, public sphere, and political discourse. Analysts often point to the lack of empirically-grounded socially impactful social science scholarship in Singapore. The problem is often positioned as one related to rankings, suggesting implicitly that the drive toward rankings in Singapore-based institutions has a key role to play in the lack of social relevance of social science scholarship. The solution to this lack of socially impactful social science scholarship is often framed as the need for hiring a core of Singaporean academics that would be committed to the local context. In this blog post, I will argue that while the drive toward rankings is indeed an impediment toward generating socially impactful scholarship in Singapore (with the em...

For anyone that has been to a Durga Puja in Singapore, the account I offer here is both familiar and often accepted as normative.  Durga Puja is a celebration of Bengalis, a five-day festival that celebrates the victory of the Goddess Durga over Mahishashura (the asuras are synonimized with evil) in upper caste Hindu narrative (inverting the narrative of violence carried out by upper caste Hindus over the indigenous peoples, as voiced in Santali narratives of the festival). In Bengal, Durga Puja is celebrated over a period of five days although the preparations for the festivities take place often over two months. The celebrations of the Durga Puja in Singapore take place in two distinct registers, narrativizing the trajectories through which caste and class in the Bengali context travel through Singapore.  The puja of the expatriate, upper caste, upper class Hindu Bengalis, mostly from West Bengal (henceforth referred to as expat), and the puja of the working class Bengali mi...

When voices from the margins speak out/up, the dominant structures will respond by attempting to silence these voices. Whether you are co-creating a culture-centered intervention within a form of government that presents itself as a democracy or in a form of government that is more strictly authoritarian or a form of government that is somewhere in between, power is invested in protecting itself. To protect their interests, those in power will create as normative/cultural specific forms and strategies of silencing voices from the margins.  Because culture-centered interventions, when they actually work, co-create infrastructures for the voices of the "margins of the margins" (see Dutta, 2020), the interventions themselves as well as the accompanying structures are often the targets of attacks. The attacks can take a wide range, from actual violence, to labeling the infrastructures as anti-national (against the national interest) to raising accusations of foreign interference ...

<Notes from fieldwork> Working in a patriarchal Asian authoritarian regime where university structures were deeply complicit in the reproduction and circulation of a climate of sexual harassment, one of the emergent areas for CARE's work has focused on sexual harassment within Asian universities. Through face-to-face participant observations, digital participant observations, focus groups, in-depth interviews, and two cross-sectional surveys, our team of academics, community researchers, and activists have documented the various forms of sexual harassment in Asian universities. Much of this work within the university was shaped by the recognition of the urgency of social change within the university, with multiple accounts shared by students, graduate staff, non-academic staff and junior academic staff of experiences of sexual harassment that were not dealt with.  In CARE's work with the question of sexual harassment in Asian Universities, particularly salient was the dep...

The mobility of graduate education to the Professoriate can be attributed to a large extent to mentorship networks. Add to the mentorship networks the publication and teaching record, the performance during a campus visit etc. Add to these ingredients a whole lot of factors beyond our control, such as the jobs available the year of graduation, the search committee configuration, and plain-and-simple luck. The coming together of these many different factors play out in shaping the places in which academics end up. For academics of colour, these are constituted amidst disciplinary #Whiteness. We each learn to perform these techniques of Whiteness to survive in academia, working also hopefully to challenge it. Negotiating these countours of an already uneven discipline, Neha found herself in an Assistant Professor job in Community College. Graduating with her Ph.D. the year after 9/11 meant that the number of jobs available to a Brown woman academic studying imperial media were limited, w...

Singapore goes to vote today.  People, academics included, who read my critical writings on Singapore and dictatorshop, are often perplexed by my love for Singapore. I often say, as an itinerant migrant, Singapore will always be in my heart, as a very special place. What makes it so very special is that in the face of the dicatorship and its methods of control, bullying and repression, so many opposition politicians, activists, community members at the margins, migrant workers, everyday Singaporeans work toward change, toward the imaginary of a democracy rooted in people's participation. In spite of the huge cost they have to pay with their lives, so many brave activist friends stand up, with their heads held high and with great moral clarity. If the "Singapore model" is the model for authoritarian governance exported across the globe, Singapore-based activism and struggles for democracy offer templates for democratic struggles across the globe. There indeed is so much fo...

The Stiletto Project, a communication platform, co-created by an advisory group of transgender sexworkers, emerged out of an ongoing relationship between CARE and Project X, South-east Asia's leading transgender sexworker advocacy organization. The Stiletto Project showcases the role of participatory communication processes in creating openings for community voices at the "margins of the margins."  As an advocacy and activist intervention, the Project emerges from a culture-centered process that works with transgender sex workers (TSWs) in Singapore through advisory groups, in-depth interviews, focus groups, a community-wide rights-based health intervention,  a pre-post survey in the community, and a national-level pre-post survey to identify the problems transgender sex workers face with health, violence, ageing and other affected areas of their life, as well as to implement policy-based advocacy solutions to health and wellbeing. In 2014, the CARE team initiated a colla...