Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

The peer review process is held up as the bulwark of science.  In my discipline Communication Studies for instance, the scientific process is enacted through the performance of double blindness. A double blind peer review means that the assigned reviewers aren't able to tell the identity of the author(s), and the author(s) aren't able to tell the identity of the reviewer(s).  The double blind process of peer review is projected as integral to holding up good science, with the strategies for masking the identity of both the authors and reviewers seen as necessary to the production of knowledge. As a discipline, we have accepted uncritically the sanctity of this process, assuming that it works to hold up scientific knowledge. What this uncritical upholding of the review process leaves unchallenged is the underlying ideology that shapes the construction of knowledge within established structures. The ideology is constituted within the ambits of capitalist power and control, with ...

Theory work in the CCA is intricately tied to its method of working in the field, through participant observations, in-depth interviews, forming advisory groups, implementing advisory group meetings, and most vitally, co-creating solutions at the margins by working alongside those at the margins. The body of the academic is re-oriented to conversations in communities at the margins, guided by the intention of co-creating solutions that are meaningful to the lived experiences of community members. This re-orientation fundamentally transforms what we come to understand as academic labour and the performance of it.  First, and this is key, academics working in/on/with culture-centered interventions are held accountable to the communities at the margins we work with. That means that the power of decision-making turned into the hands of communities at the margins shapes the nature of academic work, from research to advocacy. The question, how does the academic labour translate into actu...

Add caption   If you are at all conversant with Bengali culture, you are likely to have come across the "andaje gombhir" Bengali.  The term "andaje gombhir" is contextually Bengali, one that is difficult to translate literally into English. Roughly, it translates into the "know-it-all" pretentious intellectual-performing Bengali that has an expert opinion on every subject and is entitled to pass such opinion, irrespective of her/his expertise. For instance, the andaje gombhir Bong will tell you autoethnography is an useless a-theoretical fad, one that is anti-intellectual. When you ask the andaje gombhir Bong to elaborate on that opinion, she/he will have nothing of substance to back up the statement, except to perform a serious intellectual-appearing face. The non-verbals will tell you that as a mere mortal, your asking for backing for the claim, is out of line. The andaje gombhir Bong will declare that your question about theorizing social class in inter...

CARE community researchers and organizers co-creating a food distribution system amidst COVID-19 The culture-centered approach (CCA) lives in, breathes from, struggles through the skin.  We have to be willing to see and name our complicities with the structures, as well as struggle through in dismantling these structures if we care about transformation.  Without this willingness to see one's complicity and the commitment to work to dismantle it, our critical articulations reproduce the colonizing logics of the structures. Any theorizing of the CCA therefore has to work by grappling with what it is to work of/from/with/in/through the skin.  To work of/from/with/in/through the skin is to have the politics of one's skin embedded within the struggle for structural transformation. To work of/from/with/in/through the skin is to commit to ameliorating the tragedies of life that are inflected daily on the margins. Without the "skin in the transformation," the theorizing work ...

  One of the most powerful tropes of neoliberal governmentality is happiness.  Individualizing the anxiety, anguish, and deep sense of insecurity that are the byproducts of five decades of relentless neoliberal transformations, the owners of transnational capital and the enabling structures of the state proselytize us into happy subjects who see inequality, poverty, precarity, and struggles as personal failures. The prescription then is to turn these personal failures into successes in the competitive neoliberal order.  To succeed in the marketplace, one must first and foremost be happy. One must learn to find joy and be joyful. One must be self-fulfilled so he/she can find fulfillment in the mechanisms of the market. Any failure to attain happiness, joyfulness, and a state of self-fulfillment is a personal failure.  An entire industry of self-help, pop psychology, meditation, and new age spiritualism has propped up to hold us up to this state of happiness. This clus...

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...