Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

In culture-centered processes of social change, communities at the "margins of the margins" narrate their stories as the anchors to organizing for structural transformation.  The power of the CCA lies in the centering of these stories as the sites of change, with the sovereignty over the stories held by communities at the "margins of the margins."  This process of sovereignty turns to the question, for what purposes are the stories being narrated. For advisory groups of community members at the "margins of the margins," the ownership of the stories is the basis for change.  These stories are mobilized to organize for structural transformation. When the problems identified by advisory groups of community members at the "margins of the margins" intersect with those occupying positions of power, they often unsettle these power structures. When the solutions created at the "margins of the margins" make their way into power structures, they ...

  As a decolonization theorist, I find the fundamental question of Israeli settler colonialism as a guiding anchor to my theorizing work. As an exemplar of settler colonialism, the state of Israel continues to perpetuate a wide array of communicative tropes that justify its oppressive practices.  The oppression of colonialism is communicative. It is established, legitimized, and circulated through communicative resources and architectures. Israeli settler colonialism works through multiple communicative inversions, the turning of materiality on its head to legitimize the infrastructure of colonial violence. The communicative infrastructure of Israeli settler colonialism marks the Palestinian people as terrorist to perpetuate its terror.  Palestinian claims to sovereignty are labeled as terrorist to sustain the Israeli apparatuses of colonial expansion. The marking of the colonized subject as the source of terror is a fundamental communicative inversion that sustains the c...

Trinamool Congress (TMC) arrived in Bengal in 2011, three years before the arrival of Modi, on the coattails of a neoliberal media intricately intertwined with the interests of capital.  The neoliberal media in India, all the way from the vernacular media that propped up in West Bengal with funding from the predatory chit funds operated by TMC-related political and petty capitalist forces, to the Barkha Dutt New Delhi Television, to the Republic TV Arnab Goswami, have over the past two decades done the ideological work of promoting the interests of capital, attacking the organized Left.  Simultaneously, the intellectual class has been organized to reproduce the agenda of capital. For this class commenting on the state of Bengal in the past decade and in the context of the 2021 elections, the rhetoric of TMC and its supremo Mamata Banerjee being the forces to stop Hindutva forms the essential resource of propaganda work. The language of “subaltern” and “popular politics” have...

Any conversation on academic freedom needs to be anchored in a commitment to critiquing the workings of power that constitute the strategies of silencing built into hegemonic structures. In the humanities and social sciences, academic freedom is often under threat by powerful forces of state control and private interests. Often, in situations where academic freedom is threatened, authoritarian state practices work alongside private interests to hold up the networks of power. Private donors, trustees, and funders are some of the most frequent sources of threats to academic freedom. As public universities have faced the twin forces of government control and devolution of state funding, private interests have stepped in to exert greater and greater influence. This influence is often felt in opaque ways. Calls made surreptitiously to university managers by trustees. Threats given by donors to withdraw funding. These are the typical strategies deployed by private forces to control the unive...

The nationality of origin of migrant communities participating in intervention development  In co-creating infrastructures for voices at the "margins of the margins," the culture-centered approach (CCA) attends to the question "Who is missing from the dominant discursive spaces?" "Whose voices are not here?" "Who are located at sites of ongoing erasures?" This question then guides our theoretical sampling, with the sampling frame driven by the voices of those at the "margins of the margins." Drawing on the ley tenets of Subaltern Studies theory, the concept of "margins of the margins" is anchored in seeking to understand ongoing and continual processes of erasure. This informs a methodological reflexivity that requires the research team of community researchers, activists, and academics to continually explore the interplays of power and the co-constructive process of co-creating communicative spaces.

The racist politics of whiteness is convergent with the feudal politics of caste (Wilkerson, 2020). Both white supremacy and caste supremacy work through the erasure of the voices of the outcaste, even as the outcaste is turned into the object of interventions. Brahminical privilege in the diaspora colludes with Whiteness in perpetuating caste oppression.  Caste oppression, picked up and circulated into the networks of White  Pākehā culture, find new modalities of perpetuating its violence. In response to the work of the culture-centered approach (CCA) (Dutta, 2004), imagine this scenario, a White  Pākehā  person and a White Brahmin person having a conversation about the "margins of the margins," a key concept of the CCA.  The conversation goes somewhat like this. White  Pākehā (with a grimace, expressing disgust) : And what even is that, "margins of the margins?" White Brahmin (picking up the  Pākehā grimace and perfecting it) : Oh really, how disgust...

By  Ngā  Hau Christine Elers and Mohan Dutta  One of the vital strategies of whiteness is "talking behind your back."  Reflecting on this strategy of whiteness, notes Nga Hau: "I write this as Māori woman, who has endured many experiences in my life, of toxic and racist kōrero conducted behind my back by Pākehā, while undertaking my work duties. Sometimes, eventually that kōrero has made its way back to me. Recovering racist Andrew Judd, explained to our Feilding advisory group of Māori participants, at the end of last year, that is very common for Pākehā to engage in disturbing and even racist kōrero behind our backs, whilst appearing supportive to our faces.  Not only will some Pākehā do that with other like-minded Pākehā but they will also seek out people of colour, including Māori who are receptive to the mechanics of Whiteness to justify their own racism, because if people of colour engage in this type of kōrero then it must be true. And that they begin by ...