Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Internationalization is the anchoring buzzword of the neoliberal university in search of accelerated and ever-expanding forms of profiteering.  The neocolonial expansion of the neoliberal university is constituted in the ongoing search for new markets.  These new markets offer the revenue streams that hold up the contemporary neoliberal university. Amidst the large-scale and widespread public defunding of public higher education, the turn to privatization of the university is upheld by international markets. Internationalization as a strategy for the education sector is the backbone that ensures the survival of the sector amidst the continuing assaults by cascading neoliberal reforms.  International students often pay two to seven times the fees paid by domestic students, ensuring the cash flow of the university. Simultaneously, universities have turned to establish international campuses to build financial models of revenue generation. The model here is one of the univer...

by Balamohan Shingade The Indian News Editor interviewing mainstream politicians in Aotearoa I’ve just received a thinly-veiled threat from an Auckland outlet called the Indian News. It's in response to the story I'd shared with the Herald on being the target of a conspiracy theory by a Hindutva (Hindu Nationalism) platform, which tried to establish a link between me and the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence. (See Aotearoa Alliance of Progressive Indians's website for more on the conspiracy theory , part of a far-right strategy of propagating hate). Today's piece in the Indian News (February 17th, 2022) is built around a key deceit. In reference to the Herald report, the editor-in-chief writes that the Herald "has quoted some staged, fake narratives of a couple of gullible anti-Hindu and anti-India left leaning youngsters. [...] it only confirms any doubts of some bigger and nefarious designs working behind the scenes, against Hindus and the Indian nation....

Dutch East India Company: Getty Images Academia as a colonizing structure is built on the extraction of knowledge from communities.  In the academic study of resistance, community struggles, social movements, and transformative organizing turn into data, as sources of information to be extracted.  Embedded within the colonial architecture of the modern University, the academic study of activism and resistance strategies replicates the colonial habits that are widespread in the everyday organizing of academia.  Intrinsic to the organizing of the academic study of activism and resistance is the lack of commitment to the actual labor of the struggle in the community.  Resistance as the field is an object to be mapped out, categorized, and drawn out into conceptual threads. Hegemonic theories of resistance thus draw on the actual production of distance between the academic and the struggle, normalizing the lack of commitment among academics. This lack of commitment takes...

Radical politics of social change emerges from and is intricately intertwined with the struggles of the body.  Social change as structural transformation necessitates the placing of the body on the line.  To transform structures calls for the creation of conditions that make the status quo untenable. When it no longer is sustainable for the structure to continue in its existing form, the processes of social change start unfolding. The organizing for social change, therefore, is one of creating the conditions that enable social change. To create these conditions, communities and activists at the margins routinely place their bodies on the line.  The "body on the line" narrates the oppressions written into the structure, witnessing the everyday forms of violence carried out by the structure. It accounts for, questions, and explores the fissures in hegemonic formations through the act of speaking. So what does "body on the line" look like? In culture-centered organizin...

The year 2021 brought with it a lesson that I hope to carry forward in my academic journey in the coming years. That the sources of power will seek to silence the voices emergent from the margins is a lesson I have borne witness to over the last two decades of academic-community work, in some instances, at personal cost.  As we built the activist-in-residence program, starting with the transformative conversations with Braema Mathi, Sue Bradford, and Tame Iti, the organizing role of power in silencing dissenting voices became all too evident. From generating disinformation campaigns, to planting false narratives, to carrying out witch hunts framed as audits, to targeting academics with hate messages, threats of violence, and incarceration, dominant structures will draw upon a wide array of strategies and tools to silence academic voices that speak with and alongside the margins. In the face of these practices of silencing, academia can continue to thrive as a vital space of dissent...

Nana with her newspaper In my childhood, an old black and white picture hanging on the family wall stood as a reminder of the possibilities that was India. We knew to pay our respects to the hanging picture, alongside other pictures of ancestors who had passed on our way out the door. Paying homage to the hanging picture was particularly important before exams.   My grandmother, we called her nana, would fondly recall the stories of her Jnan kaka (uncle in Bengali), the bespectacled man, dressed in a white shirt and with a smile, in the picture. She would recall the stories of growing up, of her doctor father, and her Jnan kaka, the scientist in the family. Those conversations would almost always underscore the nation building role of science in modern India.  Sir Jnan Ghosh writing at his desk In the picture, Jnan dadu as we would call him, following our parents, appeared more like a poet, perhaps an invitation to consider the poetic relevance of his role as an architect...

  Hindutva forces attacking Muslim prayers As I have been witnessing my social media feed inundate with stories of Muslims and Christians being attacked by Hindutva forces in November/December 2021, listening to genocidal speeches delivered by Hindutva ideologues calling for attacks on Muslims, I am reminded of the powerful communicative inversion, the turning of materiality on its head through symbols, carried out by Hindutva organizations in the diaspora.  Hindutva, deploying violence targeting religious minorities in India, mobilized around symbolic and material strategies rooted in hate, appeals to multiculturalism and multi-faith accommodation in Western democracies to forge the space for itself. It turns itself into a minority, appealing as a minority, building persuasive registers that speak to the overarching logic of diversity and inclusion in Western democracies.  This communicative inversion, the turning of its materiality of hate into a symbolic appeal to the ...