Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

As the weekend rolls in here in Aotearoa, I am getting ready to have a weekend of much-needed sleep. This past week has been one of many late nights, staying up crafting a petition, collaborating with fellow academics, and gathering signatures in support of the academic-activist Professor Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt. Reshmi is being subjected to an external investigation by her employer for her social media posts.  You can read more on the petition here, sign on to it, and circulate it. When the Newsroom story, " Academics divided on their own freedoms ," made its way into my mailbox in the morning, I was looking forward to reading it. The story was behind a paywall, and I had to wait until noon, when a colleague kindly forwarded the text of the story for me to read. The story reported from a survey commissioned by the Free Speech Union and carried out by Curia Market Research. Curia boasts many clients including Pfizer, Microsoft, and National (the party ). In its opening page...

This last week, I have been largely preoccupied with organising solidarity for a beloved colleague, a woman of colour from the Global South, a vocal critic of the corrupt power grab by misogynist structures in universities, who is being targeted, surveilled, and harassed for carrying out this work. One of the key emergent lessons from this organising work and from similar such organising, including in working through struggles when I have been targeted by the corrupt surveilling structures of authoritarianism, is the vital role of legal infrastructures of solidarity. Infrastructures of surveillance that hold up power and control target justice-based scholarship through narrative anchors that communicatively invert calls for justice into threats.  The traditional forms of power and control in society that uphold colonial, patriarchal, cisnormative, racist, ableist, capitalist interests are threatened by academic voices that speak truth to power, rendering visible through explanatory...

The far-right thrives on the politics of hate.  Whether it is the hate politics of Hindutva or the hate politics of white supremacy, the ongoing generation of hate is vital to the machinery of the far-right. Hate is an instrument for growing membership and legitimating the politics of the far-right.  To recruit people into its politics of deep inequality, the far-right continually sell hate.  The establishment of inequality as normative needs the perpetual other. This other is cast as the threat to the status quo, the established order, and therefore the target of hate. Hate finds legitimacy in the threat posed by the other. Funded by the capitalist class that profits from the perpetuation of these social inequalities as legitimate and necessary, the communicative infrastructures of the far-right are propelled through digital platforms that profit from the virality of hate. Note here the capitalist investments into the political agendas of the far-right, whether it is the...

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...