Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

With choto pishi and pishemoshai, enjoying a meal she prepared. These meals are a part of the journey home. Familial spaces of love and care, extending to wide networks of familial connections, offer powerful registers of sustenance.  Reflecting upon my childhood and my large joint family, Dutta Bari , I grew up in, I am drawn to the pedagogy of care that has shaped the ways in which I relate to the world, anchored powerfully by my mothers, aunts, and grandmother.  Within this broader ecosystem of care, my aunts (father's sisters) played salient roles, upholding us, their eighteen nieces and nephews with love, joy, and friendship.  From our aunts, we learned the practices of eternal kindness, knowing we could go to them with whatever requests we had, big and small. From our aunts, we learned the power of our collective, connecting us to land and place, tying us to the roots that shape our everyday lives. Choto pishi is my youngest aunt, beautiful, soft spoken, and kind. A...

  Submission on the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill   I am Mohan Dutta, Dean’s Chair Professor of Communication at Massey University, Director of the Center for Culture-Centred Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE). I am a Fellow of the International Communication Association, a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association, and recognized among the Top 2% of social scientists globally (Stanford University rankings). One of my areas of research and that of my research team at CARE explores the impact of disinformation on social cohesion and human health. Broadly within this theme, I study the roles of marginalising discourses, foreign interference, and organised campaigns designed to threaten democracy on health and wellbeing of communities that are systematically disenfranchised because of structural inequalities. I begin by noting that my family and I love Aotearoa, and that when I was considering multiple international appointments, Aotear...

As the Trump universe devolves into a meltdown between the MAGA white supremacist base and the far-right Silicon Valley Big Tech base, the responses of the segment of the Trump supporting upper caste techies offers critical insights into the workings of caste in the technology sector in the diaspora. Although this particular analysis focuses on the U.S., we can see similar patterns of racist upper caste Indian investment in upholding the far-right across the West, including in Aotearoa New Zealand. In this post, I will analyze the response of an X handle Siddharth @Cloudwatch199 that declares itself as "High skilled Indian Immigrant. Investor. I'm a Technopreneur & Engineer. I create jobs and work with young Indian and American grads." The handle is accompanied by the U.S. and Indian flags, announcing its patriotism. I will mark in bold the key words in the tweets to help you see the pattern. Responding to the anger in the white supremacist base of MAGA around Trump...

Recently, I made a post about the city of Kolkata and its contributions to global intellectual history.  Figure 1: My original LinkedIn post In response to the post on LinkedIn, an account launched an ad hominem attack, claiming his city Bangalore is better than my city Kolkata (although I didn't really claim in the post that Kolkata is my city), followed by calling Kolkata a city that produces pseudointellectuals like me.  Full disclosure, I did point to the person posting that Bangalore is a hub of Hindutva hate, that produces misogynist Hindutva disinformation on technological platforms and circulates this hate on platforms (posting the link to the following blogpost about the #BrahminGene campaign that was launched by a Bangalore-based entrepreneur:  The ideological infrastructures of racist Brahminism, Indian techno-capital, and architectures of violence ). The term pseudointellectual is often used by Hindutva to discredit critical analyses of Hindutva propaganda....

Figure 1: Caste discrimination at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) This blog piece builds on my earlier analysis of the convergences and collaborations between Brahminism and white supremacy . I have argued previously that white supremacy , based on its ideology of inherent racial superiority, parallels and reproduces Brahminism, the ideology of the superiority of the Brahmin varna (caste).  A key ingredient of the Indian caste system is its belief in the stability of the category of caste, passed on hereditarily, and to be managed through strict communicative practices that maintain racial purity (marriage, food, employment, housing, access to water etc.). The Hindu constructs of the caste system played a critical role in shaping colonial race science, with colonial administrators and record keepers forming their earliest categories of racial hierarchy based on the caste system, learned through their ad/ventures into India.  The racist hierarchy of inherent categories...

Figure 1: Ethnographic fieldwork in Jangal mahal, West Bengal, India, guided by Adivasi advisory groups and in partnership with Adivasi community researchers Wrapping up the year in 2024, as I reflect on the key methodological registers of the CCA amidst the global ascendance of whiteness, crystallized as white supremacy that is mainstreamed into politics and policy making, I offer in this blog post some reflections on the sustenance of the CCA.  Before I turn to the question of sustenance, I want to outline a key concept that anchors the CCA: body on the line . Body on the line Culture-centered scholarship calls on researchers to place our bodies on the line in solidarity with struggles that we write about. Body on the line is not a call to posturing risk-taking or claims-making to activism. Instead, as an intervention into methods of knowledge production in the social sciences, it is a basic recognition that the nature of knowledge production is embodied.  Indigenous and l...

  The Free Speech Union has a problem with, you guessed it, Free Speech! In its latest round of performing victimhood (white, male, heteronormative, cisnormative), the Free Speech Union (FSU) tells us that it is triggered by Te Kungenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University offering its academics the choice of using Toitū te Tiriti (meaning “honor the Treaty”) in an electronic email signature. In this opinion piece, I will argue that this attack on the university is part of a broader ideological project of the FSU that seeks to concoct a crisis around the university, simultaneously mobilising around the ideologically-driven organised attack of the far-right targeting of Te Tiriti we are currently witnessing in Aotearoa New Zealand. This concoction of the crisis of the academy and the crisis of democracy is central to how the FSU seeks to reorganise universities and democracy in Aotearoa to align them with its broader far-right agenda. This project of reworking universities is evi...