Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

The neoliberal establishment, replete with its performative identity games, has powerfully co-opted the trauma discourse to serve the agenda of neoliberal power structures. Trauma as a communicative device in everyday discourse is mobilized to silence critical conversations. Conversations around accountability are carefully silenced because they are traumatizing. Conversations asking critical questions? Just label them as gaslighting, and there you have it. The neoliberal infrastructure, replete with its capitalist logics NGO-izing social change, continually tells us that we have no space for critique, that critical conversations marginalize us. Each of us that have found our ways into some circle of power find a way to perform the perfect victim, crying trauma and pointing to our marginalization just so we can't be scrutinized. Such uncritical co-option leaves intact the hegemonic structures, paving the way for the far-right to further consolidate power. It fails to ask the necess...

Too often, in social circles of Indians (mostly in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) disciplines, often with less-than-mediocre CVs, I have heard the sense of performed outrage about the critical and necessary emphasis on Mātauranga Māori across the sciences. At my University, Te Kunenga Ki Pūrehuroa Massey University, this takes the form of outrage politics around the mission of the University that gives effect to our commitments to Te Tiriti. I am struck by how often the ones outraging on the threat posed by Mātauranga Māori would have very little to no published scholarship in international peer reviewed journals (hence my claim about mediocrity). The performed outrage among upper caste Savarna Indians in the STEM disciplines around Mātauranga Māori mimics the racism of whiteness, parroting the arguments about how Mātauranga Māori is not science, how the emphasis on Mātauranga Māori is a distraction from the scientific endeavour and how Mātauranga Māori is a cult. The s...

Figure 1: Satellite image depicting the destruction in Gaza (Scientific American) by Sean Phelan I recently finished teaching a second-year course in International Communication. And when preparing for one of the tutorials, I checked to see how regularly New Zealand’s Minister of Foreign Affairs (and then Deputy Prime Minister), Winston Peters, had referenced Gaza on his X/Twitter account.   Each of the weekly tutorials with the small distance class began with an informal news round-up where we reflected on the international news stories that had gotten our attention over the past week. The topic of Gaza featured a lot in our conversations this semester. And on the particular day (May 7), I shared details with the students of a story I had just read in The Irish Times titled “Taoiseach Micheál Martin accuses Israel of war crime over blocking of aid entering Gaza”.   The article reported that the Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) had condemned the Israeli blockade of ...

One of the most persistent elements of Singapore academia is its shallow opportunism, its continual ability to place itself along the latest trends.  This culture of "keeping up with the trends" ensures the rankings and high scores on performance metrics.  This is perhaps most evident in the Humanities and Social Sciences. In Singapore, you discover a sort of performativity that emerges from the structures of the authoritarian state. The performativity translates into the rush for metrics, continually being updated to anticipate the trends and respond to them in adapting research programs, seminars, publications, and so on. The state has created powerful communicative strategies for its deep authoritarianism by embedding it in everyday practices of its academic institutions. You see this most powerfully play out in the sort of careerist opportunism Singapore cultivates in its academics. Academic opportunism on one hand, means keeping up with the fads, being ahead of the fads,...

June 05, 2025.  The New Zealand Parliament voted today to suspend for 21 days two MPs, Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, the co-leaders of Te Pāti Māori, and for seven days the youngest MP, Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, who had performed the haka in the Parliament in protest to the racist and divisive Treaty Principles Bill. The Treaty Principles Bill, introduced by the right-wing ACT Party, is reflective of the Far-Right attack on New Zealand political economy, seeking to undo New Zealand's foundational document Te Tiriti O Waitangi. Fundamentally based on disinformation, the Treaty Principles Bill communicatively inverts the narrative of equality--reflecting similar far-right attacks on equity, dressed up as equality--being witnessed globally. In response to the introduction of the Bill (the first reading) in the New Zealand parliament, several Members of Parliament (MPs) expressed their opposition to the bill, with the Member of Parliament (MP) of Te Pati Māori Ha...

Figure 1: The Nakba that forms the infrastructure of Israeli settler colonialism   I was recently approached for a leadership opportunity.  The person (Let's call them Sam) that approached me for the role stated in great depth how much they valued my commitments to social justice, de-westernizing knowledge systems, and building spaces for the Global South. The position was crafted with the descriptors of social justice, decolonization, and building community that felt appealing. In his initial email, Sam noted that I was one of the top candidates for their group. After some deliberation, I decided to explore the conversation to see where it would take me.  Sam was convinced that this opportunity is a great fit for my career, and one I would find challenging in a meaningful way. They shared with me the various resources that would be available for building architectures, programmes, and pathways dedicated to social justice.  By the third iteration of the conversation,...

Dear Dr. Parmjeet Parmar, You and I, both Indian origin migrants, migrated out of India in the 1990s.  Both of us, in the STEM disciplines, completed our graduate degrees abroad after migration.  You completed your Masters in Biochemistry in India, married, and moved to Aotearoa in 1995.  I completed my Bachelors in Agricultural Engineering in India, took the GRE and moved to the U.S. to pursue a master's on a scholarship.  You then completed your PhD from the University of Auckland in Neuroscience in 2003. I completed my PhD in Mass Communication from the University of Minnesota in 2001.  Both of us eventually found ourselves in this unique land in Aotearoa, where Te Tiriti offers a powerful global register for how to organize a settler colonial/postcolonial society.  Both of us probably had no awareness of Te Tiriti before migrating here.  New Zealand to most Indians is mediatized through visuals of cricket games broadcast on TV screens, stories of E...