Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Figure: A screenshot of a comment in response to my analysis of whiteness of NZ media. I often receive similar commentary on my social media. This blog post is written as a critical response to the ongoing discourses and taxpayer dollars that are deployed to target the critical humanities and social sciences. In this post, I turn the ongoing extremist discourse around "taxpayer dollars" on its head, interrogating the "use value" of Business Studies, the love child of right-wing extremists who would love to redo the University as an extension of Business. Universities, once envisioned as sites of critical inquiry and emancipatory knowledge, are increasingly co-opted by the logic of the market. Nowhere is this more evident than in the proliferation of business studies programs—management, marketing, finance, entrepreneurship—that dominate academic landscapes worldwide. These disciplines, draped in the rhetoric of "use value," promise practical skills, employ...

  A community advisory group of ageing community members in the Whampoa community in Singapore developing culture-centered community-led ageing solutions, Partnership between CARE and Tsao Foundation By Mohan J. Dutta In an era marked by rapid globalization, technological advancements, and complex socio-political challenges, effective communication lies at the heart of effective public administration. As a scholar who has dedicated decades to understanding the role of communication in fostering social justice, health equity, and democratic participation, I argue that governments must invest in competent communicators who can shape how government policies and programmes navigate the intricate dynamics of governance, build trust, and co-create solutions through partnerships with communities. Drawing from the Culture-Centered Approach (CCA), which emphasizes the agency of marginalized communities in shaping communication processes, I contend that effective communication professionals ...

Taken from OpenVers e The Astronomer crisis , circulating on digital platforms, based on an alleged affair between the CEO and the Chief People Officer (the irony of that title!, the one in charge of implementing organizational norms) of a global technology corporation caught on screen at a Coldplay Concert depicts the sociopathy that is normalized through the structures of global platform capital.  That Andy Byron, with poor judgment and character, could climb the organizational ranks to the position of CEO, and that the ethically inept Kristin Cabot similarly could climb the ranks to the position of CFO (the one in charge of developing and implementing organizational culture!) speaks to a core feature of global tech: its moral rot, albeit replete with narratives of company culture, sustainability, effective governance, and stakeholder accountability. Sociopaths usually climb to organizational leadership positions in contemporary neoliberal organizations because these organization...

Image of the Sameshwari River in Shushong Durgapur, now a part of Bangladesh As a practicing Hindu, a part descendant of a Hindu Bengali family who migrated from Bangladesh amidst the violence of partition driven by British colonialism, I am intimately aware of the loss, trauma, and struggles with identity that are shaped by the intertwined processes of expulsion and displacement.  This expulsion at the root shapes the yearning for the land that is lost on the other side of the partition, the soil, the cultural textures, and narratives of belonging.  Land loss forms the infrastructure of colonial violence, reflecting its white supremacist ideology, carving out lands into property and nation to uphold the extractive practices of racial capitalism. Lost stories and a lost land I, like most of our family in my mother's side, live everyday with stories of loss, of being disrupted from the land that roots us.  This land is now marked as alien land, on the other side of the bor...

It is great to witness the increasing acknowledgment of diverse geographies on the registers of our disciplinary associations. The term "global" as a signifier entering into disciplinary conversations offers an anchor for starting to de-center the US-centrism of the discipline.  It is the beginning of the acknowledgment that Communication Studies has historically been US-centric and in this sense, deeply parochial.  The Cold War roots of the discipline, underlying the US-centric hegemony, drive the basic assumptions that have shaped our discipline, taking for granted the US centric norms.  The US is ever-present by its absence as a site/space in disciplinary conversations.  While the elsewheres of geographies is where globalization happens, the US core and its taken for granted assumptions shape the contours through which globalization is conceptualized and engaged. This functioning around US assumptions unfortunately is also perpetrated by many people of colour, Glo...

As evidenced globally, starting from the Trump ecosystem in the US, the far-right infrastructure threatening academic freedom is mainstreamed into political and media systems. This mainstreaming process lies at the core of the threat that democracies are witnessing globally.  The onslaught on the academe and on Universities we are witnessing in the US has mobilized a global phenomenon of attack on Universities.  Bullying, Intimidation and Threats Here in Aotearoa, the interplays of white supremacy and Zionism, mainstreamed into the discursive spaces of power, forms the core of the persistent threat to academic freedom. This evening, in response to a post I made about the intersections of white supremacy and Zionism, the underlying white supremacist infrastructure of contemporary Zionism, being carried out in the form of a genocide, an X account @hamishpricenz tweeted, "It is incredible that a tenured university professor is able to post such hateful venom. Turns out he's not a...

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...