Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

In the hallowed halls of academia and the echo chambers of progressive activism, the left loves to preach about decolonization. We wave banners of solidarity, chant mantras of equity, and perform our anti-racist rituals with the fervor of converts.  But peel back the performative skin, and what do you find? A festering wound of whiteness – a structural hypocrisy that co-opts the language of the oppressed while systematically erasing the very voices it claims to amplify. The erasure is complete through the language games of civility and appeal to the white majority.  Bring up whiteness and risk becoming a pariah. Risk being lectured how you are going to lose out on the white mainstream of the Left, or worse, trigger a backlash from the center and center-right. The codes of whiteness are carefully crafted to silence any conversation on whiteness, the hegemonic values of white culture--individualization, property ownership, extraction, competition--that shape the driving forces o...

The U.S. MAGA  far right's playbook enters New Zealand politics out in the open. When I made a straightforward fact-based statement that Charlie Kirk is a white supremacist far-right activist, I did not anticipate it being the target of an organized disinformation campaign. But what followed revealed something quite sinister about how far-right tactics have entered New Zealand's mainstream politics. Let me set clearly what actually happened—and why it concerns us all. In the rest of the post, I will analyze the anatomy of far-right disinformation and its networks of travel from the Trump MAGA ecosystem to Aotearoa New Zealand. What I Actually Said My initial tweet was straightforward: "Charlie Kirk is a white supremacist far right figure" and that attempting to pay homage to him in New Zealand's Parliament revealed "who is backing the far right in NZ mainstream politics." This was not hyperbole. This was based on documented fact from such trusted sources...

Figure 1: In Aotearoa New Zealand, the far-right Destiny Church memorializing Kirk The killing of Charlie Kirk has quickly become more than a personal tragedy. For the American far right, it is an opportunity: a way to reframe Kirk as a conservative and free speech martyr.  It is not sorrow—it is tactics. Tactics to accelerate the communicative inversion that constructs free speech as an instrument of authoritarian control. And it is measurably dangerous to democracy. By placing Kirk in the category of a fallen hero, the far-right discursive infrastructure is attempting to whitewash his record and conceal the truth regarding the ideas for which he advocated. The communicative construction of Kirk as a free speech hero is an instrument for mainstreaming the deplorable hate-filled white supremacist ideology of the far-right. To accept that account without challenge is to make extremism more mainstream and perhaps sow it more firmly in our political culture. The Reality of Kirk's Rhe...

Note: At the onset of this blogpost, I express a sense of profound sadness in witnessing the violent attack on Charlie Kirk, the message that sends for political culture, and the broader culture of violence we witness in the U.S. This violence has become an infrastructure of U.S. culture, replete with an aggressive gun culture (school shootings, attacks on public spaces), attacks on politicians, and deep polarization brought about through disinformation weaponized on digital platforms. In the analysis that follows, I have attempted to offer contextual analysis rather than lifted quotes and also linked to the show materials for the readers to follow. I have over the last two years Chaired the Taskforce commissioned by the National Communication Association on Threats to Academic Freedom and Tenure.  As part of the work, our taskforce has documented systemic patterns of attacks on academic freedom and tenure. One of the key players in this organized attack on teachers, researchers, a...

The recent assassination of Charlie Kirk, a prominent American far-right activist and founder of Turning Point USA, has sparked a wave of coverage in New Zealand’s mainstream media. Outlets such as "Stuff", "The New Zealand Herald", and TVNZ have reported on Kirk’s death, often framing him as a charismatic conservative figure who galvanized young voters in the United States, particularly within Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.  However, this coverage has been strikingly selective, painting a sanitized portrait of Kirk that conveniently erases his deeply troubling legacy of inflammatory rhetoric, attacks on academics, promotion of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, and contributions to a climate of violence.  As a scholar of communication and advocate for decolonizing media narratives, I argue that New Zealand’s mainstream media’s whitewashing of Kirk’s legacy perpetuates a dangerous erasure of his role in fostering division and harm, reflecting a broader failur...

The patriarchal landscape of North India, interwoven with the ideological currents of Hindutva, thrives on deeply rooted cultural practices that devalue women and perpetuate gender-based violence. Central to this matrix is the preference for the male child, a cultural artifact that intersects with Hindutva’s nationalist agenda to amplify misogyny and justify systemic oppression.  In the North Indian states from Bihar to Rajasthan, where these dynamics are acutely visible, the triad of sexual violence, family violence, and alcoholism sustains a cycle of harm, exacerbated by disinformation and propaganda that falsely attribute the determination of a child’s sex to the mother. North Indian upper caste men thrive on this disinformation, playing the victim while perpetuating systemic sexual, physical, and family violence. The relentless capacity of caste privileged Hindi-Hindutva men to manufacture the oppressed male victim forms the infrastructure of moral degeneracy and violence, disp...

Anchored in the culture-centered approach (CCA), which I have championed as a framework for amplifying marginalized voices and knowledges against colonial and hegemonic structures, the convergences between the Māori argumentation tradition and the diverse Indian argumentation traditions—Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Adivasi, and Dalit—reveal a shared commitment to relationality and resistance.  Māori whaikōrero, the eloquent oratory of the marae invoking ancestors and environmental ties, finds resonance with Indian traditions of dialogical exchange, all of which reject adversarial Western debate in favor of collective meaning-making rooted in cultural and communal contexts. The Māori practice of whakawhanaungatanga (building relationships through dialogue) aligns with Hindu nyāya and Buddhist vāda, where argumentation, as seen in the Nyāya Sūtras or Pali Canon debates, seeks harmony and contextual truth rather than domination, mirroring CCA’s emphasis on subaltern epistemologies as deco...