Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Of late, I have been increasingly amazed at the number of folks publishing in our journals making blanket statements about "doing" science and then using that pulpit to outright put down what they consider to be lay public opinion. In these instances, the language of science is being used to silence opinions that are contradictory to the status quo that our so-called communication scientists serve. The scientific terminology becomes a mechanism to silence and erase, a way to fundamentally ask people to "believe" without questioning because that happens to be the recommendations of these "high priests and priestesses" who have dominated knowledge for centuries. Much like the Church, they want us to take them at face value, and don't really care to offer backing and warrants in their arguments. Many of the arguments go like this, "anyone questioning a behavior (say immunization) must be unscientific because the behavior (say immunization) is scienti

This is a posting that celebrates the news about one of my former advisees winning a Young Scholar Award...it is a moment of pride and a moment of joy! It is one of those wonderous moments when one sits back in awe and looks at the trajectories of meaningful work that has been created by a student, a mentee, and a friend. It is also a moment of reflection about what makes some teaching and mentoring relationships so very special, so very personal, and so very influential. Some of these very special relationships grow into friendships of a lifetime, relationships of solidarity, and partnerships in a lifelong journey of learning, living, and loving. When I think back to this one friend of mine, I remember that sense I had from the first time that I received an email from him expressing interest in my work. It was a conviction that this was someone with a purpose, a purpose that intrinsically connected to the politics of social change. In the years that we grew together, I learnt as

Understanding the magnetization of sex workers, there is two stigma attached to them that put them to the edge of the society: first one is can be seen in the UNAIDS definition, sex workers are“ female, male, and transgender adults and young people who receive money or goods in exchange for sexual services.”; second, sex workers are the populations that have the higher prevalence of STD, they are assumed as the disease carrier and spreader. Mohan J. Dutta(2009):Sex workers and HIV/AIDs tried to describe two organization Kolkata area of India, SHIP and New light’s HIV/AID project. It is very surprise to me that the stakeholders of these two organizations are mainly prostitutes. There is one word said by Lakshmi: “ You have to live here to really know what’s going on, You can’t just come in , ask questions and tell us what to do”. I totally understand that as a outsider researcher or government member, it is hard for them to build the communication with the sex workers, maybe that’

Young’s piece on Culture, illness got me thinking about three concepts he touched on.These include desocialization, biomedical reduction, and the dismissal of the other’s view as unscientific in our articulation of illness and disease. The three key words have one thing in common, the acclaimed supremacy of biomedical paradigm in our interpretation of illness, or better still the design of health interventions along the stipulations of biomedical paradigm. I use the term paradigm to mean the strongly held world views and beliefs that undergird scholarship or our beliefs that guide our interpretation of reality. Desocialization is the displacement of historical, political, and economic determinants of sickness, while biomedical reduction entails using medical and empirical standard as a normative referent for evaluating what constitutes illness or disease (Young,1982). As I reflect upon the arguments, two profound questions that resonate in my mind are: Is it right to incorrectly quest

Grounded theory is the premiere choice in culture-centered approach research. I write this as a statement because this is how I understand it, but I desperately want to end it with a question mark. If it is true, then I desire a confirmation as to why this may be the case. My assumption is because the existing theories that incorporate culture (such as theory of reasoned action and the health belief model, which are both referenced in Mohan’s article) were created under the auspices of institutions holding power and access. Therefore, to build a theoretical framework using these existing theories would be like instantly giving the upper hand to the hegemonic powers that be, rather than those who are the primary concern for the research: the marginalized communities. But, such pondering leads me to the next statement/question… How do you effectively use a grounded theory approach and still maintain a strong sense of credibility and buy-in from institutional peers? It is one thing to

The marriage of Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) with the Culture-Centered Approach (CCA) seems to be one that was destined to happen...the synergies between these approaches to the uses of clinical information are incredible. This brings me to the core point about CCA, the one about Structure, and one that puts it in opposition to postmodern approaches to critical theory that often get reduced to the feel-good elements of identity politics in multiculturalism. In foregrounding the localized voices of the margins, the approach continually seeks to engage with entry points for making truth claims in relationship to social structures. That hunger is a truth in the most salient rendition of it is something that is continually brought to the forefront in multiple CCA studies. If CCA is positioned in the quest for truth that is grounded in material evidence, the value of CER to CCA precisely lies in the quest for clinical evidence base for medical decision-making that is grounded

I am in the process of reviewing a proposal for a large scale project that frames itself in terms of addressing healthcare disparities. After giving us sermons about how disparities are bad, and so on and so forth, the proposal goes on to talk about some silly and outdated concept of "external locus of control" and makes the claim that addressing external locus of control would change behaviors. The behavior in question, my favorite, eating fruits and vegetables. So the evaluation measures of the project that is asking for a large sum of money to address health disparities is played out in getting the target community to eat more fruits and vegetables. Silly, silly, silly...and more importantly, one might suggest, wastage of tax payer dollars. Nowhere in the proposal does the researcher show awareness of the prices that the poor have to pay for securing fruits and vegetables, or of the fact that fruits and vegetables are typically out of the reach of the common person. Most i