Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Two-year Postdoctoral Research Fellow Positions 15 July 2012 2 positions available immediately . Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) Department of Communication and New Media Faculty of Arts and Social Science National University of Singapore, Job Description: The Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation is a project-driven center housed in the Department of Communication and New Media at the National University of Singapore that utilizes ethnographic and participatory action research methods in carrying out culturally-centered social change interventions in marginalized populations. The Center is global in scope with initial project emphases in South Asia and Southeast Asia. The goals of the Center are to (a) create a strategic research core for the social scientific study of health communication and social change issues in Asia (e.g. China, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand...

In articulating organizing strategies for social change, Dutta (2011) discusses the role of resources in community organizing for social change. 1.Wondering how community or subaltern groups implement organizing campaigns when they have no access to resources. E.g., in circumstances when the dominant structures employ all tactics to prevent such groups from having access to resources. In other words, can large scale community organizing be effectively implemented or successful without financial support?What should the groups do when they are restrained from accessing any form of resources that will support social change processes 2.Also Dutta (2011) highlights the importance of information sharing in planning and implementing resistance projects. Given the censorship of information dissemination channels by the dominant structures, wondering how subaltern groups navigate information censorship

On pg. 238, Dutta mentions that "the increasing availability and use of the Internet as a communicative platform" has greatly helped activists to organize on an international scale. But in what ways can groups -- who are too marginalized to access the Internet either because of their lack of education or infrastructure or both or are too underprivileged to attend an international conference of grassroot-level activists -- get their voices heard on a global platform/forum? In a hypothetical situation, say, after a successful social resistance movement, when a resistive group comes to the table for negotiations with the structures, or powers to be, how do they decipher whether they are being coopted or not, since structures can operate in insidious ways?

1) How does organizing subalterns under the dominant structures of economic political organizations upend or reinforce the dominant structure? In other words, is speaking the "language" of the dominant structure to voice the subaltern voice actually just a co-opting of the subaltern voice? 2) What effect does identifying and classifying issues do to the overall ability of the subaltern to speak his/her voice? In other words, does it help in the short run but hurt in the long run for the subaltern to be able to speak, especially if their needs change?

1.) As noted in the readings, organizing for social change fundamentally occurs on a collective level, with frames, identities, issues, resources, etc deriving from individual experience to gain collective resonance. Given this, what is meant by the term “collective agency”? In other words, in what ways are individual and collective agency similar and different both in conceptualization and in practice? 2.) The CCA approach to empowerment foregrounds the perspectives, rationales, and agency of the marginalized, which serves to challenge or provide alternatives to dominant structures precisely through the privileging of those who have been excluded from discursive sites and processes of decision-making. This stands in contrast to the participatory development approach, which relies on experts imparting to the marginalized various skills and knowledge derived from the repertoire of the status quo to empower communities to act within the dominant socio-political-economic system. W...

Assignment List, H400, Religion in America Transcript #2 LR: what does hunger mean to you? M: when my kidney starts hurting. LR: you have something wrong with your kidneys, like dialysis or something? M: no, so some people are only born with one kidney, and I’m one of those. So I gotta be careful, my kidney hurts a lot. LR: so if it hurts all the time, how do you know when it hurts because of hunger? M: it’ll hurt real bad for a second and then it’ll start to go away. LR: okay, so do you have any experiences where it’s hurt and you haven’t been able to get food? M: I go to the food pantry. LR: do you like going to the food pantry. M: no, the kidney doctors keep telling me that I should eat fresh food and fresh meat and stuff like that, no pot and no coffee, and it’s hard to do that cuz the only thing I can really get is juice from the food pantry and that’s not a guarantee every time either and I don’t get a lot of money to go out and buy food...

Assignment List, H400, Religion in America Transcript #4 LR: Let’s start with, what does hunger mean to you? BS: for me it’s when my blood sugar drops, I start shaking and sweating, that’s when I know I’m hungry LR: do you have diabetes? BS: yeah. Before I was on the glucal pills, and I think they gave me the wrong ones or something, but now I’m off them and that’s been helping. LR: okay, how often do you go hungry? BS: I only eat about once a day, in the evening. LR: what do you have? BS: I have mac ‘n’ cheese or a bologna sandwich and a coke; I only get 36$ for the month. LR: tell me what it’s like to get food. You said you get 36$ but… BS: I ride the bus. LR: you ride the bus? Okay, how long does that take you? BS: about an hour and a half, two hours. LR: okay, and how, is it cost-effective to ride the bus to get to the food pantry? BS: yeah, it’s worth it. LR: what food pantry do you go to? BS: St. John’s , uh, I go...