Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Rotin , a student from a moffusil town of Bengal, once came to work with me as a student. He wanted to make change in the world, make a real difference in the rural Bengal that he had seen around him growing up. Growing up in moffusil Bengal, he had seen a lot of poverty all around him. He had grown up amidst the poverty. He wanted to earn a PhD because he wanted to make a difference in the world. He felt that learning the tools of communication would equip him with the tools that he needed to work on grassroots change. He didn't talk much, usually just smiled at me when I pushed him to work harder or become more confident in his ways. When I shared with him my journeys of fighting back and shared why I felt he needed to express his convictions boldly, he just smiled back at me. I wanted him to share the anger that we experienced as academics of color in an academe so ensconced in its expectations of Whiteness. And Rotin just smiled in silence. In his silence, I s

I cry in our sadness In the loss of a little child in the hills and plains of Pakistan, US, Somalia, Afghanistan. I weep in pain in the suffering in our suffering. My grief like yours hurts. My loss like yours is loss. Our grief, here and there is grief. My body like yours hurts. But it is I who has to do the explaining It is I who has to be interrogated It is I whose motives have to be questioned It is I who will be accused of interrupting your grief It is I who will be lectured on civility the appropriateness of time, place, context. And I must go on Because grief must be interrupted. Lest it be used for more violence. I must go on Because Grief must be interrupted. Mine, yours, ours. Stories must be told, Imaginations must be engaged, questions must be raised, here, now, there Everywhere.  

Facebook today is inundated with accounts of pain, empathy, and outpouring of support for Boston. Headlines and posts such as "terror strikes again" have caught our attention once again. The show of emotion expresses itself in the act of reaching out, in finding a common point of emotional sharing with the people in Boston. Stories emerge that seek to respect the dignity of the lives lived. Our attention is drawn to the observations that this is one of the oldest marathons and that the race was taking place on a special day, symbolizing all the good things about freedom, liberty, and independence. The stories of heroism emerge on this backdrop to narrate the courage of the American people. The expressed emotions on social media ranging from pain to anger remind me of the range of emotions I was immersed in after the 9/11 attacks. The inherent goodness and strength of Boston residents is juxtaposed in the backdrop of the imagined perpetrator of terror. Along the lin

A Planned Parenthood activist who labels herself as feminist surprisingly uses the argument that "family planning interventions work and have effectively empowered women in the global South." She apparently draws on the rhetoric of gender empowerment to advocate for Planned Parenthood. What surprises me about the position articulated in the advocacy statement above is its uncritical celebration of the language of empowerment without interrogating the questions of power that are tied to the interpretive frames circulated in family planning interventions. I am also surprised by the erasure of the historic complicity of Planned Parenthood in racist population control programs in the early years, working closely with eugenicists to shape population control programs directed at poor, black and colored recipients of the Third World. The lack of historical familiarity with the context within which family planning interventions developed demonstrates the fluidity of human righ

The "Voices of Hunger" project, a narrative co-construction grounded in the CCA with the food insecure in Indiana, depicts the everyday struggles with the absence of food among the food insecure. At the time that the project was taking its roots, inequality in the US was on the rise, and there were a growing section of the middle class who had been "thrown to the streets." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcom.12009/abstract A theme that continued to reiterate through the stories of hunger was the uncertainty around it and the suddenness with which community members experienced it. http://www.care-cca.com/about/cca-video-series/voices-of-hunger/ The transition from a life of plenty to a life of hunger was often unexpected and sudden. It all happened overnight. The two storey home; the car; the fenced back yard. The signs of middle class comfort that depicted the life a large majority of Americans were soon disappearing, and for most of the com

Mediocrity is often built into the everyday practices of academe under the guise of civility. Civility becomes the trope that manages our academic relationships. I see this for example in how teacher student relationships are constructed. The value of such relationships measured in the form of student evaluations works well to reify the status quo. Teachers are prompted by the lowest common denominator under such systems of measurement. Learning takes the backseat as teachers work on minimizing assignments, making lectures entertaining etc. so that teaching evaluations can be higher. Minimizing expectations then works to reify the mediocrity of the status quo. As teachers, we pay more attention to making nice than to caring about our students learning. We are also trained to be inauthentic, managing our teaching by norms of civility in the mainstream, learning to stage a face. The neoliberal organizing of knowledge works precisely through the organizing of teaching under a

Over the past couple of months, I have been engaging adolescents in Marion County in centering their voices to identify heart health needs and propose solutions that are meaningful to them. The adolescent heart project emerged from the suggestions of the adults in the CUAHD project. Thus far, the experience of working with teenagers to design and implement a health campaign targeting heart disease has been interesting, and speaks to the uniqueness of our broad theoretical framework, the culture-centered approach that seeks to locate decision making power into the hands of the community. An example of the interesting dynamic that is playing out in the project is the concept of individualism versus collectivism in decision making and in driving the project forward. On March 6, I emailed the group about my inability to attend the planned strategy development workshop due to bad weather .Interestingly, the group proceeded with organizing the workshop as originally scheduled, and also set