Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

In 2012, based on a promotion and tenure case in Singapore, a number of US academics, many of them who had served on the promotion and tenure review committee of a Singapore academic, had initiated a petition observing what they felt as violations of tenure and promotion processes. The petition was organized around the concept of academic freedom, powerfully suggesting the importance of upholding the principle of academic freedom in the context of Universities and the important role that can be played by faculty. A number of Singapore academics had initiated another petition requesting the University administration to reconsider their decision. Along the same time, a number of US academics had raised their voices on the case, suggesting that the decision-making processes reflected the lack of academic freedom in Singapore and had called for a boycott of Singapore universities. In response to these calls for the boycott of Singapore universities based on this one case, I had penne

I shared in an earlier post my letter to the Chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, requesting her to respect the communicative and academic freedom of Professor Steven Salaita. Professor Salaita, who had resigned from his job at Virginia Tech University to accept an offer at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, was "de-hired" from the University. This decision was apparently prompted by tweets posted  by Professor Sailata criticizing the Israeli attack on Gaza. The UIUC decision to de-hire Professor Salaita came in the backdrop of social media conversations that suggested that Profesor Salaita had crossed the line of civility in his criticism of Israel. So what exactly is this line of civility that defines the range of possible conversations on social media? What are the communicative expectations of interaction on social media? When writing on Facebook, how are we expected to voice our opinions, thoughts, and feelings? What are the exp

Phyllis M. Wise Chancellor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Robert Warrior, Department of American Indian Studies (UIUC) August 7, 2014 Dear Chancellor Wise and Professor Warrior, I refer to the recent decision by the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign to “de-hire” Professor Steven Salaita, apparently in response to his social media posts on Gaza.   That social media foster spaces of social change, bypassing the dominant narratives circulated in the establishment media is an observation that has been solidified in US academic and public sphere celebrations of the Arab Spring. In a wide ranging collection of essays, communication experts studying social media point to the democratic possibilities fostered by social media such as Facebook and Twitter. In my own work on “Voices of Resistance” documenting grassroots-driven social change processes across the globe, I attend to the possibilities of transformative democratic politics ground

They say they tap on the roof. The sound that warns of the impending doom. They say run with whatever you have. We show you mercy. They say this is civilization, a fair warning to collect all that we have and run to save our lives. They say the children are human shields placed amid security threats that must be bombed. So in the darkness as the bombs drop from the skies, We wait for the tap. The children huddled on my lap.

Imagining today a world where many voices come together in standing witness to injustice. Where many voices come together in the faith that truth shall prevail where injustice will be erased by stories of justice. Where many voices speak unchained that which is truth challenging what we see on TV and read on paper stories. Where many voices sing together the songs of freedom Standing together witnessing, accounting returning the gaze.

A salient liberal response to the ongoing Israeli attacks on Gaza is a call for dialogue. Dialogue is a key tenet of the CCA, as an avenue for disrupting the silences and marginalization that are perpetuated by dominant power structures. I will reflect here on the concept of dialogue in CCA. More specifically, in this essay, I will draw upon a piece that Mahuya Pal and I wrote in Communication Theory , "Dialogue theory in marginalized settings" to suggest that dialogue is impossible in the face of colonial violence. Here is a link to that piece: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2010.01367.x/full There are two intertwined ideas I will put forth. First, dialogue is "constituted in" erasure and is "constitutive of" erasure. Second, colonialism, as the systematic erasure of the sovereignty of a people, is intrinsic to the conceptualization of dialogue. Inherent in the idea of colonial violence is the fundamental erasure of the

When we interact with individuals, households, communities in our fieldwork, we do so as social scientists. The traditional framework of the social sciences have taught us to name the people we converse with as participants or respondents in our social scientific projects. The participants are sources of data. Data that we can then plug into our excel files or NVivo coding sheets for the purposes of sense making. In the confines of our labs , we then run our analyses, often through software packages such as SPSS and NVivo, seeking to glean patterns of thought, emotions, and behaviors, and correlating these patterns with other patterns. We observe the correlation between social class and health information seeking, the patterns of experiences among foreign domestic workers, the remittance patterns of male construction workers that have migrated from China etc. We then write up these results in our discipline specific journals in disciplined language, giving a seemingly objectiv