Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

    NCA Scholars' Office Hours (2023) All attendees are invited to NCA Scholars' Office Hours on Friday, Nov. 17, from 2 to 3:15 p.m. at the Gaylord National Harbor Convention Center . This annual session provides seasoned scholars, junior scholars, and graduate students the opportunity to network and connect with each other in an informal and interactive atmosphere focused on mentorship. Participants can also meet the current NCA journal editors at the session. Keeping with the convention’s theme – “Freedom” – this year’s Scholars’ Office Hours expands what it means to be a “senior” scholar in the field of Communication. Participants can expect to meet and speak with scholars who are well-published and advanced in their careers.  At the same time, the session will center scholars who advance community-engaged scholarship, activism, and other non-traditional communication work. We are thinking specifically of scholars who “free up” or open the discipline to new ways of

Thursday October 12, 2023. The settler colonial occupation had unleashed its infrastructure of violence over the Palestinian people over a period of five days. Gaza was being indiscriminately bombarded, with mass civilian casualties that Amnesty International noted " must be investigated as war crimes ." At 3:32 p.m., my office phone rang. I was occupied and the call went to the voicemail. "Dutta, you are a murderous, f***ing, racist c***. Go back to where you belong...I will see to your termination in New Zealand." A couple of hours before that, an email had gone out from the Zionist Dane Giraud to the email listserv of the Free Speech Union, performed as a supposed apology for attacking my academic freedom. In the email, Giraud referred to my earlier b log post on the interlinkages between far-right Zionism, attacks on academic freedom, and the free speech union, noting how he had been enraged by the following statement on my blog: "I was therefore not surpri

In this blog post, the activist Paul Thistoll, the founder of Countering Hate Speech Aotearoa outlines what they see as the agenda of the Free Speech Union, to push the Overton window of political acceptability to the Right.  Although the FSU claims that it represents free speech interests across the ideological spectrum, Paul demonstrates through three key arguments that the FSU works continually to build the platform for far right-wing hate speech. I am providing the link to Paul's blog here .

March 15, 2019. It was a day of terror. Unleashed by a white supremacist far-right terrorist. Driven by hate for brown people. Driven by Islamophobic hate. Earlier in the day, I had come across a hate-based hit piece targeting me, alongside other academics, the University of Auckland academic Professor Nicholas Rowe , Professor Richard Jackson at Otago University, Professor Kevin P Clements at Otago University, Dr. Rose Martin from University of Auckland and Dr. Nigel Parsons at Massey University.  Titled, "More extremists in New Zealand Universities," the article threw in the labels "terror sympathisers" and "extremist views." Written by one David Cumin and hosted on the website of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, the article sought to create outrage that academics critical of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid are actually employed by universities in New Zealand. Figure 1: The web post written by David Cumin on the site of Israel Institute