Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Outside of the disciplinary framework of communication scholarship that systematically examines communication processes, communicative phenomena, messages, and their effects in the realms of health, science, and risk, mostly originating from within the Communication discipline in the U.S. and published in the top-tier disciplinary and sub-disciplinary journals, claims to expertise in science, health, and risk communication are often made by outsiders to the discipline of Communication in other parts of the world. This certainly seems to be the case in significant proportions of science, health, and risk communication being done, taught, and launched across the Asia-Pacific. A quick survey of these new and market-driven forays into science, health, and risk communication would suggest they have little grounding in and little to do with the scientific study of communication. Reviewing these programs, I often come away disappointed, and more importantly, with the recognition that our

from #fieldnotes2011 When the tides of voices emerging from the margins, tell their stories, they offer lessons that disrupt your draconian rules. When the tides of voices emerging from the margins speak their truth, they shake up the lies that you have carefully woven. When the tides of voices emerging from the margins, sing their songs, they sow the seeds of hope. When the tides of voices emerging from the margins, make new rhythms, they remind you the end of your repression is near.

In 2007, more than a decade back, six years into my journey in the Professoriate, I was asked to serve in a leadership role. Since then, I have had the opportunity to serve in various leadership roles from the Deanery to Headship to the Directorships of two centers that I founded. In these journeys of leadership, the key lesson I have learned is the role of a leader as an advocate. Of course, my energy, creativity, and resilience have been great resources that have enabled me in my leadership journey. But all of these resources have been anchored in a lesson I learned early on, leadership in academe is the pursuit for building supportive structures that enable and inspire others to create, to imagine, and to build. This work of building enabling structures is what I understand as advocacy. An academic leader is first-and-foremost an advocate for the people she/he serves. Because most often academic leadership is a pathway into which one ends up (I certainly never imagined I wo

Trained as an agricultural engineer in the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), on the underlying technology and mechanics of agricultural innovations, I was drawn to the social sciences because I stumbled into the early realization that any design of technological solutions is incomplete without taking into consideration the societal, cultural, and contextual dimensions that constitute technologies and their uses. Working with poor rural and urban communities, one of the early lessons I was taught by community leaders who had developed their wisdom through the grueling and committed community work was this: narrowly technical solutions to problems of marginalization and inequality erase, often strategically so, the very underlying causes. This simple yet profound realization, mostly emerging from the communities I found myself conversing with, drove me to the social sciences, and more specifically to communication as it offered a pragmatic anchor to developing solutions to the pr

The culture-centered approach (CCA) outlines a conceptual framework for communication for social change, developing empirically grounded tenets that map out key concepts of communication within the broader ambits of social change. As a meta-theoretical framework for communication for social change, the CCA explores the ways in which culture, structure, and agency constitute spaces for meaning making and sites of participation for communities at the margins of social systems. Social change in the context of marginalization specifically attends to the co-creation of communication infrastructures, communication tools, and communicative spaces where the voices at the margins of societies are heard. From the question of systematic erasure of subaltern subjectivity, the CCA theoretically grapples with the work of communicative processes in disrupting these erasures, the role of communication in struggles for voices to be heard, and the array of communication strategies that open u

2008. During our trip to Phuket, Debalina and I were inundated with images of White men, mostly middle-aged and above, roaming the streets of Phuket with women that seemed to barely have crossed their teens or just beyond their teens. This sight, of the "old White man" with a young Asian woman, often old enough to be his daughter, is a fairly common sight across East and Southeast Asia. The image is so common that it is naturalized as part of the scenery, a normative element of the "unique selling proposition" of Phuket, Bangkok, Bali. The liberals and Asian apologists of cultural tourism have often responded with the concept of consent, noting that the women participating in these "relationships" offer their consent in participation, that they are fully aware of the consequences of participating in such relationships, and therefore, make active choices. However, consent and participation are never devoid of power. To construct some elaborate

Figure: The activist Samarendra Das organizing the Foil Vedanta campaign in the backdrop of the Vedanta mining operations in Zambia. Culture-centered processes of social change, grounded in the voices of the margins within local contexts, explore the ways in which communicative spaces can be co-created through collaborations with those at the margins. In the co-creation of these communicative spaces as well as resulting from these communicative spaces, a plethora of communicative strategies emerge. For those at the margins, these strategies become ways of securing access to resources that are mostly erased or absent. While in many instances, collaborating with(in) institutional structures to shift normative expectations prove to be effective, in many other instances, an antagonistic strategy is necessitated to create the grounds of claims-making. A monolithic focus on collaboration with institutional structures often ends up perpetuating the status quo, without creating t