CARE Director, Professor Mohan Dutta’s academic-activism recognised with prestigious Presidential Citation

Professor Mohan Dutta has been recognised by the National Communication Association (NCA) with the Presidential Citation.

Professor Dutta, Dean’s Chair Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), has been commended by the NCA for his impact as an activist-scholar in the #CommSoWhite movement.

The movement began as a result of growing recognition that the communication field was mainly dominated by white perspectives and preferences, which affected how people were recognised by their work. Resulting research supported the movement as it revealed how the field has historically ignored the contributions of scholars from diverse backgrounds.

Professor Dutta says he’s humbled to be part of a broader movement that is creating generative changes for minoritised scholars.

“Communication as a discipline is rooted in the intersections of colonialism and Empire, having historically worked to systematically erase diverse forms of scholarship. This is reflected in the plethora of ways in which knowledge is organised in the discipline. The #CommSoWhite movement is a critical part of the conversation to build spaces for transformation.”

Professor Dutta’s contributions involved efforts to uplift all minoritised communities in the discipline, including writing blog posts, developing interventions on digital platforms and collaborating with other activist scholars in the field. Together, they established digital spaces where scholars could express their experiences and challenges regarding inclusion in the discipline.

Alongside Syracuse University’s Professor Amardo Rodriguez and Georgia Southern University’s Associate Professor Elizabeth Desnoyers-Colas, Professor Dutta co-edited the special issue of Departures in Critical Qualitative Research on ‘Merit, Whiteness and Privilege’. In his role as Editor of the Journal of Applied Communication Research, Professor Dutta played a key role in establishing a platform for diverse forms of scholarship addressing communication practice. This initiative involved launching a new section within the journal titled ‘Communication Intervention’, which sought to highlight a wide range of community-engaged, place-based scholarship.

While grateful for this recognition, Professor Dutta says there is still much work to be done in advancing equity and inclusivity within academic spaces.

“We need to continue to build critical interventions that bring about changes to how scholarship is understood and recognised. Doing this work brings about risks from being targeted by structures of whiteness, and my current energies are focused on how we safeguard academic spaces for scholars doing the brave work of challenging these structures.”

About the National Communication Association

The NCA advances communication as the discipline that studies all forms, modes, media and consequences of communication through humanistic, social scientific and aesthetic inquiry. The NCA serves the scholars, teachers, and practitioners who are its members by enabling and supporting their professional interests in research and teaching.

Dedicated to fostering and promoting free and ethical communication, the NCA promotes the widespread appreciation of the importance of communication in public and private life, the application of competent communication to improve the quality of human life and relationships and the use of knowledge about communication to solve human problems.

Article Source: Professor Mohan Dutta’s academic-activism recognised with prestigious Presidential Citation – Massey University


CARE Director, Professor Mohan J. Dutta, Massey University named in the latest World’s Top 2% Scientists List by Stanford University

We wrap up the year congratulating our Director, Professor Mohan Dutta, for being ranked among the Top 2 Percent scientists globally published by Stanford University. In these rankings, Professor Dutta is ranked first in Aotearoa New Zealand in his discipline.

#ElsevierBV #CAREMassey #WorldsTopScientistsList #CultureCenteredApproach #CommunityBasedCommunication #SocialChange #HealthCommunication #StanfordUniversity #CARECCA #MasseyUni

CARE Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Phoebe Elers receives the 2022 MSA MBS Research Excellence Award by Massey Business School

Being recognised in our own College, the Massey Business School, for our research excellence, gives us joy, says Prof. Mohan Dutta. CARE is grateful to the significant contributions made by Dr. Phoebe Elers as a postdoctoral fellow. Phoebe has led a range of culture-centered interventions and is an important contributor to the theorising of the culture-centered approach (CCA).

The 2022 MSA MBS Research Excellence Award is presented to Dr. Phoebe Elers, Prof. Mohan Dutta and Senior Lecturer Dr. Steve Elers from School of Communication Journalism and Marketing, Massey Business School for the paper: Culturally centering digital inclusion and marginality: A case study in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Link to paper- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14614448211063180


National Communication Association (NCA) Scholars’ Office Hours (2023)

Representative image

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 thinking and doing communication work, thereby pushing the discipline forward in transformative ways.

We have assembled an eclectic and diverse group of scholars who cut across multiple areas of the field. To see the full list of participating senior scholars, visit NCA Convention Central.

If you are a graduate student, new tenure track faculty member or adjunct faculty member, you are especially encouraged to attend! We are particularly excited to welcome Black, Indigenous, and early career scholars of color, LGBTQI scholars, and scholars negotiating different abilities working at diverse intersections.

If you have any questions about the program, please feel free to reach out to co-planners Mohan Dutta and Rebecca de Souza. We are excited for you to join us and start networking!

Mohan Dutta, Scholars’ Office Hours Co-planner, Massey University, New Zealand

Rebecca de Souza, Scholars’ Office Hours Co-planner, San Diego State University

CARE Director, Professor Mohan J. Dutta, Massey University named in the latest World’s Top 2% Scientists List by Stanford University

CARE: Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation congratulates its Director, Professor Mohan J. Dutta, Massey University for being named in the latest World’s Top 2% Scientists List (Stanford University). The excellence in the research impact at CARE is reflective of the contributions of our collective of community advisory groups, community researchers, activists-in-residence, and academic research teams working tirelessly to build strong communities as participants in organizing for social change.

We are proud of this recognition of excellence that speaks to the impact our collective scholarship makes to the theorizing of justice-based health communication processes, demonstrating the power of culture-centered community-based communication organizing for social change in transforming colonial, capitalist, patriarchal, racist and casteist structures.

Check out the Dataset- https://elsevier.digitalcommonsdata.com/data…/btchxktzyw/4

Photo by Vivien Beduya.

#ElsevierBV #CAREMassey #WorldsTopScientistsList #CultureCenteredApproach #CommunityBasedCommunication #SocialChange #HealthCommunication #StanfordUniversity #CARECCA #MasseyUni

CARE Directors Blog On Gandhi Jayanti: Deception and the Hindutva way of life by Prof. Mohan Dutta, CARE, Massey University

On this Gandhi Jayanti, reflecting on the ways in which Gandhi’s experiments with truth resist and challenge the communicative infrastructure of deception that forms the discursive basis of the fascist politics of Hindutva.

“As a fascist ideology, Hindutva thrives on the production and circulation of lies, continually at work to vilify India’s Muslim minorities.

This deception, communicating contradictory and conflicting messages internally and externally, actively producing misinformation, and mobilizing violence on the basis of the misinformation, lies at the crux of the organizing of hate as a technique for rule.

Gandhiji’s assassination.
Image Source: Google Search

Deception forms the everyday habits of Hindutva, drawing from the Brahminical hierarchy that gives it its conceptual formation. Brahminism as the underlying feature of Hindutva mobilizes the practices of deception.

From the active production of disinformation in the form of conspiracy theories to practices based on lies in everyday life, the communicative infrastructure of Hindutva thrives on deception.”

This article first appeared on the culture-centered blog.

Professor Mohan Dutta to delivers 2023 G. Jack Gravlee Lecture on Decolonizing Democracies at Colorado State University

Professor Mohan J Dutta delivering 2023 G. Jack Gravlee endowed lecture in the Department of Communication Studies at Colorado State University

Professor Mohan Dutta, Dean’s Chair Professor of Communication and the Director of the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) will deliver the 2023 G. Jack Gravlee endowed lecture in the Department of Communication Studies at Colorado State University on September 19, 2023.

Professor Dutta’s lecture, titled “Decolonization as organizing radical democracies: Centering health, resisting climate colonialism, securing food systems, and resisting hate” will be delivered in conversation with the University’s theme this coming year (2023-2024), Democracy and Civic Engagement.

The lecture will draw upon two decades of ethnographic fieldwork carried out by Mohan Dutta in struggles for Indigenous rights, migrant rights, transgender rights, anti-racism, and working-class politics, exploring the everyday habits of democracy that are sustained through community action.

The talk will outline the key tenets of the culture-centered approach as an organising framework for decolonizing democracies, attending to Indigenous, Black, and various Global South traditions for organising democracies. It will attend to the ways in which white supremacy shapes the infrastructures of settler colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial democracies, with hegemonic notions of democracy scripted into practices of extraction, expulsion, and displacement through the mobilisation of violence.

Professor Dutta will wrap up the talk by offering insights into the organising work of building transformative democracies through the co-creation of community voice infrastructures that work toward achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, addressing the challenges of climate colonialism, food insecurity, poverty, and digital colonialism.

Massey News:

Professor Mohan Dutta delivers Gravlee Lecture at Colorado State University