Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation
Stay tuned for more information on the new Lecture Series or follow us on our Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CAREMassey & Twitter: https://twitter.com/CAREMasseyNZ pages for the latest updates.
Wednesday, 16th September 2020 @ 7PM NZST
Facebook Livestream: @CAREMassey
Link:
https://www.facebook.com/CAREMassey/videos/638665510413217/
Abstract:
The rise of authoritarian regimes across the world has made it more and more difficult for immigrants, migrants, asylum seekers and refugees to move to places and spaces that provide more avenues of sustainable livelihood, security from religious or other forms of persecution, or simply a better life for themselves and their loved ones. Their situation has been made even more vulnerable within the context of COVID-19 and border closures. In this talk, I review current literature on (im)migrant populations and racism and critically analyze the discourses of powerful politicians from different parts of the world to unpack how their response to COVID-19 and the control of their borders have deeper and long-lasting meaning and implications for (im)migrants and other vulnerable populations. The analysis reveals that politicians’ COVID-19 responses achieve several racist and nationalist goals: tilting the ideological wars in favor of labor laws that largely disregard the value and needs of (im)migrants; promote the nationalist agenda of restricting legal immigration; and fan the fires of the strong, pressing, and, sometimes violent, aspirations of the dominant White class eager to play exclusionary politics with regard to (im)migrants’ religious/ethnic/racial identities. I end with a reflection from my personal experience as an immigrant within the COVD-19 context and provide some directions as to how discourses of resistance can be formed, even within the restrictive policies and politics of the authoritarian impulses that are rampant realities in today’s world.
For more info visit: https://www.facebook.com/CAREMassey
#Immigrants#BorderRestrictions#Racism#AuthoritarianImpulses#CoronavirusResponse#COVID19 #CAREMassey#CARECOVID19LectureSeries #MasseyCJM#MasseyUni
CARE Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CAREMassey/posts/4073794152636959
Mohan J. Dutta, Dean’s Chair Professor of Communication at Massey University and Director of the CARE: Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation C, recently received the 2020 Charles H. Woolbert Research Award and the Golden Anniversary Monograph Award from the National Communication Association (NCA). Given annually, the Charles H. Woolbert Research Award honors a journal article or book chapter that has stood the test of time and has become a stimulus for new conceptualizations of communication phenomena. Dr. Dutta was recognized for the article, “Communicating about Culture and Health: Theorizing Culture-Centered and Cultural Sensitivity Approaches,” published in Communication Theory in 2007. Dr. Dutta’s paradigm-shifting critical-theoretical and applied intervention into health communication contexts and practices, addresses structural inequalities and centers the voices of those struggling on global margins. “Communicating about Culture and Health” changed the discipline, expanded cross-disciplinary and cross-methodological collaboration, and influenced curricula in medical schools as well as clinical practice.
Cited more than 600 times, in more than a dozen languages, on every continent, this article has directly shaped projects benefitting “marginalized communities around the world, ranging from immigrant, African American, and First Nations communities in the United States and Canada, to migrant workers communities throughout South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, to minoritized communities in South Africa, South America, and more.”The Golden Anniversary Monograph Award is given annually to honor the most outstanding scholarly monograph(s) published during the previous calendar year. Dr. Dutta was recognized for the article, “‘Communication sovereignty’ as Resistance: Strategies Adopted by Women Farmers Amid the Agrarian Crisis in India,” published in the Journal of Applied Communication Research in 2019 with Dr. Jagadish Thaker. Drs. Dutta and Thaker’s article is based on five years of participatory research with women farmers in southern India. The article highlights how women from oppressed caste communities in southern India come together to organize for increased economic and political power. The intervention that this article develops and emerges from addresses one of the most pressing issues of our time: food.“NCA’s annual awards honor communication scholars’ teaching, scholarship, and service,” NCA Executive Director Trevor Parry-Giles said. “NCA is proud to recognize Dr. Dutta’s significant contributions to the Communication discipline with this award.”Dr. Dutta’s award will be presented virtually on November 21 at the NCA 106th Annual Convention. For more information about NCA’s awards program, visit http://www.natcom.org/awards/.
About the National Communication Association:
The National Communication Association (NCA) advances Communication as the discipline that studies all forms, modes, media, and consequences of communication through humanistic, social scientific, and aesthetic inquiry. 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, 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. NCA supports inclusiveness and diversity among our faculties, within our membership, in the workplace, and in the classroom; NCA supports and promotes policies that fairly encourage this diversity and inclusion.
For more information, visit natcom.org, follow us on Twitter at @natcomm, and find us on Facebook
#ResearchAwards #NationalCommunicationAssociationAwards #CharlesHWoolbertResearchAward #GoldenAnniversaryMonographAward
CARE: Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation team congratulates Professor Mohan Dutta on the Outstanding Book Award from the National Communication Association Health Communication Division to his book, “Communicating health: A culture-centered approach” published with Polity. The book lays out the foundational concepts of the #CultureCenteredApproach (CCA), a meta-theoretical framework for health communication organizing, advocacy, and activism directed at transforming the deeply unequal structures that constitute health inequalities. The impact of the book, and its key theoretical argument on the CCA is felt globally, shaping two decades of health activism, health communication solutions, health interventions, and advocacy to shape health policy. Most vitally, the framework put forth in the book is recognized by global policy organizations including the World Health Organization (WHO) Europe and the United Nations Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organization UNESCO, as a lens for exploring the connections between culture and health. Cited over 485 times across #CommunicationStudies, #MedicalAnthropology, #Geography, #Sociology, #PublicHealth and #Medicine, the book has formed the basis of over 200 MA theses and doctoral dissertations.
#CultureCenteredApproach#CARECCA#CAREMassey#MasseyCJM#MasseyUni#NationalCommunicationAssociation#HealthCommunication#CommunicatingHealth#WorldHealthOrganisation#UNESCO#PolityPress
Communicative capital, the consolidation of communicative infrastructures to drive profiteering, forms the face of twenty-first century neoliberalism. From Facebook to Amazon, digital communication is one of the most profitable sites of capitalist expansion.
Communicative capital is intertwined with financial and technological capital, drawing on the global networks of finance and simultaneously creating new sites and spaces for financialization.
Communicative capital works through the commercialization of human participation on digital platforms, turning likes, shares, and comments into profitable resources.
Of the wide array of human emotions on digital platforms that drive profiteering, hate is a powerful resource that draws in viewers, propels shares, and creates networks of flow. Hate has the potential of generating large profits because of its virality.
#CAREMassey #carewhitepaper #DigitalHate #Infrastructures #CommunicativeCapital
Dutta, M. J. (2020, September). Digital Hate and the infrastructures of communicative capital. CARE White Papers, 10. http://carecca.nz/2020/09/03/care-white-paper-issue-10-digital-hate-and-the-infrastructures-of-communicative-capital/
COVID-19 has placed squarely into the public eye some fundamental academic debates within the discipline of critical health communication, broadly defined as the scholarly interrogation of the ideological bases of available public discourses of health. In this talk, combining personal reflection and a review of relevant literature, Dr. Shaunak Sastry analyzes the politicization of personal protection in global responses to COVID-19. Masks, a crucial element in COVID prevention, symbolize an individual action to minimize a societal risk, but masking (as policy) operates on certain social, institutional and political consensuses. While it is impossible to ignore the “culture war” around masking in the United States, Dr. Shaunak Sastry attends to this singular aberration and explore the everyday politics of masking in other global contexts, with a focus on China. In particular, Dr. Sastry explores the identity work that ensues from masking as public health policy, the implications of masks as social currency, and the role of “mask diplomacy” as a futile response to the conditions of neoliberal globalization that exacerbated the global risk of COVID-19. Finally, he looks at mask politics through a historical-critical lens to argue that the politicization of protection is not “novel”, but a fundamental condition of pandemics through time.
Dr. Shaunak Sastry, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Cincinnati and Affiliate Faculty, Center for Culture-centered Research and Evaluation (CARE) at Massey University, New Zealand. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of health and culture, globalization and health, and the cultural politics of infectious diseases. His work combines ethnographic and field-based methods with critical analysis of public discourses of health. He has published on HIV/AIDS in India, the politics of global HIV/AIDS interventions, and on the 2014 Ebola epidemic.His work has been published in leading international peer-reviewed journals like Health Communication, Communication Theory, Journal of Health Communication, Culture, Health & Sexuality, Frontiers in Communication, and Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, in addition to several book chapters and more than 30 paper presentations at national and international conferences. He is a Senior editor of the journal Health Communication, and sits on the editorial boards of several other academic journals. He is currently working on a digital ethnography of China’s early response to CoVID-19 and the politics of masking.
Watch the full lecture on https://www.facebook.com/CAREMassey/
Overview: The culture-centered processes of community organizing drawn on the case studies of community organizing in Communist Kerala and in Iwi-led Māori checkpoints in settler colonial Aotearoa New Zealand foreground the vital work of alternative practices of health response, serving as the basis for robust alternative imaginations amid the pandemic.
Here is the link to the full article –
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2020.00062/full#h9
#CultureCenteredProcesses #CommunityOrganizing #COVID19Response #Kerala #Aotearoa #NewZealand #CCA #CAREMassey #CARECCA #MasseyCJM #MasseyUni
Read More
Thousands of headlines in the past few months alone have referenced the uncertainty that we are going through, and “during these uncertain times” is a part of nearly everything written about the pandemic. However, uncertainty is not new. In fact, it individuals have experienced (and tried to manage) uncertainty since the advent of time, so, what, if anything, makes this pandemic moment unique? Prof. Walid A. Afifi, a Fellow of the International Communication Association, is among the worldwide leaders in the study of uncertainty. In this discussion, he will overview some of the decades of research on uncertainty across disciplines and geographic boundaries, and reflect on both the uneven distribution of uncertainty across communities and on the implications therein. He will also share preliminary data from a four-wave national study collected in the United States across a three month period spanning early stages of the covid pandemic, and introduce for the first time a framework that identifies four broad coping strategies for community-wide and chronic experiences of uncertainty.
Bio:
Walid A. Afifi (PhD, University of Arizona) is a Professor in the Department of Communication and Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He is an author on over 75 articles, chapters, and books, served as Chair of the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa (2013-2016), served as Chair (2016-2018) of national Task Force on academic-community collaboration with members of oppressed communities, and is a leading voice in the Communication discipline to create more inclusive spaces. His program of research revolves around uncertainty and information-management decisions and has led to the development and refinement of the Theory of Motivated Information Management. That work has increasingly focused on immigrant communities and/or communities experiencing trauma. He was recently elected as a Fellow of the International Communication Association (the first Palestinian so honored) and recognized by UCSB for “extraordinary commitment to the general growth and development of students and the quality of student life.” He is a proud father to two daughters.
More info on our Facebook page : https://www.facebook.com/CAREMassey
In this talk, based on the example of the COVID-19 response in the state of Kerala, Mohan Dutta will examine socialist processes of organizing politics and economics in COVID-19 response. He will draw on the key tenets of the culture-centered approach (CCA) to outline culture-centered principles of socialist organizing of health, economics, and politics.
Facebook Live stream Link: https://www.facebook.com/CAREMassey/videos/275117623792323
More info on CARE: Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/CAREMassey
Q & A with Prof. Mohan Dutta by Gabriella Davila, Senior Communications Advisor, Massey University
Staff questions and answers
Professor Mohan Dutta is the Director of global research hub, Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) which relocated to Massey in 2018 from Singapore. He is also Dean’s Chair, Professor of Communication at the School of Communication, Journalism, and Marketing.
His research examines marginalisation in contemporary health/healthcare, health care inequalities, the intersections of poverty and health experiences at the margins, and the political economy of global health policies.
Mohan has received more than $6 million in funding to work on culture-centered projects of health communication, social change, and health advocacy. Working broadly on social change interventions designed to achieve the sustainable development goals Mohan has directed seven documentaries, run more than 20 360 degrees advocacy campaigns, and guided the building of various wellbeing infrastructures from irrigation systems and cultural spaces to health care systems and city design. His impact on global policy-making is evident in his advisory roles with the World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), and The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).
He has written and edited 10 books and more than 200 articles and book chapters. Earlier this month, he published the book, “Communication, culture and social change: Meaning, co-option, and resistance” with Palgrave MacMillan. He has previously been recognised as an Outstanding Applied/Public Policy Communication Researcher of the ICA and Outstanding Health Communication Researcher of the National Communication Association). Earlier this month he was named a Fellow of the International Communication Association
Can you tell us about your childhood?
I grew up in a middle-class family in a town called Kharagpur in West Bengal, in the eastern part of India in a family of teachers, union organisers, Left party workers, and activists. My childhood in many ways was very simple but also enriching, surrounded by people that were engaged in wanting to make change in the world.
I also grew up in what’s called in India a joint family which is quite similar to the concept of whānau in Aotearoa. We had this one house where two of my dad’s sisters and seven brothers all lived together with my grandmother who was the matriarch and played a key role in holding the family together. I was brought up with 18 cousins and it was quite beautiful in terms of this idea of a collective and a broader whānau caring for each other. This collective played a big role in terms of my own learning and support because when I got a scholarship to go study in the US, for instance, even just arranging the flight ticket didn’t just fall on my dad. My uncles and cousins all chipped in to pay for that money and that is how the broader collective is organised.
What did you like learning when you were a child?
My interests were pretty wide ranging. I loved sciences very much and I did my undergraduate degree in engineering. I really loved maths, physics, biology, and at the same time I also loved English, geography and history.
Learning happened for me inside the classroom but also outside of the classroom and I learned being on picket lines with say an uncle or being a street performer. When I was around 11 or 12, I started performing in many street plays with the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) and often the plays were held at protest marches. When I was growing up, India had strong spaces of resistance against The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). And those were great moments of learning because they taught you in terms of the power of a broader collective and building registers for change against the individualising logics of neoliberalism.
Can you tell us about your most inspiring teacher and why?
My eldest uncle was the headmaster of the local school and I learned a lot witnessing how transformative his impact was, certainly not just in the small little community but in the broader township where we lived and his ability to touch lives.
I had another uncle who was a maths teacher and a union organiser. Early in the mornings on the weekends, children of many different ages would come to our house or sit down with him and learn in an open space. I think that those moments taught me that teaching can be transformative, it can create pathways of mobility for others, and it can make a big difference in society.
How and when did you decide what your career would be?
After I completed my undergraduate engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), I realised I didn’t want to continue with engineering and instead I wanted to do something that had to do with human beings and connecting with them and interacting with them.
It seemed to me that in very disenfranchised communities, the challenge of wellbeing was not one of developing engineering and more technical solutions, but really a challenge of communication in terms of how to communicate and where communities can have a voice in creating policies and solutions that address their needs.
I think that interest in wanting to develop a pedagogy of voice and how those communities have a say was the turning point. I realised that my training as an agricultural engineer at an elite Indian university that produces technology leaders (many CEOs and technopreneurs across the globe are IIT graduates) was quite limited because it didn’t really teach you how to work with the communities that you wanted to develop solutions for. Communication was and is often the missing link, when you consider the challenges of poverty, health and wellbeing, clean drinking water, decent work, inequality and justice outlined by the Sustainable Development Goals.
In one sentence can you describe the purpose of your present position?
I am the Director of Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) and what we do as a collective of researchers, community organisers, activists and communities, is to develop methods of communication and radical democracy so that communities can have a voice and really, have a say in the policies and solutions that are created, and in defining the futures that they would like to live in.
How did you decide to relocate CARE to New Zealand?
CARE’swork is with very disenfranchised communities and there can sometimes be some significant challenges when working within specific authoritarian contexts such as Singapore, neo-fascist India under the Modi regime, or China. Certainly, the Center was up against some significant state pressures when working with rights of low-wage migrant workers and questions of poverty in Singapore.
After pushing against the system and the structure for six years, I was at that point thinking what could this look like if CARE was in a system that was more aligned with its values and philosophy.
We had a number of choices in terms of whether to move the research centre to the US, and whether to move to some other parts of Asia such as Hong Kong, but New Zealand was really appealing because of the confluence of the politics and the ethics of care in the country.
Do you believe that what you do changes people’s lives?
Absolutely. I want to say this with humility, that as an academic who works on communication for social change, one learns very quickly that change takes a long time. It also takes a lot of commitment, not just in terms of one’s role as an academic but I think the commitment of people and communities and other researchers and activists to make change happen.
Having said that, I think that we have a lot of evidence that what we do actually impacts lives and contributes to better outcomes of health and wellbeing. For instance, when you witness our work in rural India in very disenfranchised indigenous communities living in extreme poverty, CARE’s work has translated into building sources of clean drinking water. These communities would otherwise have to dig deep into the ground and get water through a filtering process. In those contexts, we work on developing community democracy to get access through development structures and institutions to clean drinking water.
We work with people on developing methods of advocacy and activism and this very idea of community democracy succeeds in very tangible ways. From designing development infrastructures rooted in democracy to designing hospitals, cities, and health care systems that are anchored in social justice, CARE makes real impact in people’s lives. Also, our work in communities is not episodic. Instead, these are sustained interventions developed through a commitment of a lifetime.
What do you like doing when you’re not working?
Fatherhood brings much joy and meaning in my life. Debalina [wife] and I have three children and we hang out with them, take them places and play with them. That really takes up the rest of the time outside of work. I am privileged and blessed being a father and really enjoy it.
Source: Gabriella Davila, Senior Communications Advisor, Massey University.