ICA 23 Toronto Preconference: Ethics of Critically Interrogating and Reconceptualizing Culture Ethics of Critically Interrogating and Reconceptualizing Culture
Organized by: Sudeshna Roy, Stephen F. Austin State University, US Mohan Dutta, Massey University, New Zealand
We at CARE are delighted to support this keynote by Leena Manimekalai, Director of KAALI Filmmaker, poet, actor, and activist
The keynote “I make art to upwrite my cultural body” by Leena Manimekalai, Director of KAALI Filmmaker, poet, actor, and activist took place at the ICA pre conference on Thursday, 25 May 2023 after the screening of KAALI Film at Charbonnel Lounge in Elmsley Hall of University of St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto
CARE: Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation’s Activist In Residence Programme (AIRP) with Tina Ngata , #Aotearoa #NewZealand #Activist | 15th – 18th May 2023 | CARE, Manawatu campus, Massey University
Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation is proud to host and welcome our next Activist in Residence- Tina Ngata, an Aotearoa New Zealand activist, who will be conducting Activist in Residence public events focused around Anti-racism and will collaborate with Prof. Mohan Dutta on a CARE White Paper at CARE, Manawatū campus, Massey University.
On 4th August 32023, CARE Will be launching the White Paper Issue #18: Māori-Migrant solidarities in resisting white supremacy with Tina Ngata & Prof. Mohan Dutta.
Scroll to the CARE White Paper Section below for more details.
Bio: Tina Ngata is a Ngati Porou mother of two from the East Coast of Te Ika a Maui. Tina’s work involves advocacy for environmental, Indigenous, and human rights. This includes local, national, and international initiatives that highlight the role of settler colonialism in issues such as climate change and waste pollution and promote Indigenous conservation as best practice for a globally sustainable future.
Visit the CARE social media links below for updates :
The Highbury Advisory Rōpū, built by tangata whenua community researchers at the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) in partnership with the community in Highbury, has been working hard over the last many months to put together the community-led culture-centered social cohesion intervention called Pā Tamariki. Drawing upon the Māori concept of Pā as a protective space that nurtures the community and supported by funding from the Lotteries Community Grant, the advisory Rōpū envision social cohesion as emergent from the everyday spaces of care, connection, and love in the community.
Pā Tamariki is built with the goal of bringing the whanau and the community together in Highbury to create and sustain a strong community that protects and safeguards the children and the youth.
According to Venessa Pokaia, lead community researcher and community organizer at CARE, “the idea of the Pā as a generative space in the community brings the community together to build positive pathways for the youth. In doing so, the Pā connects the many diverse groups in the community, creating dialogues between the groups and connecting them together in the work of creating a strong community that supports the youth.”
The opening event on Saturday, December 17, witnessed diverse communities in Highbury come together to build this space of dialogue, understanding, care and support, anchored in manaakitanga. Through sharing food, games, and community activities, Pā Tamariki offered a message of hope for Highbury, that positive transformations can come about when community members connect with each other.
The Pā Tamariki campaign builds on the earlier campaign “I Choose Highbury” that was designed by the Highbury Advisory Rōpū to challenge and shift the dominant deficit-based narrative around Highbury. It centered stories of Highbury as a space for positive community interactions, community support, and community mutual aid. The “I Choose Highbury” campaign was launched at a Matariki celebration event in 2020, and was accompanied by community-led community garden initiatives, community cupboards, and community-driven public education programmes on the prevention of violence.
The Pā Tamariki event showcased activities that connected them to culture, offered interactive games, and enabled intercultural interactions among diverse communities residing within Highbury. The hāngī put together by the community after three decades and the food prepared by the Afghan refugee community demonstrate the power of community sovereignty, when communities at diverse intersections come together to create spaces for love, care, and generosity. The organising power of the Highbury Advisory Rōpū demonstrates the effectiveness of culture-centered community-led interventions when power is transferred into the hands of communities as drivers of social change communication. Community sovereignty, the capacity of the community to make decisions and drive change, lies at the heart of positive transformations.
Massey News: Pā Tamariki event brings the communities of Highbury together
Synopsis: Center for Culture-Centered Approach for Research & Evaluation (CARE) has completed 10 years and is organising this conference to celebrate the journey. Centre for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE ) at School of Communication, Journalism & Marketing, Massey University is humbled to invite you to the 10 year anniversary conference and proud to share with you some snippets of the work we have done at CARE. As with any recounting of a decade, our reflections here take stock of our milestones, and at the same time, invite you to join the collective work of Culture-centered interventions resisting structures: Building transformative futures, imagining a just future together where human health and wellbeing are universally upheld. Please do join us for the keynotes, sessions and panels to be conducted in a hybrid mode- in person and online.
9:00am – 10:00am | Day 1 | Session 1 Welcome, “New forms of resistance for transformative futures” Keynote to the Conference, Distinguished Professor Graham Hingagaroa Smith10:00am –
11.00am | Day 1 | Session 2 Keynote “Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti” by Marise Lant
11:00am – 12:30pm | Day 1 | Session 3 Culture-centered interventions on poverty (Glen Innes): Dr. Phoebe Elers & Mohan Dutta
1:30pm – 3:00pm | Day 1 | Session 4 Culture-centered interventions led by Māori at the margins (Highbury): Venessa Pokaia & Mohan Dutta
3:30pm – 5:00pm | Day 1 | Session 5 Indigenous leadership in organising resistance (Feilding): Selina Metuamate & Mohan Dutta
6:00pm – 8.00 pm |Day1 | Session 6 CARE Opening Ceremony & Reception @ SGP2.01 | Sir Geoffrey Peren Building / Auditorium
Keynote “Observations on Culture-centered Scholarship” by Dr. Shaunak Sastry
10:00am – 11:00am | Day 4 | Session 2 Margins negotiating legal structures: Dr. Rati Kumar & Mohan Dutta
11:00am – 12:30pm | Day 4 | Session 3 Culture-centered social justice and challenging hate: Mohan Dutta
1:30pm – 3:00pm | Day 4 | Session 4 Climate organising in/from the Global South: Indranil Mandal, Pankaj Baskey, Mohan Dutta
Friday 2nd December 9:00am – 10:30am | Day 5 | Session 1
Transgender organising at the margins of the margins: Mohan Dutta, Raksha Mahtani, De’Anne Jackson
11:00am – 12:30pm | Day 5 | Session 2 Activists in conversation: Anti-hate organizing: Challenging disinformation and dismantling racism with Sina Brown-Davis, Tameem Shaltoni, Haroon Kasim, Byron Clark
1:30pm – 3:00pm | Day 5 | Session 3 Conclusion CARE conference
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.
by Catherine Delahunty and Mohan J. Dutta, Center for Culture – Centered Approach to Research & Evaluation, Massey University
The climate and environmental crises we are in the midst of are symptoms of the failed extractive economic system based on colonial theft. The disproportionate burdens of climate change borne by Indigenous and local communities across the Global South foreground the importance of locating justice as the anchor to climate change organising. In this white paper, we argue that climate change cannot be addressed without the recognition of the racial capitalist processes that drive it. Based on the recognition that both colonialism and capitalism shape climate change, we propose that we cannot solve the crisis of climate change by relying on the colonising traditions and profit-driven techno fixes offered by the west, immersed in the ideology of whiteness. We offer the argument that addressing climate change calls for centering a justice-based framework that is both anti-colonial and anti-capitalist, and that looks to Indigenous peoples and local communities in the Global South to learn to rebuild relationships with the earth and with each other.
CARE was proud to host and welcome our next Activist In Residence- Catherine Delahunty who will be conducting Activist in Residence public events and collaborating with Prof. Mohan Dutta on Replacing Colonial Theft and Capitalism by Lunch Time between, 10- 14 October 2022 at CARE, Manawatū campus, Massey University.
Bio: Catherine Delahunty is a Pākehā activist and educator with a long history in critical thinking and radical organising. She organised the first high school students union in Aotearoa when she was 15 and at 68 she is still organising and teaching in environmental activism, Te Tiriti workshops,anti racism education and the campaign to support a free West Papua. She was a Green MP from 2008 until 2017 and is a Trustee and tutor at Kotare Trust, The Basket – social and environmental justice Hauraki, and member of West Papua Action Aotearoa, and is Chair of Coromandel Watchdog of Hauraki who work to protect Hauraki Coromandel from multinational mining. She has been active in the group over 40 years. Her writing includes essays and columns in anti colonisation and Te Tiriti issues, the struggle against mining and in valuing participatory radical education, as well as poetry and fiction.
Friday, 14 October 10.30 am NZDT Activist In Residence: CARE White Paper Launch- Replacing Colonial Extractivism and Capitalism by Lunch Time with Catherine Delahunty and Professor Mohan Dutta Venue: CJM COMMS LAB BSC B1.08 and Live on the CARE Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/CAREMassey/live_videos
CARE is proud to host and welcome our next Activist In Residence- Catherine Delahunty who will be conducting Activist in Residence public events and collaborating with Prof. Mohan Dutta on Replacing Colonial Theft and Capitalism by Lunch Time between, 10- 14 October 2022 at CARE, Manawatū campus, Massey University.
Bio: Catherine Delahunty is a Pākehā activist and educator with a long history in critical thinking and radical organising. She organised the first high school students union in Aotearoa when she was 15 and at 68 she is still organising and teaching in environmental activism, Te Tiriti workshops,anti racism education and the campaign to support a free West Papua. She was a Green MP from 2008 until 2017 and is a Trustee and tutor at Kotare Trust, The Basket – social and environmental justice Hauraki, and member of West Papua Action Aotearoa, and is Chair of Coromandel Watchdog of Hauraki who work to protect Hauraki Coromandel from multinational mining. She has been active in the group over 40 years. Her writing includes essays and columns in anti colonisation and Te Tiriti issues, the struggle against mining and in valuing participatory radical education, as well as poetry and fiction.
Friday, 14 October 10.30 am NZDT Activist In Residence: CARE White Paper Launch- Replacing Colonial Extractivism and Capitalism by Lunch Time with Catherine Delahunty and Professor Mohan Dutta Venue: CJM COMMS LAB BSC B1.08 and Live on the CARE Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/CAREMassey/live_videos
Dr. Leon, is leading CARE’s work on precarity, labour and digital futures. He is a 2021 recipient of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment Science Whitinga Research Fellowship researching on, Examining the effects of the expansion of gig work on health and wellbeing in a post-pandemic economy at CARE, Massey University.
“The thing with a message like Hindu Lives Matter, is that it has to be read within this broader infrastructure of messages that are calling for Muslim genocide,” says Mohan Dutta, professor at Massey University in #NewZealand, who has researched anti-Muslim hate in #India.
Dutta worked on a 2021 report about the experiences Muslims in India have with Islamophobic content on digital platforms. It found that, since Modi’s election victory in 2014 and 2019, “the hate on digital platforms in India and in the Indian diaspora has proliferated exponentially.”
“The content of digital hate driven by Hindutva,” the report notes, referring to an ideology promoting Hindu hegemony, “has been directed at India’s religious minorities, Muslims and Christians, as well as oppressed caste communities.”Dutta says using language mirroring the Black Lives Matter slogan, which is rooted in organizing against racist structures, falsely suggests that Hindus are systematically oppressed in India. “It’s ironic that a majoritarian structure takes that hashtag to deploy hate towards India’s Muslim minority community, which has consistently been targeted by hate,” he says.
We at CARE: Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation are excited to collaborate with our civil society partners Islamophobia Register, The Humanism Project and Aman to build these Community-led Culture-Centered dialogues on addressing the structural drivers of Islamophobia through the participation of the “margins of the margins”. About the collaboration Islamophobia Register Australia presents “Difficult Conversations”Difficult Conversations is a community-led, culture-centered activating of structural transformation to address the drivers of Islamophobia – it aims to build and implement actionable solutions to help tackle Islamophobia in Australia.
The “Difficult Conversations” Project is utilising the ground-breaking, culture-centered and evidence-based approach to organising against prejudice and racism, that prepares both community participants, and civil society and government stakeholders, for different roles than they are typically used to, and measures the results when they are brought together.
The Details:
Main Conference
Parkroyal Parramatta, 30 Phillip Street, Parramatta (Gidley King Room)
Tuesday 2nd August 9:30am to 4pm
Speakers include: Derya Iner Principal Researcher & Author of Islamophobia in Australia Reports
Mariam Veiszadeh Lawyer, Founder & President Islamophobia Register Australia
Rita Jabri Markwell Lawyer & Advisor Australian Muslim Advocacy Network
Professor Mohan Dutta Director, Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research & Evaluation (CARE) Dean’s Chair Professor of Communication, School of Communication, Journalism, and Marketing Massey University NZ
Senator Fatima Payman, WA Senator first hijab wearing Afghan Australian Muslim woman in Parliament (TBC)
Julie Inman Grant eSafety Commissioner (TBC)
Kara Hinesley Director of Public Policy Twitter Australia (TBC)
Josh Machin Head of Policy (Australia) Facebook /Meta (TBC)
