Category: News

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CARE Director Prof. Mohan Dutta’s upcoming Talk on “Decolonising communication education : insights from SITE” at February 2021 part of the Birth CentenaryDr. Vikram Sarabhai

CARE: Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation‘s Prof. Mohan Dutta will be delivering a talk on “Decolonising communication education : insights from SITE”on 19th February 2021.

Mohan J Dutta is Dean’s Chair Professor of Communication.He is the Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), Massey University developing culturally-centered,community-based projects of social change, advocacy, and activism that articulate health as a human right. Hesits on the advisory group “Cultural Contexts of Health” of the World Health Organization Europe’.Abstract:Professor Dutta will discuss the theoretical registers created by SITE for intervening into thewhiteness of communication studies. The presentation will attend to the concepts of public ownership of media,community-owned development, science democracies, and public pedagogy as the basis for interrogating theprivatization of development and communication infrastructures,

The imaginary of SITE will serve as a basis forvoicing communication as community participation in development.Manipal Institute of Communication (MIC) is a constituent unit of Manipal Academy of Higher Education , #Manipal, #Karnataka, #India.

MIC is a premier media and communication studies institution in India.MIC is organising a webinar in honour of Dr Vikram Sarabhai’s birth centenary.Dr Vikram Sarabhai’s birth centenary is an occasion to pay tributes to his unique contribution to the development and deployment of satellites for Communication. Dr Sarabhai as the Director, Physical Research Laboratory located in Ahmedabad, convened an army of an able and brilliant scientist, anthropologist, communicators, and social scientist from all corners of the country to spearhead the Indian Space programme. In 1966, Sarabhai’s dialogue with NASA was instrumental in SITE. The historic Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) in India (1975-76) was regarded as “the largest sociological experiment in the world”. SITE is regarded as a textbook case of mass media and development. It covered 2400 villages of six states and transmitted programmes using ATS-6. British Science writer, Arthur C Clarke called SITE the” greatest Communication experiment in history.” It has engendered research traditions in communication spanning areas of policy, technology choice, deployment, instruction, and relevance of certain paradigms in the field. The webinar apart from paying tribute to the visionary would highlight scholarly reminiscences of that era and where applicable its resonance in the positive communication ecosystem.

#CAREMassey,#SITEWebinar2021,#VikramSarabhaiCentenary,#MasseyUni,#Decolonising,#Communication,#Education

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CARE-JVBU PROJECT: VIOLENCE PREVENTION NEEDS OF DIVERSE COMMUNITIES: A CULTURE-CENTERED APPROACH

The Centre for Culture-Centred Approach to Research and Education (CARE) at Massey University has secured funding from the Joint Venture Business Unit, Eliminating Family Violence and Sexual Violence (JVBU) to provide co-design expertise for its project “Violence prevention needs of diverse communities”

CARE secures a grant on prevention of sexual violence and family violence

While family violence and sexual violence affect a broad range of people in Aotearoa New Zealand, some populations in New Zealand are disproportionately affected. These groups experience multiple and overlapping factors, including disadvantage, discrimination, stigmatisation, and isolation. Current prevention approaches are limited in addressing the needs of disabled people, new migrant communities, rainbow communities, and ageing communities. Moreover, needs and experiences are likely to differ across these four communities, including at the mutual intersections of these identities and intersections with Māori, Pacific peoples, young people, rural people, etc.

The proposed co-design process draws on the framework of the culture-centered approach (CCA) developed and fine-tuned by CARE Director Professor Mohan Dutta in identifying and co-creating community-led approaches to the prevention of sexual violence and family violence, and in building a national level framework for the prevention of sexual violence and family violence that is based on community participation. CARE will draw on the team’s experience over a decade working on violence-related community-led interventions across the globe with sex-workers, migrant communities, transgender communities, survivors of genocide, and refugees with experiences of trauma amongst others. The team draws on the insights developed by advisory groups of community members and community researchers who inhabit marginalised identities and come from the communities that are being researched.

The culture-centered approach (CCA) driving this co-design process places marginalised communities in the driving seat in shaping prevention solutions and in owning them.  It creates a dialogic space for conversations between place-based locally-owned strategies of prevention and national level prevention strategies.  The CARE team will partner with local diverse communities at the “margins of the margins,” key stakeholders, and the JVBU to produce an interim and a final report for Ministers, with recommendations on:

  • the violence prevention needs and aspirations of disabled people, new migrant communities, rainbow communities, and ageing communities
  • community-led prevention initiatives to be funded by the government
  • a longer-term prevention investment strategy that is anchored in community voices.

The work will draw on the key tenets of the CCA to build participatory spaces for disabled people, new migrant communities, rainbow communities, and older people to develop a community-led framework for the prevention of sexual violence and family violence. Notes Professor Mohan Dutta, Director, CARE, “This work offers a vital register for listening to the voices of communities who have hitherto been erased. Through the participatory spaces co-created with communities, imaginaries and frameworks for violence prevention solutions are generated that are anchored in the lived experiences and everyday negotiations of violence in marginalized contexts, situated in the rhythms of community life.”

The culture-centered process builds voice democracy at the margins, where community members who are most disenfranchised (at the “margins of the margins”) develop a conceptual framework for the prevention of sexual violence and family violence. Through community-based interviews, interviews with key stakeholders working with violence prevention, advisory groups, and workshops, the project will outline strategies for community-led prevention that are anchored in community voices and owned by communities.

#CAREMassey, #SexualViolence, #FamilyViolence,

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CARE News faculty member Dr. Jagadish Thaker co-authored a piece on attitudes toward vaccines in Aotearoa New Zealand

CARE faculty member Dr. Jagadish Thaker co-authored a piece on attitudes toward vaccines in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2020. Here’s Dr. Ashley Bloomfield citing the research in 2021, noting that one in four New Zealanders are hesitant to get vaccinated and the importance of focusing on reliable information from trusted sources.

Read Dr. JT’s Research on Massey Research Online here:
https://mro.massey.ac.nz/…/Aotearoa%20New%20Zealand…

Article Links:

PDF: Aotearoa New Zealand Public Attitudes to COVID-19 VaccineDownload

#MasseyCJM #masseyuniversity #MasseyUni #COVID19 #COVIDVaccine #Aotearoa #NewZealand

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CARE News: Professor Mohan J Dutta serves as an advisor on the WHO-Europe Expert Advisory Group on Cultural Contexts of Health

Professor Mohan J Dutta serves as an advisor on the WHO-Europe Expert Advisory Group on Cultural Contexts of Health. In this role, Professor Mohan Dutta offered expert insights into strategies for addressing pandemic fatigue. These insights are relevant now more than ever.

  • Understand people. Collect and use evidence for targeted, tailored and effective policies, interventions and communication.
  • Allow people to live their lives, but reduce risk. Wide-ranging restrictions may not be feasible for everyone in the long run.
  • Engage people as part of the solution. Find ways to meaningfully involve individuals and communities at every level.
  • Acknowledge and address the hardship people experience and the profound impact the pandemic has had on their lives.
WHO Pandemic fatigue Reinvigorating the public to prevent COVID-19 & Prof. Mohan Dutta

Here is the link to the insights document & the pdf below:

https://apps.who.int/…/WHO-EURO-2020-1160-40906-55390…

Pandemic fatigue Reinvigorating the public to prevent COVID-19

#COVID19 #pandemic #pandemicfatigue #WHO #EuropeExpertAdvisoryGroup #CulturalContextsOfHealth

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CARE manuscripts accepted at 71st International Communication Association Conference, 27-31 May 2021

ICA 2021 conference theme of Engaging the Essential Work of Care: Communication, Connectedness, and Social Justice

CARE: Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation is looking forward to the opportunity to share our work at the 71st International Communication Association Conference #ICA21. This year’s virtual ICA conference is to be held on 27-31 May 2021 and has the theme “Engaging the Essential Work of Care: Communication, Connectedness, and Social Justice”.

The following manuscripts have been accepted for presentation

  • Negotiations of health among Rohingya Refugees in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh: A culture-centered approach to health and care by Mahbubur Rahman; Mohan Jyoti Dutta
  • Receiving healthcare while locked down: Voices from the margins in Aotearoa New Zealand by Phoebe Elers,Steven Elers & Prof. Mohan Jyoti Dutta
  • Extreme neoliberalism, migrant labour and COVID-19 outbreak in Singapore: A culture-centered interrogation by Prof. Mohan Jyoti Dutta
  • Migrant worker health as a human right: A culture-centered approach by Prof. Mohan Jyoti Dutta
  • Nobody Cares About Us: COVID-19 and Voices of Refugees from Aotearoa New Zealand by Pooja Jayan
  • If they cared, they’d listen:’ Culturally centering listening to disrupt the logics of community engagement by Christine Elers
  • Innocence lost: Community building as praxis by Prof. Mohan Jyoti Dutta, Prof. Shiv Ganesh & Christine Elers

In addition to: ‘Prejudice toward the “Other” during the Covid-19 Pandemic’ by Stephen Croucher, Thao Nguyen, Mohan Dutta & Doug Ashwell, along with fellow academics Tatiana Permyakova & Oscar Gomez

#ICA21 #ICA2021 #SocialMedia #communication #Connectedness #SocialJustice #CARE Massey #CARECCA #MasseyCJM #MasseyUni #masseyuniversity #Research #NewZealand #Aotearoa

https://www.icahdq.org/page/ICA2021

About ICA 2021 conference theme

The ICA 2021 conference theme of Engaging the Essential Work of Care: Communication, Connectedness, and Social Justice calls for our examination of how care forms the fabric of our social and interconnected lives. From the moment that we enter this world we are completely dependent on the care of others, and as we move through our lives, the care of our teachers, doctors, leaders, and artists shape us into the adults that we are today. Even as we leave this earth, on our last days, we are comforted by the care of loved ones.

“Care” can be understood from a variety of perspectives relevant to communication. Namely, care can refer to:

  • Providing Assistance for Others (She takes care of my aunt.)
  • Being Interested in a Topic/Issue/Idea (They care about the notion of compassion.)
  • Concern about Others’ Well-Being (He cares what will happen to his children.)
  • The Provision of Needed Attention or Resources (Do they provide care at the hospital?)

The concept of care can also be understood from at least two vantage points that intersect with those meanings: self-directed and community-centered. The relative priority of self and community care within a given community reflects deeply embedded cultural values, experiences of oppressions, access to resources, and histories of trust.

The concept of “care” requires our thoughtful examination and reflection. Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, the crisis of climate change, and militarized police brutality that continues to target, harass, and kill people of color, the urgency of care to address entrenched inequalities, an overarching climate of neglect, and a global political economy of individualized self-help has been rendered visible. Communication emerges in this backdrop as a transformative site for re-working care, anchoring it in relationships, communities, organizing processes, media systems, and social formations. Care is both constituted by and constitutive of communication, as a register for creating spaces of compassion and connectedness.

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Publication News: Prof. Dutta’s Mohan J. Dutta: A Culture-Centered Approach to Radically Transforming Creative and Cultural Infrastructures.

at ST PAUL St Curatorial Symposium 2019: It’s as if we were made for each other

Source: Deborah Rundle, Made for Each Other, 2019. Photo: Sam Hartnett.

About ST PAUL St Curatorial Symposium 2019:

This is the eighth in a series of symposia for ST PAUL St that have been concerned with artistic and curatorial practices as they relate to knowledge production, exhibition-making, and relational commitment. It has been our privilege to be a part of the ST PAUL St Symposium almost every year since its beginning in 2012 as attendees or contributors, and to convene it this year together. The lasting impression of the series, and the experiences with which we have been coming and going and our reasons for returning, is what we hope to bring to the fore this year. The 2019 Curatorial Symposium extends the core concerns of sociability in the 2019 ST PAUL St exhibition How to Live Together, which was guided by the coupled question: What is the intimacy we must develop to create a community? What is the distance we must maintain to retain our solitude?

The programme over the following two days is facilitated by Te Kawehau Hoskins and Alison Jones, Mohan J. Dutta, artists Fiona Amundsen and Pallavi Paul, and regenerative practitioner Lucy-Mary Mulholland.

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CARE Research News: CARE article published in Health Communication journal- “Negotiating Health Amidst COVID-19 Lockdown in Low-income Communities in Aotearoa New Zealand”.

Christine Elers , Pooja Jayan, Phoebe Elers & Mohan J. Dutta

Center of Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), School of Communication, Journalism and Marketing, Massey University

Negotiating-Health-Amidst-COVID-19-Lockdown-in-Low-income-Communities-in-Aotearoa-New-ZealandDownload

Abstract:

Aotearoa New Zealand’s public health crisis communication approach amidst the COVID-19 pandemic effectively mobilized the nation into swift lockdown, significantly reducing community transmission. This communication approach has been applauded around the world. How did communities situated amongst the “margins of the margins” in Aotearoa New Zealand navigate through the existing structural barriers to health during the pandemic? In this study, we use a culture-centered analysis to foreground the structural context of disenfranchisement amidst the COVID-19 lockdown. Drawing on in-depth interviews with participants in a larger ethnographic project on poverty and health across three communities in Aotearoa New Zealand, we attend to the ways in which health is negotiated amidst the COVID-19 outbreak and lockdown response at the “margins of the margins.” The narratives point out that health communication interventions to prevent COVID-19 in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand furthered the marginalization of communities at the margins, and community voices were largely erased from the enactment of interventions. With the extant structures failing to recognize these aspects of everyday struggles of health at the margins, the health and access challenges were further magnified during COVID-19. Our attention to communication situated in relationship to structures builds a register for health communication scholarship in the context of COVID-19 that is committed to disrupting the behaviorally based hegemonic health communication literature and transforming the unequal terrains of health experiences.

The trajectories of COVID-19 (C19) as well as the preventive policy responses to it have disproportionately impacted the global margins (Dutta et al., 2020). Across countries, regions, and communities, those at the gendered, raced, and classed margins have borne largely the effects of the pandemic (Patel et al., 2020). Aotearoa New Zealand has been globally recognized for its decisive leadership and the overarching effectiveness of its science-based C19 response, accompanied by clear communication and state-led welfare support (Cousins, 2020; Dutta et al., 2020; PRovoke Media, 2020). How then do inequities in health play out amidst this effective model of C19 response? Traditionally, Māori, Pasifika, and refugee communities have borne the greatest burdens of poor health outcomes in Aotearoa New Zealand (Mahony et al., 2017; McIntosh & Mulholland, 2011; Ministry of Health, 2014). These features of raced/citizenship-based identity intersect with poverty to produce marginalization (Bowleg, 2020).

In this essay, we draw on our ethnographic fieldwork embedded in the culture-centered approach (CCA) with Māori, Pasifika, and refugee communities across three sites in Aotearoa New Zealand to examine the interplays of culture, structure, and agency at the margins in constituting the everyday negotiations of health and wellbeing amidst the C19 outbreak (Dutta, 2020). Our emphasis here is on foregrounding the structural context of marginalization, drawing out the common threads in the diverse experiences with the Whiteness of the pandemic communication response across raced identities at the peripheries in Aotearoa New Zealand that historically bear disproportionate burdens of health inequities (Mahony et al., 2017; McIntosh & Mulholland, 2011; Ministry of Health, 2014). The C19-related advocacy work performed by our academic-activist team emerged out of our advisory group members seeking solutions to the existing and new challenges to health introduced by C19. In this essay, we highlight the structural dimension of the culture-structure-agency framework of the CCA, challenging hegemonic message-based theorizing (Dutta, 2015).

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CARE PUBLIC TALK SERIES: Transforming Indigenous Education: Kaupapa Māori Enactment with Distinguished Prof. Graham Hingangaroa Smith, Massey University

CARE PUBLIC TALK SERIES : Transforming Indigenous Education: Kaupapa Māori Enactment with Distinguished Prof. Graham Hingangaroa Smith,Distinguished Professorial Chair, Te Toi Ihorei ki Pūrehuroa, Massey University

Date: THURSDAY 26th NOVEMBER 12 PM NZDT
Venue: Mezzanine Floor (1 Floor Entrance), Palmerston North City LibraryJoin the Facebook

Livestream on @caremassey

Link: https://www.facebook.com/CAREMassey/posts/4290919210924451

Talk Abstract:The title transforming Indigenous education is deliberately ambiguous – both meanings are intended. That is, given the persistence of high and disproportionate outcomes of inequality within Māori and Indigenous communities there needs to be transformative change with respect to both the processes and outcomes of education. We will not have a revolution of our unequal social and economic conditions without a prior or simultaneous educational revolution. In this presentation I argue the need for Indigenous educators to be able to work across the intersections of simultaneously being a scholar, critical activist and transformer.In this presentation Prof. Smith shares stories that illustrate this approach and challenge the dominant institutional pressures to become ‘privatized’ academics.About the Speaker:Professor Smith is a prominent and internationally regarded Māori educationalist and scholar who has been at the forefront of transforming Māori and Indigenous education and schooling. His work links theoretical thinking and practical applications within an ongoing cycle of transformative praxis.Professor Smith’s earlier training was in Social Anthropology and he completed a MA (Hons) dissertation on ‘Māori Rituals of Encounter’ entitled ‘The Significance of Green Leaves in Pohiri Ritual’. He trained as a teacher at Auckland Teachers College and taught in Auckland schools. He also lectured in Education at Auckland College of Education. He was one of the first teachers and developers of a Kura Kaupapa Māori – a Māori philosophy and principles-based School. These schools have grown from a single entity in 1988 to over seventy-five publicly funded schools in 2015. His theoretical leadership in the Education Department at the University of Auckland helped inform the emergence of Māori Education as a distinct field of study across the New Zealand Tertiary Sector. This work has encouraged a wide range of academic studies focused on overthrowing persisting inequities within and as a result of education and schooling in New Zealand. His significant contribution to New Zealand education is to be seen in his work related to Kaupapa Māori as a theory of Transformative Praxis.#CAREPublicTalkSeries#Transforming#IndigenousEducation: #Kaupapa#Māori#Enactment#Aotearoa#NewZealand
#CARECCA#CAREMassey#MasseyCJM#MasseyUni#PNCC#PalmerstonNorthCityLibrary See Less

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Special Presentation: A New Lecture Series :”Decolonizing Whiteness” with Prof. Mohan Dutta.

Join us at the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) for this special presentation of Professor Mohan J Dutta’s new lecture series: Decolonizing Whiteness Lecture Series

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.