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.
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
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.
Talk Abstract: Communicating about cancer presents many challenges for patients and their families. Uncertainty is prevalent across the survivorship trajectory; specifically, questions regarding recurrence, unexplained symptoms, and renegotiating relational roles all may persist after cancer treatment is completed. This talk will consider the communication processes and uncertainty management strategies patients and families engage in throughout a cancer experience and beyond.
Short Bio: Laura Miller received her PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Communication Studies at the University of Tennessee in the USA. Her works explores how individuals communicate about health, how families communicate support amid health stressors, and how illness-related uncertainty is managed. She is passionate about global education and has taught in Beijing, Dublin, and Sydney.
Dr. Phoebe Elers, CARE Massey spoke on Radio Waatea about the forthcoming launch of #PovertyIsNotOurFuture campaign. Waatea News and interviews are broadcasted on all 21 radio stations of the Iwi Radio Network.
Dr. Deshpande is Associate Professor and Acting Director of the Social Marketing Department at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. Sameer teaches, trains, and conducts research in social marketing. He is the Editor of Social Marketing Quarterly. Over two decades, Sameer has raised over two million dollars and published studies testing effectiveness of social marketing framework with special emphasis on consumer-insights approach in a variety of contexts, including promotion of alternative rides, responsible drinking, alcohol abstinence during pregnancy, water rights, safe sexual practices, and physical activity. Sameer has widely published in academic journals, books, and conference proceedings. Prior to joining Griffith, Sameer offered services in the U.S., Canada, India, and Singapore.
Dr. Sameer Deshpande
Associate Professor (Social Marketing), Acting Director (Social Marketing @ Griffith)
Department of Marketing, Griffith Business School, Griffith University
Microinterventions—situated, small-scale, issue-based action in the context of long term ethnographic engagement—have considerable potential to enrich the quality of ethnographic research, and they can constitute an ethically responsive form of community-based research. Conversely, they can play into broader and vastly problematic narratives of researchers as imperial saviors, alienate communities from outsiders, and result in the continuing marginalization of already vulnerable groups. In this conversation, I discuss how one might consider the ethical imperative of engaging in microinterventions against the pitfalls of doing so, in the context of an ongoing field work project amongst Jenu Koruba tribal communities in Bandipur district and its environs in Southern India.
The Bandung Conference transformed the global dynamics that had been shaped by imperialism and colonialism, breaking away from the binarism of socialist and capitalist ideals. And with the rapid ascent of nations like Africa, Asia, the Carribbean and Latin-America, the history of conquest can now be brought to light, examined and understood. Professor Kuan-Hsing Chen argues that this re-examination will lead to solidarity across all sectors. Only when programmes like Indonesia’s New Marine Time and China’s One Belt, One Road are understood through the lens of the Bandung spirit of decolonisation, can they be connected intellectually and politically. This not only demands a critical re-examination of histories, but also challenge existing modes of knowledge that were shaped by European colonisers for the past two hundred years.
Speaker:
A self-claimed Bandungist, Kuan-Hsing Chen works in the Center for Asia-Pacific Cultural Studies, Hsinchu. Founding Chair of the board of trustee for the Inter-Asia School (an international NPO). He taught in Chiao Tung University (2008-2017), Tsing Hua University (1990-2008) and has held (and is still having long term affiliation with) visiting professorships at universities in China, Ethiopia, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Uganda, Ethiopia, and the US.
28 Feb 2018 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Block AS7, #01-06
What is the World Health Organisation? Its Headquarters in Geneva? Or, is it a more dispersed international entity, which engages and deals with disparate polities in order to stay effective and relevant? In all this, how can we conceptualise the historic formation, underpinning negotiations and impact of the WHO Regional Offices, which are the legal entities that negotiate and work with national governments on a daily basis? Professor Sanjoy Bhattacharya uses recent histories of international and global health projects to question a series of presumptions that continue to colonise scholarship about the value of the idea and work of a relatively small sets of actors. In so doing, he argues for the need for greater transparency and democracy in inter-sectoral partnerships that aims to improve global health and well-being.
Speaker:
Sanjoy Bhattacharya is Professor in the History of Medicine Department of History, University of York, UK. He studied at St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi (India); Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi, India), and the School of Oriental and African Studies (London, UK). He is a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator working on the history and contemporary workings of Primary Health Care and the provision of Universal Health Coverage in South Asia. Sanjoy also continues to work on the histories of the worldwide eradication of smallpox, and the migration, experiences and contribution of South Asian doctors in the UK’s National Health Service.
1 March 2018 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM
VENUE CHANGED
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Block AS6, Lecture Theatre 14 (LT14)
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Block AS6, #03-33, CNM Meeting Room
