We are excited to welcome back Dr. Asha Rathina Pandi as a Research Fellow at the Center. At CARE, she will lead the Labour and Race in Asia Project, with her research focusing on the health of Plantation and Migrant workers in Malaysia.
Previously, she held teaching and research positions at the Department of Communications and New Media, Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), and Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. Asha received her PhD (2011) and M.A. in Sociology (2005) from the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM), USA. She also holds a M.Sc. (2000) and Bachelor’s degrees in Urban Planning (1996) from University Technology of Malaysia, and a Graduate Certificate in Global Health and Population Studies from UHM (2012).An academic-activist, Asha has 18 years of experience in higher education. Her teaching and research interests are in social change and justice, health communication, community engagement, mixed methods and marginalized populations. She has published in journals of International Development Planning, Journalism, Development Studies, Frontiers in Communication, among others. At the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore, she led and taught the Communication for Social Change course that created a register for pedagogy of structural transformation for students.
We look forward to the transformative openings that Dr. Pandi will build in her work at CARE!
The outcome of this collective work/report is titled, “Beyond bias: exploring the cultural contexts of health and well-being measurement”.
Abstract: This first expert group meeting on the cultural contexts of health and well-being was convened by the WHO Regional Office for Europe on 15–16 January 2015. As part of the adoption of Health 2020, the European policy for health and well-being, WHO Member States agreed to a measurement framework, which would measure and report on objective and subjective well-being. However, practical challenges remain, particularly with respect to the influence of cultural factors on well-being and well-being measurement. The aim of this meeting was to provide advice on how to consider the impact of culture on health and well-being, and how to communicate findings from well-being data across such a culturally diverse region as Europe. This report outlines the detailed recommendations made by the expert group in relation to each of these objectives.
Dr. Leon Salter @ Massey University’s Graduation Ceremony
Dr. Leon’s project is titled. “Examining the effects of the expansion of gig work on health and wellbeing in a post-pandemic economy.”It uses the culture-centered approach (CCA) to create a framework for worker organizing in the gig economy. Dr. Leon will be housed at CARE: Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation in doing this work.
The social impact of this work is in creating a framework for safeguarding worker rights through collaborations with unions and advocates, and is at the frontiers of the kinds of questions we ought to be grappling with in the context of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) economy.Congratulations again on this amazing acheivement.
Professor Mohan J Dutta, from the School of Communication, Journalism and Marketing, has been named as the 2021 Aubrey Fisher Mentorship Award winner.
The award, presented by the International Communications Association, was first initiated in 1988 and honors outstanding scholars, teachers and advisors who have had a major impact in the field of communication.
The Aubrey Fisher Award is the highest recognition for mentorship in the discipline of communication and most importantly, recipients of this award are recognised to have influenced their former students, who themselves are important figures working in the field of communication.
His nomination states, “the discipline is more inclusive today, to a large part because of Mohan’s tireless advocacy. Mohan’s courage in questioning consistently disciplinary #Whiteness is one of most powerful testimonies to his mentorship. This mentorship role extends much beyond us, his advisees, as he inspires students of colour across the discipline and works to make space for them.”
Professor Dutta says he is honoured to be recognised with the award. “This award for me is one of the most powerful recognitions of my lifetime of mentoring students, community organisers and activists”.
Professor Dutta is Dean’s Chair Professor of Communication. He is the Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), developing culturally-centred, community-based projects of social change, advocacy, and activism that articulate health as a human right.
CARE has been awarded a grant from the International Communication Association (ICA) to host a regional hub for the 2021 ICA Conference. CARE is especially delighted as Theme Co-Chair of the 2021 ICA that we are able to host this hub in Aotearoa with the theme of “Engaging the Essential Work of Care: Communication,Connectedness, and Social Justice.”
The hub will be hosted as a face-to-face conference that complements the virtual conference, with spotlight sessions that are focused on work in Aotearoa. The conference will be hosted from May 27 to May 31, 2021.
The Hub will operate in a hybrid model, with face-to-face participation complementing virtual participation. It will feature two spotlight sessions per day for the five days of the conference that bring together participants around themes, and host face-to-face conversations around the virtual sessions. Participants will indicate their preferences for the sessions around which they would like to have face-to-face conversations. They will watch the virtual session together, followed by a discussion of the themes emergent from the session.
In addition, each spotlight session will be complemented with a complementary workshop held on May 26 and May 27, where participants will bring in their manuscripts accepted at ICA and rework them for publication. These workshops will be led by journal editors and editorial board members of leading journals of the discipline.
The ICA Regional Hub at CARE will complement a one-day hybrid workshop on “Centering Care: Methodologies of the Global South.” The workshop will bring in scholars from across the global south in virtual sessions, working alongside face-to-face interactions, focusing on key methodological questions in scholarship of/from the Global South. Aligned with the conference theme, the workshop will center the essential work of care in organizing research and practice in universities. Sessions will connect with local organizers and activists in generating conversations on key questions of care work in the generation of decolonizing knowledge. Centering the principles of Kaupapa Māori, the workshop will explore the decolonizing work of care in culture-centered methods.
As a theme co-chair, Prof. Mohan Dutta will be hosting a closing plenary with academics and activists on the theme, “Empire and the global politics of care: Academic-activism, social justice, and Southern imaginaries.”
To be a part of the #ICA21 Regional Hub RSVP below or email your contact details to Breeze Mehta: b.s.mehta@massey.ac.nz
To be a part of the complementary Hybrid workshop : Centering Care:Methodologies of the Global South, RSVP below or email your contact details to Breeze Mehta: b.s.mehta@massey.ac.nz and we will be in touch with you.
Health communication research has experienced a rapid grown in recent years in Asia. The diverse and rich Asian cultures, socio-economic modes, policy regulations, and familial factors contribute to a wide range of exciting research agendas and provide enormous opportunities to advance knowledge about the meanings and practices of health as well as the explanation, prediction, intervention, and control of disease and illness. This symposium invites researchers to share their observations of challenges of and opportunities for conducting health communication research in the Asia contexts or from the Asian perspectives. Key issues to be interrogated in this symposium include, but are not limited to, theorization, technology, culture, risk and crisis, and provider-patient relations in health communication with an Asian focus.
Organizer: Centre for Media & Communication Research, School of Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University
Day 1: March 4 Panel 1. 8:30-10:00 am
Information and Intervention in the Digital Era
Panel 2. 10:20-11:50 am Key Theoretical, Methodological, and Ethical Issues in Health Communication
Day 2: March 5 Panel 3. 8:30-10:00 am Culture and Health
Panel 4. 10:20-11:50 am Risk and Crisis in Health Communication
Panel 5. 1:30-3:00 pm Emerging Agendas in Health Communication
The racist politics of whiteness is convergent with the feudal politics of caste (Wilkerson, 2020). Both white supremacy and caste supremacy work through the erasure of the voices of the outcaste, even as the outcaste is turned into the object of interventions.
Brahminical privilege in the diaspora colludes with Whiteness in perpetuating caste oppression.
Caste oppression, picked up and circulated into the networks of White Pākehā culture, find new modalities of perpetuating its violence.
In response to the work of the culture-centered approach (CCA) (Dutta, 2004), imagine this scenario, a White Pākehā person and a White Brahmin person having a conversation about the “margins of the margins,” a key concept of the CCA.
The conversation goes somewhat like this.
White Pākehā (with a grimace, expressing disgust): And what even is that, “margins of the margins?”
White Brahmin (picking up the Pākehā grimace and perfecting it): Oh really, how disgusting it is! To talk about us migrants and put us in a box. To call us as the margins?
White Pākehā: What even is the margins of the margins? Who is that?
White Brahmin: I know right? It is not acceptable sorry. I mean, I am myself a migrant. I live migrant identities. How can you call me margins?
White Pākehā: And who exactly are you centering in this talk?
White Brahmin: Remember, for you who is at the periphery is at the center for others. I don’t think of myself as the periphery.
White Pākehā: That’s mansplaining….
This snippet of a fictitious conversation depicts the whiteness of the violence of the erasure. Of course, this violence is performed without having done the readings although numerous readings and lessons have been shared with the White Pākehā. Necessary to the perpetuation of erasure of the margins is the deployment of “woke discourse” that serves the hegemonic positions of whiteness and brahminism. As a communicative inversion, “mansplaining” becomes the rhetorical tool for the White Pākehā and the White Brahmin to erase the margins, to deny its existence, and worse, to turn it into a caricature to serve Pākehā-Brahmin hegemony.
Lazy posturing is an integral strategy that holds up White privilege, and deploys primitive caste politics to bolster it, all under the pretext of progressivism or radicalism (mediated by the oh-so-feminist-sounding jingoism).
The Savarna Brahmin in the diaspora performing the model minority is integral to the erasure of the margins. That there exist material registers of marginalization is the anchor to transformative social change. The White Brahmin collaborator with the White Pākehā culture maintains the infrastructures of erasure by denying the existence of the margins. Even worse, the White Brahmin takes up the migrant position to deny the existence of the margins and her struggles, erasing the possibilities of listening to the voices of the outcastes in the diaspora who are also the objects of the Brahmin’s oppression in the homeland. Erased from the discursive registers are the predominantly caste-based gender violence perpetuated by Brahmins both in the homeland and in the diaspora.
The Brahmin profits from this denial of marginalization, both at home and in the diaspora. Erased from the discursive registers are the everyday forms of gendered-raced violence perpetuated by the whiteness of settler colonialism.
That somehow the reference to margins is disenfranchising works to hold up the supremacy of both the Pākehā and the Brahmin. This denial can justify both Brahmin and White privilege, with the privileged continuing to talk about how to lift the burden of the soul, all along denying the very agentic capacities of those at the margins (Dutta, 2004). Not seeing, not witnessing the margins and attacking the discursive register of the margins is integral to the denial of the voices of those at the margins.
To deny the materiality of the margins is a vital strategy to retaining and reproducing white Pākehā and brahminical privilege.
In our work with the CCA therefore, it is vital to witness, count, describe and challenge this politics of white-savarna denialism.
As resistance then, let’s turn to the discursive register. The margins exist. The “margins of the margins” exist. Produced by the very structures of White-Brahminical colonialism that both White Pākehā and White Brahmins deny.
References
Dutta, M. J. (2004). The unheard voices of Santalis: Communicating about health from the margins of India. Communication Theory, 14(3), 237-263.
Wilkerson, I. (2020). Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Random House.
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,
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.
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.
CARE COVID19 Lecture Series- Fear, Trauma, Loss and Grief: The effects of Terror and Covid-19 on Polarity and Discrimination within Workplaces with Dr Fatima Junaid, School of Management, Massey University
Abstract: In this talk Fatima talks about the implications of prolonged exposure to terrorism, and the current context of Covid-19. She highlights the influence of stress and trauma due to loss, and how that impacts us in terms of drawing closer to those we trust, while the fear of death makes our social attitudes rigid, especially towards those who are different. This complexity can cause polarity and discrimination within workplaces.
