Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation
Professor Mohan Dutta sits down with CARE Activist-in-Residence Dr James Gomez of Asia Centre, a not-for-profit organisation that seeks to create human rights impact in the South-east Asia region.
Follow the link below for the in-depth interview of the academic, former politician, and Nobel Peace Prize nominee!
The attack on Central Reserve Police Force personnel in Kashmir’s Pulwama on February 14 has turned up the volume on the jingoistic media channels.
Jingoism sells. The images of violence sell in a concerted call for more violence.
The shouting matches on the split Television screens are perfectly orchestrated to call for war, with suited anchors frothing up at the sounds of war. As if to match up the tenor of the emotions at the site of the attack, the decked-up newsrooms buzz with the calls for attack. From the plush studio settings, mediatized images of the broken vehicles and streets littered with debris are organized into a propaganda campaign.
For the middle class digital sphere, the immediate calls to war from the comforts of the living room offer succour to middle class sensibilities of national security.
This is the mechanics of propaganda.
From Operation Iraqi Freedom to the surgical strike, images and sounds feed the war machinery.
In turn, the war machinery manufactures the images and sounds, pumping up adrenaline, drawing even more viewers in to the 24X7 cycles, driving the ratings up in an ever-accelerating pace.
Wars are powerful tools of propaganda. They feed on insecurity, the threat of the “other” materialized through images, talk, and sound, and the gory materiality of violence.
Manufacturing a war organizes entire collectives of citizens as nationalists, projecting on the national imaginary the threat to the nation, brought together with media images of terrorists that need to be targeted through attacks. This threat to the nation is circulated across media screens, capturing the emotions of citizens as war mongers, rallying behind the political elites and only to be satisfied with more gore.
Crises form the bedrock of authoritarian techniques of producing sites of control and managing them to keep power intact. When under threat of losing power, authoritarian regimes create a wide range of strategies to keep power intact. The spectacle of a terror event is the perfect crisis that calls for strong response, propping up the authoritarian strongman as the legitimate and necessary ruler.
Such a response is often produced amid suspended reason. Revenge must be sought, that’s all, and the authoritarian regime is well suited to extract revenge. That the middle classes that quickly demand such revenge never step into the violence of the war zones is part of the mechanics of war. That it is often the poor, enlisted into the police and military to escape poverty, who must place their bodies amid violence, is part of the mechanics of war.
Moreover, the production of war and the circulation of geostrategic threats work well as communicative strategies for generating public support for authoritarian power. Wars often supply the perfect recipe for authoritarian regimes that hold on to power through appeals to emotion. Catalysing the citizen around the nation and national interests works well to distract from questions of economy, inequality, unemployment, and difficulties of everyday life.
The recent attack in Kashmir seemed to have offered the perfect backdrop for the mobilizing of patriotism. Noted Modi, issuing a warning to Pakistan that India will not be divided: “If they (Pakistan) think that the kinds of things they are doing, the conspiracies that they are concocting — that they will be successful in creating instability in India, then they should abandon that dream. They will never be able to do it.”
As television stations capitalize on the ratings-generating stories of the attack, the nation is once again organized around the enemy, with the call to protect national security. Heuristics of the enemy unify national sentiments, captured in smart techniques of producing the other.
Amid crisis, critical questions are suspended. The audience is configured into a homogeneous mass of collective hysteria.
Wars are also the backdrop for attacking the opposition in an election cycle. Building up to the elections, digitally circulating images quickly pick up stories that equate the opposition with the “other” of the nation. The ruling political party becomes the nation, and the nation the party.
Any critique of the jingoism is dangerously painted as anti-national, with large consequences. Any opposition to the regime is painted as the enemy of the nation. Facebook posts, YouTube videos, Tweets, and WhatsApp messages quickly circulate these
Consider for instance the photo of Rahul Gandhi, photoshopped with the Pulwama suicide bomber. The post,“भारतीय फौज पर हमला करने बाला नीकला राहुल गांधी का खास। क्या इस हमले के पीछे कांग्रेस का हाथ तो नहीं (The man who attacked the Indian army was close to Rahul Gandhi. Is the Congress behind the attack? -translated)”, made on the Facebook group Once Again MODIRAJ 2019, includes photoshopped images of Rahul Gandhi to suggest that the involvement of the Congress in the attack.
Consider similarly cropped videos of Priyanka Gandhi allegedly laughing after the terror attacks.
These images and stories work strategically to paint an increasingly strong opposition as the enemy. The war is a powerful political machinery, one that will quickly organize national politics around its agenda.
Amid these heightened calls to war, consider the critical questions that call for further reflection and deliberation. What are the places of dialogue amid this violence? What role does violence play in mitigating violence? Situate the police-military deaths in war alongside the deaths of civilians and protesting people in Kashmir. Most importantly, consider the question of sovereignty of the Kashmiri people that forms the backdrop of this violence.
by Mohan Dutta
Source: https://www.thecitizen.in/ind ex.php/en/NewsDetail/index/4/16300/The-Calls-For-War
The transformative capacity of collaboration between academics and activist offers a pivotal anchor for local-national-global resistance. In the white paper on academic-activist partnerships, Dr. Sue Bradford and Professor Mohan Dutta draw from their journeys in academia and activist organising to examine the intersections, synergies, challenges to, and lessons for academic activist partnerships. Questioning the meaning of collaboration and the nature of collaborative spaces in social change, the authors offer a conceptual framework for collaboration that joins in solidarity with the struggles of the oppressed.
Follow the link below for our final Activist-in-Residence video with Dr Bradford:
Kia ora koutou,
As we begin this new semester we are pleased to announce that we have 2019’s First Activist-In-Residence at CARE
from 27th February-1st March at Manawatu campus.
Our theme for this semester for our Activist-in-Residence series is “Anti-racist Interventions!”
Our first activist-in-residence is the Singapore activist Sangeetha Thanapal, whose work on Chinese privilege has
intervened into the racist structures of Chinese imperialism. Here is a link to her website: http://kaliandkalki.com/
She was recently interrogated and issued warning by Singapore Police for her anti-racist work under the colonial anti-sedition law:
Prof. Mohan Dutta will be working with Sangeetha to share some of CARE’s ongoing work with racist structures that marginalize
Indians in South-east Asia and strategies for race-based activism. She will be presenting a Public Talk, Workshop and Whitepaper during her residency at CARE.
More event specific details to follow shortly.
Click on the url link for media related articles on Sangeetha Thanapal
In the latest video of our Activist-in-Residence video series, Professor Mohan Dutta, Director of CARE, sits down for a one-on-one interview with Dr Sue Bradford and talks about her life in politics and activism.
Watch this compelling interview by following the link below!
We begin with our first Activist-in-Residence Dr Sue Bradford and her public talk called “Social Movements, Party Politics, and Structural Transformation.”
Please find the link below:
Sessions: The Reading Group will meet once a month in the academic year
When: 12:30, Monday, 18 February 2019
Venue: SSTE2.42, Social Science Tower Extension
Chapters 2 and 3 of Franz Fanon’s “Black Skin White Masks”
Book – Black Skin White Masks – link to the book!
ISSUE2. (NOVEMBER 2018)
Dr. Sue Bradford & Prof. Mohan Dutta
In this advocacy brief, we examine the transformative capacity of collaboration between academics and activists offering a pivotal anchor for local-national-global resistance. In the white paper on academic-activist partnerships,
Dr. Sue Bradford and Professor Mohan Dutta draw from their journeys in academia and activist organizing to
examine the intersections, synergies, challenges to, and lessons for academic activist partnerships. Questioning
the meaning of collaboration and the nature of collaborative spaces in social change, the authors offer a
conceptual framework for collaboration that joins in solidarity with the struggles of the oppressed.
by Prof. Mohan Dutta
It was summer. A summer when the violence escalated.
In those months, when the repression accelerated from polite threats to sit down meetings to direct threats to the accusations, I was writing this encyclopedia entry on Power and Control for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication.
Witnessing power work through the cells of my body, feeling my body respond to the repression from bouts of throwing up to losing consciousness, disrupted my understanding of power as communicative, anchoring the discursive sites of power in material articulations.
I felt the brute effect of power even as I was writing about it.
My readings and re-readings of Marx, Adorno, Gramsci were intimately intertwined with my experiences with power, resisting it, and negotiations of it in an ever-contingent space of (im)possibilities.
In this Review, I explore the interplays of the discursive and the material in the production of power and control. Power is both a force that perpetuates oppression as well as a vital source of emancipatory resistance. The review works through the question of power from interpersonal and organizational levels to political, economic, and societal realms. It attends to the contemporary context of power in the digital, circulated through structures and networks of data, in the surveillance and manipulation of behaviors, and the continuous search for extractive sites for digital capital.
Here is the link to the article:
APA citation:
Dutta, M. (2018). Power and control in communication studies. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Oxford University Press. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.636
by Prof. Mohan Dutta
Much of the terms of internationalization of Communication as a discipline driven by the International and National Communication Associations are juxtaposed in the backdrop of the proliferation of the Communication discipline outside of the U.S. Across Asia, from China and India to Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Bangladesh, communication programs have proliferated at an exponential rate.
The growing communication sectors across Asia call for pedagogical opportunities that train the next generation of communication practitioners across Asia. Communication training in many parts of Asia is driven by practical industry needs for communication skills. Programs therefore focus on teaching the basic skills of journalism, marketing communication, advertising, and public relations. Although the nature of communication training varies across sub-regions and nation states within Asia, the overarching emphasis on skills training for the professional communication industries is a thread that flows throughout the region.
Whereas many of these communication programs are driven by the exponential growth in the number of communication opportunities across Asia, other programs have specifically developed as significant spaces for doing communication research/scholarship. In these programs, the teaching of communication is coupled with a serious commitment to develop strengths in communication research.
It is worth noting that a number of communication programs across Asia rank among the top Communication programs across the globe, certainly placing at the top in rankings charts and in the global metric games. This is indeed an excellent sign of the internationalization of the discipline, to the extent that rankings are accepted as measures of legitimacy and/or respectability.
The proliferation of communication programs as acknowledged sites of knowledge production across Asia is an important anchor to the ongoing de-westernization of the field, at least to the extent these rankings point toward a certain sense of legitimacy and respectability. The parochial US-centrism of the discipline is at the very least disrupted by the publication of the rankings, which introduce into the cognitive schema of Communication the existence of spaces of communication knowledge production outside of the U.S. mainstream.
However, even as we increasingly have these diverse sites of knowledge production across Asia, what really do the rankings imply? Although these rankings provide important anchors to de-centering the discipline, it is worth noting that the rankings themselves are US-centric. Organizations such as Times Higher Education, US News, QS are U.S.-Eurocentric organizations, with their economic infrastructures, revenue models, and histories rooted in U.S. and Europe. Although these organizations have spent significant efforts in internationalizing their sampling frame, the very metrics they draw upon are US/Euro-centric.
Consider for instance, the rankings of research reputation and research productivity. Measures of research impact and productivity draw from knowledge database corporations such as Elsevier (which owns Scopus) and Clarivate Analytics (which owns Journal Citation Reports). These databases cull through data on productivity and impact (measured as citation), aggregate them, and offer impact impact metrics for counting the research outputs of faculty members.
These research outputs are then aggregated to offer metrics of impact for the comparison of programs, including programs in Communication.
The knowledge database corporations are U.S./Eurocentric corporations, located/centered in the US/Europe. The databases are U.S./Eurocentric, drawing their publication and citation data from largely U.S.-based/Europe-based journals. Asian institutions seeking to maximize their global reputation through rankings therefore strategically invest in hiring scholars that demonstrate their ability to publish in US/European journals, implementing strict, parochial, and ever-accelerating publication metrics in evaluation and retention processes. The rankings therefore work as instruments for pushing Communication programs across Asia toward a hegemonic US/Euro-centric standard, legitimized through US/Euro-centric journals. The patterns of hiring, retention, and promotion within Asian institutions therefore replicate the U.S. hegemony, albeit with Asian flavour. Asian academics, mostly trained in the U.S., are hired into Asian institutions, and are then disciplined with strategies of measurement that foreground and reproduce the hegemony of U.S. and European journals as sites of knowledge production and circulation. In Asian institutions chasing rankings, the h-indices and total citation counts work toward producing techniques of disciplining with greater vigor than institutions in the U.S. and Europe. This explains the recent proliferation of Asian scholarship in Communication, albeit reproducing the U.S. hegemonic assumptions, with signposts to Asian difference.
The journals of the discipline, centered in the U.S. and Europe, hegemonically push the production of Communication knowledge through the hegemonic roles played by databases, data aggregators, and rankings.
Now, one might suggest that internationalizing the discipline of Communication enables the work of de-centering the discipline. Unfortunately, with the editorial boards, editorships, and reviewing bodies of most journals primarily composed of U.S.-based academics, the scope for internationalization is limited. More importantly the very criteria for evaluating scholarship, for the evaluation of quality, and the rules of publishing in Communication are grounded in US-based logics. Even as the field is internationalized, say with editorial board members from Japan, Singapore, China, and India, the overarching codes of the discipline remain embedded within the narrow logics of U.S. communication academe. One might argue that while the recruitment of a Chinese or an Indian scholar to the board of a top Communication journal is an important entry point, it is worth noting that the Chinese or Indian scholar invited to serve on an editorial board of a top journal has usually been disciplined into the techniques of the discipline, often a product of the U.S.-based methods of disciplining.
Theorizing from Asia as a result is often an incremental addition to U.S.-centric theorizing. The hegemonic formation of U.S.-based theorizing is left intact, with some notion of Asian culture as essence (consider for instance the scores on individualism/collectivism, itself an Eurocentric construct) offered as a mediator or moderator variable. Asia as a contruct emerges as a cultural appendage, offered as an outpost of U.S.-centric Communication theory. Consider for instance the theorizing of social capital and political participation from China that predicts the relationship between social capital and political participation. The data-driven piece does so without taking into account Maoist philosophy, the organizing of community life in China under a socialist framework, and the nature of political participation. Consider similarly a piece on public opinion toward LGBTQ rights in Singapore that does so without taking into account the authoritarian state structure, multicultural values, and political pressure on civil society in Singapore. In such instances, although the published manuscripts do indeed internationalize the discipline, in reproducing U.S.-centric methods and conceptual categories, they fail to seriously engage with social phenomena in Asian contexts.
The fundamental assumptions of Communication, embedded in the Cold War/imperial liberal notions of capitalism and democracy are left intact, without engaging with the many opportunities for de-centering the liberal hegemony that emerge from/in Asia. Theorizing from Asia shaped in the contours of the disciplinary mechanisms, disconnected from Asia, is reduced to reproducing U.S. hegemony.
Blogspot Link: https://culture-centered.blogspot.com/2018/11/theorizing-from-asia-as-replication-of.html
Image Source: timeshighereducation.com