CARE White Paper Launch: White Paper On Hindutva Organizations In Aotearoa on Monday, 14th August 2023 with Prof. Mohan Dutta, Balamohan Shingade & Richa Sharma.
Joins us LIVE at 7 pm NZST via Facebook and YouTube to learn more about this important CARE White Paper on the Hindutva.
Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation is proud to launchCARE White Paper Issue #18: Māori-Migrant solidarities in resisting white supremacy with Tina Ngata & Prof. Mohan Dutta in two versions including the community version 1.0 as below.
This opinion piece is the second of a five-part series on the organised attack of the far right on communication and media studies pedagogy. This ecosystem has picked me as a sample case for all that is wrong with the discipline as a propaganda instrument of what it terms the “Left Woke Agenda.”
Moreover, it delivers a political market. That’s why hate proliferates in election cycles, building up to elections. Whether it is Modi’s Hindutva, Bolsonaro’s Brazilian Christo-fascism, or Trump’s white supremacist Christian nationalism, far-right authoritarian strategies depend on hate to take over democratic processes and spaces. One of the cornerstones in the political mobilisation of the far-right across these movements is the attack on education and learning, seeking to replace critical education with propaganda upholding the majoritarian ideology (consider here the convergence in the attacks on history curricula), activated around drummed-up fears of what the youth are being fed in schools. Moreover, the ideology seeks to redo learning as a vocation and technique, framing critical pedagogy as propaganda that doesn’t belong in the classroom.
At its core, the mobilisation of hate to attack pedagogy seeks to retain power in the hands of the elite.
Hate lies at the core of the neoliberal attack on public resources. Conservative political parties, think tanks, and media work hand-in-hand to mobilise hate as a strategy for organising systemic attacks on public services, public education, and public pensions etcetera. Consider the mobilisation of attacks on critical race theory as part of this broader agenda of attacking public schools, catalysing the privatisation of education, an agenda aggressively pursued by right-wing think tanks in the United States, and globally, with key ideas originating from the US right-wing infrastructure.
In a speech delivered at the National Archives Museum in 2020, Trump attacked critical race theory by stating that it encourages “deceptions, falsehoods and lies” by the “left-wing cultural revolution”.
Suggesting that students in US universities are inundated with what he terms “critical race theory propaganda,” Trump said, “This is a Marxist doctrine holding that America is a wicked and racist nation, that even young children are complicit in oppression, and that our entire society must be radically transformed. Critical race theory is being forced into our children’s schools, it’s being imposed into workplace trainings, and it’s being deployed to rip apart friends, neighbours, and families.”
The Trump ban on critical race theory, formally known as Executive Order 13950, catalysed systemic attacks on the teaching of critical race theory across institutions by far-right politicians in all but one US states, threatening schools with the loss of funds. Higher education institutions are at the core of the targeted attack by the far-right because research and teaching around critical thought and analysis, reasoned argumentation, and informed public discourse are seen as originating from these institutions. This organised attack on Critical Race Theory, funded by dark money, forms a core infrastructure of the far-right, mainstreamed into right-wing policies targeting Critical Race Theory globally (see examples of the attacks in the UK, Australia, and in Aotearoa New Zealand). Here, the agenda is pushed by various far-right groups, including the group Family First, finding its way into mainstream political rhetoric.
The global mobilisation of right-wing attacks on critical race theory is reflective of the influential role of the US in disseminating the far-right ideology, offering the discursive infrastructure for potential US interference in democratic processes across spaces. Atlas Network, a US-based global network of right-wing policy infrastructures, actively pushes policies promoting privatisation, interfering with political processes and inserting right-wing neoliberal frames into electoral systems. Atlas Network receives funding from a range of actors including the US State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the infamous Koch Foundation. Consider here the role of the Atlas Network in shaping Latin American politics, and in shaping the wholesale privatisation of the public sectors.
Professor Mohan Dutta
Why communication studies threatens misinformation
The infrastructure of hate is built on misinformation.
As I have documented in my scholarship, a core strategy for crafting misinformation is communicative inversion, the mobilisation of symbols to turn materiality on its head.
For example, in the hideous communicative infrastructure of the far-right, the beauty of organising in communities that have been historically marginalised by settler colonial structures to secure better health outcomes, growing food gardens, advocating for safe play areas, and participating in preventive activities is turned on its head, projected as part of a nefarious radical agenda.
For the far-right, historically marginalised communities having a say in policy-making, undoing the erasures that have been carefully scripted into settler colonial structures, is part of a global conspiracy for radical takeover. The conspiracy web of the Alt-Right sees Neo-Marxist agenda in spaces where racially marginalised communities are empowered to participate in health decision-making processes to transform the unconscionable health inequities that whitesettler colonies are plagued by.
Some of the profound contributions made by the discipline of communication studies include the examination of the underlying processes that drive misinformation, strategies for countering misinformation through digital literacy and community-grounded approaches, and communication solutions for building social cohesion. Communication scholars are the frontiers of developing practical solutions that address global inequalities, poverty, hunger, and climate change, among many other grand challenges. During my tenure serving as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Applied Communication Research, I came away awed by the quality of scholarship in the discipline, across paradigms and theoretical orientations, across sub-disciplinary spaces, contributing to solving practical problems.
In our team of researchers spread across seven countries, I am impressed by the power of communication in solving problems experienced by the marginalised. When those who have been systematically erased hold the power to tell their stories, dominant forms of disenfranchisement are challenged and transformed, creating spaces for solutions that are sustainable.
It is this transformative power of communication (especially research that maps and responds to misinformation) that threatens entrenched power structures that produce misinformation and profit from it.
Alt-right’s attack on diversity, equity and inclusion
The organised white supremacist attack on social science research on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) reflects the ways in which entrenched power is threatened by impactful scholarship. Empirically-based community-engaged scholarship, built on painstaking social science research embedded in communities, is communicatively inverted, portrayed as an elaborate conspiracy hatched by an elite cabal threatening white civilisation.
Through layers of communicative inversions, scholarship on and pedagogy of DEI is labelled as racist and anti-white by white supremacists, finding a core audience base of voters organised around hate.
Academics researching and writing about inequities have been targeted with the “racist” label.
Now turning to the hit piece targeting communication and media studies I analysed earlier, I demonstrated that journalist and blogger Karl du Fresne seems to have very little understanding of the scholarly process. His construction of a global elite promoting a radical agenda is a communicative inversion of the propaganda such attacks on social justice scholarship perpetuate to protect the interests of political and economic elites. I also note here the communicative inversions that have been performed by du Fresne in attacking experts studying disinformation and hate in Aotearoa (I’m purposefully not linking those pieces here to avoid feeding the disinformation flow). Pay attention here to the online misogyny and violence, including death threats, that have been directed at the Director of the Disinformation Project, Kate Hannah.
Representing the people?
Referring to my research programme, du Fresne writes:
“The poor working schmucks whose taxes fund these institutions have no knowledge of, and even less control over, the radical agendas they enable. Unfortunately the same is true of New Zealand taxpayers who involuntarily fund activist academics and their tireless promotion of a world view that’s at odds with that of the majority of New Zealanders.”
This strategy of “speaking for the people” is often mobilised by the far-right in organising attacks on academics. In fact, across the globe, emanating largely from the US, the organised far-right attacks on academic freedom are shaped by populist rhetoric. Propagandists draw on majoritarian appeal to mobilise outside attacks on expertise, in the process seeking to destroy internal processes of institutional checks and balances within democracies. Paradoxically then, the language of accountability to taxpayers is mobilised as a critical tool by the far right in the systemic attack on institutions.
Far-right media and politicians assign themselves the role of speaking for taxpayers, concerned community members, and concerned parents (these are the three key stakeholders that the far-right assigns itself as representing) as they have taken over boards of educational institutions and passed laws directly threatening academic freedom.
Simultaneously, the far-right represents the agendas of the political and economic elite, and actively seeks to silence the voices of communities at the margins organising for change. Note the communicative inversion that erases the agency of everyday people as the discourse sets itself up to speak for the people.
Consider the condescension with which du Fresne approaches everyday citizens, whom he labels as “poor working schmucks.” This is the irony of populist far-right rhetoric that seeks to mobilise popular sentiments by fundamentally undermining the public’s capacity to know. Note also the target of the attack on institutions of democracy, specifically universities in this instance.
Far-right propagandists assign themselves the role of safeguarding ignorant publics from a sinister plot by elites seeking to take over power while actually silencing the voices of communities at the margins and safeguarding elite power and control. Note the convergence with the Trump propaganda machine that actively works to project Trump as a representative of the people in opposition to elite power, inverting the large-scale economic power held by him and his network.
The far right’s attack on education, specifically humanities and social science education, is shaped by a broader strategy that sees critical questioning as threatening to entrenched power structures. The organised attacks specifically on critical humanities and social science knowledge in the US, emergent from the Infowars-Trump-Bannon-Fox ecosystem seek to protect and perpetuate the entrenched power structures, performed as a grievance.
Moreover, du Fresne’s paragraph assumes that the “majority of New Zealanders” are at odds with a justice-based worldview (assuming that’s what he is referring to). Du Fresne doesn’t back this fairly large claim with evidence. It is worth interrogating which is the majority du Fresne is referring to.
Xenophobic hate speech in response to du Fresne’s blog.
Two worlds of credentials and academic freedoms
The article then goes on to undermine my credentials – whatever du Fresne can gather up from his google search! Including:
“Dutta also appears to be good at bigging up his CV with awards and appointments – obligingly conferred, no doubt, by people who share an interest in pushing the same agendas. Demonstrations of mutual admiration are an essential part of the academic career path.”
That he doesn’t really understand how the academic community works is evidenced once again. The silly caricature of the academic community demonstrates that du Fresne has no empirical understanding of the ways in which academic awards are organised, the peer review processes that constitute academic impact, the metrics used for evaluating academics, and the nature of the evaluative processes. Once again, to actually learn about academic evaluation processes would require doing research, having an open mind, and being willing to learn.
In du Fresne’s conspiracy web, the awards I have received (not sure which ones he is referring to) have been “obligingly conferred” without a doubt “by people who share an interest in pushing the same agendas” (i.e. radical “left woke” agendas). Note how with one broad stroke he fits the entire discipline of communication (having erased sub-disciplinary areas, differences in paradigmatic approaches, etcetera.) and its major associations (mostly the National Communication Association and the International Communication Association, the two key international associations of communication academics that have conferred awards upon me) within this conspiracy web that is seemingly pushing a global agenda.
The global associations of communication studies and the standards of recognition of scholarly impact within the discipline become part of du Fresne’s conspiracy web. Note then the blanket statement about mutual admiration that apparently drives academic career paths.
I can’t help but note the hypocrisy in the framing being used here and contrast it to an earlier article I came across on his blog where du Fresne is advocating for academic freedom.
On July 29, 2021, he penned a support letter titled “dismal setback for academic freedom” defending the Listener Seven, the academics who had penned the letter stating mātauranga Māori is not science and had then received pushback from academics across the globe for the racist tropes reflected in the letter. In that defence, de Fresne depicted the Listener Seven letter writers as “respected academics.”
Within the same piece, he launched a vitriolic attack on the esteemed Māori sociologist Professor Joanna Kidman, referring derisively to the fact that she is a sociologist. Du Fresne has carried out this obsessive attack on Professor Kidman on diverse platforms. He seems to be concerned about the reputation of New Zealand (among global academics) which apparently has taken a hit because of the critiques of the Listener Seven letter, largely led by tangata whenua academics.
So who among us academics in du Fresne’s world is worthy of earning the label “respected?”
Take as one example Associate Professor of Education Dr Elizabeth Rata, one of the Listener Seven letter writers. By measures of academic impact, Dr Rata’s google scholar citation states that she has an h-index of 25 and total citation of 2347. Note also that her publications are largely in the social sciences. Communication and sociology as disciplines don’t belong in du Fresne’s vision of the academe in Aotearoa, but apparently education does!
For du Fresne, Dr Rata is counted among heretics for her uninformed critique of mātauranga Māori (in the world du Fresne inhabits, academics critiquing its position in science are performing their role as “critics and conscience”), earning her the title “respected,” while the rest of us are lumped into a radical cabal, as part of a conspiratorial elite. The same global community that is apparently losing respect for Aotearoa because of a counter letter written by academics critiquing the Listener Seven is part of a radical cabal when it comes to social justice scholarship.
Paradoxically, I note here that none of the Listener Seven academics being defended by du Fresne are qualified mātauranga Māori scholars – here’s an excellent analysis of Dr Rata’s attack on Kaupapa Māori by Dr Leonie Pihama.
It is not surprising at all that du Fresne, with his bald-faced hypocrisy, is the face of advocacy for academic freedom on the website of the Free Speech Union. Here’s his defence of the Listener Seven on the union’s website:
“In the latest outbreak of the speech wars, the action has shifted to a new and worrying arena. Seven respected university academics found themselves effectively blacklisted in July after they wrote a letter to The Listener challenging the notion that matauranga Maori – which can be defined as the traditional body of Maori knowledge – should be accorded the same status as science, as proposed by an NCEA working group preparing a new school curriculum.
“In an unprecedented pile-on, more than 2000 fellow academics, urged on by Professors Shaun Hendy and Siouxsie Wiles, signed a letter denouncing the Listener Seven and implying they condoned “scientific racism”. The response went well beyond legitimate disagreement. The sheer weight and vehemence of the denunciation sent an unmistakable message to the academic community: express dissent at your peril.”
By du Fresne’s standards, unsubstantiated claims by academics unqualified in a subject area is academic freedom and academics challenging those unsubstantiated claims are silencing dissent. Note here also the communicative inversion of power – the hegemonic ideology of colonial whiteness that continues to erase and denigrate Indigenous knowledge is turned into a dissenting view at the margins.
What this makes amply clear is that the version of academic freedom subscribed to by the Free Speech Union is one that doesn’t really understand the concept of academic freedom, and instead promotes a far-right agenda. His mobilisation for academic freedom is thoroughly uninformed, selective, and dangerously aligned with the global Alt-right’s strategic deployment of free speech to attack social justice scholarship in universities, destabilise universities and other democratic institutions, and promote conspiracy theories that mobilise majoritarian hate to uphold hegemonic power.
The foreign import scare
Du Fresne’s article then wraps up with this:
“Fourth, and perhaps most important, we can reasonably deduce that Dutta is yet another import who has embedded himself in the tertiary education system and uses his privileged position to white-ant the society that provides his living. Explicit in his profile is a commitment to radical change; whether New Zealanders want it or approve of it is immaterial.”
His deduction here is that I am an import of the wrong kind (of course, ignoring his status as manuhiri in Aotearoa). Observe closely the language that constructs me, an ethnic migrant, as embedding myself in the tertiary education system with the supposed agenda of corroding New Zealand society from within.
The anti-immigrant hate reflective of white supremacy is exaggerated and amplified by the racist audience of the blogpost.
Note here the anti-immigrant hate that is shared, replete with the dehumanising construction of foreigners as “monsters prowling and devouring our culture.” Also note the ways in which this narrative exists in continuity with the mainstreaming of anti-immigrant hate in Aotearoa New Zealand.
The scare-mongering foreign import narrative targets social justice scholarship (erasing the actual history of organising for social justice in Aotearoa) while obfuscating the US-led far-right agenda. Note here the influence of the US government as well as organisations such as Koch Foundation that deploys hate to mobilise large-scale privatisation of economies globally. It creates a seductive trope for recruiting members organised around the fear of foreign ideologies contaminating the minds of children and youth.
That this hate percolates into the mainstream of New Zealand media and politics is of grave concern to democracy here.
Professor Mohan 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-centered, community-based projects of social change, advocacy, and activism that articulate health as a human right. He is a member of the board of the International Communication Association.
This opinion piece is part of a five-part series on the organised attack of the far right on communication and media studies pedagogy. This ecosystem has picked me as a sample case for all that is wrong with the discipline as a propaganda instrument of what it terms the “Left Woke Agenda.”
I had not heard the name Karl du Fresne. Apparently he’s a New Zealand journalist and blogger writing opinion pieces for The Platform – an outlet that has in the past circulated misinformation, hosted conspiracy theories, and participated in practices that might be considered unethical by journalistic standards.
Karl du Fresne, a key propagandist in this attack (Image source: Robert Kitchin/stuff; www.stuff.co.nz website)
Earlier this month, a journalist reached out to me on Twitter, sharing that du Fresne had written a hit piece for The Platform targeting me. They commiserated with me, sharing how they were also the target of an attack carried out by du Fresne earlier, directed at their employer and attacking their livelihood.
Fairly certain what the attack might look like, given the organised campaign by the far-right infrastructure targeting the academic freedom of scholars writing on issues of social justice (particularly racial and gender justice) and challenges around the Sustainable Development Goals (specifically gender equality, reduced inequality and climate change) across the globe (largely imported from the US-Infowars-Bannon-Trump-DeSantis-Tucker-Carlson hate machinery), I was curious to explore what a New Zealand take on this ecosystem would look like.
Unfortunately, what I found when I dug up the article was a shabby hit piece, replete with its uninspiring tediousness, parroting the far-right conspiracy themes from the Infowars-Trump-Bannon universe, and demonstrative of the organised attack on critical literacy directed at silencing the questioning of entrenched forms of power in society.
The article begins with the title “A blank canvas for stokers of the culture wars.” The framing of the title, portraying Aotearoa as a blank canvas, juxtaposed against the “stokers of culture wars” phrase gives away the racist ideology that drives the article.
To frame Aotearoa as a blank canvas for supposedly imported conspiracists like me (more on this later), du Fresne has to erase tangata whenua and the history of Māori activism against colonisation, racism, and white supremacy. The suggestion that stokers of culture wars are bringing in our “outsider” and therefore, impure ideologies of social justice in Aotearoa is racist, both in erasing long-held Māori leadership in struggles for justice here and globally, and in marking me, an ethnic migrant, as the wrong kind of migrant bringing in dangerous ideas that are corrupting Aotearoa by “stoking culture wars.”
Du Fresne also strategically obfuscates his own familial history as Tangata Tiriti, as manuhiri (visitor or guest) to this land.
As the article rolls on with its rhetorical fallacies, it seems obvious that what du Fresne seems to have an issue with is the fact that I teach and research at a University in Aotearoa. As a way to set up his attack, he targets the language that describes my programme of research on the Massey University website, suggesting the language used on the website is part of a radical conspiracy. He copies and pastes extensively from the website, stating that the description is “written in a dialect that most people would find almost incomprehensible.”
In democracies, it is the work of journalists to do the critical work of translating scholarship for the public. Of course, for bloggers such as du Fresne speaking to a right-wing conspiracy web while posing as a journalist, that would be too much work. Such work would entail doing research and learning, calling on critical pedagogy that is cultivated through rigorous journalism education, grounded in communication and media theory, participating in critical analyses of power (especially when reporting on social science and humanities scholarship), and drawing on critical engagement with questions of ethics in reporting.
Suggesting that making the language incomprehensible is purposeful and part of a larger conspiracy, du Fresne then goes on to write:
“Elite groups have always used their own coded jargon to project (and protect) their power, to enhance their aura of exclusivity and to impress the impressionable. The object is not to explain, as most language strives to do, but to obscure, presumably in the hope that no one will detect its phony portentousness. No one does this stuff better than neo-Marxist academics.”
Note here the slippery slope du Fresne embarks on, placing me as part of an elite group and implying that this group is part of a global conspiracy web to uphold and perpetuate power. This elite group does so through propaganda. In the conspiracy web that du Fresne cooks up, this elite group seeks to establish a Marxist global order, and it does so through the use of “coded jargon.”
His conspiracy draws directly from the misinformation-based discursive frames weaved by the Alt-Right. In this conspiracy web woven together by white supremacists, a global Communist conspiracy is being ushered in by Marxists, working alongside and/or being funded by the Chinese Communist Party, and intertwined with the agendas of the World Economic Forum, United Nations etcetera to secretly rule the world.
For the far right, the framing of the teaching of theories of social justice in the academe as Marxist conspiracy works as a strategy for silencing the voices of Indigenous, Black, and migrants of colour communities. The white supremacist hegemony of the far-right sees the organising for justice from the margins as threatening to the status quo. Its conspiracy web therefore communicatively inverts materiality, inverting historic processes of racist marginalisation on their head to portray voices advocating for social justice as the elites occupying power.
Another communicative inversion performed here by du Fresne is the framing of social justice scholarship as an imported idea, all along inverting the direct replication of American far-right talking points in the article. The actual “culture wars” that are imported into Aotearoa are the far-right mobilisation of white supremacist cultural nationalism to attack academic freedom, in direct violation of the Education Act 1989, section 268 of the Education and Training Act 2020, and in continuity with the racist settler colonial infrastructure of Aotearoa.
Du Fresne then goes on – “The university system is awash with this gibberish – a fact that would be comical if we weren’t paying for it.”
Accountability to the taxpayer is one of the key resources in the mobilisation of the far-right. Designating themselves as gatekeepers, as representatives and advocates of the voices of the tax payer, far-right individuals and organisations launch their attacks on academic freedom by claiming that the research and teaching on questions of social justice are a waste of taxpayer money.
In portraying an entire body of scholarship (in this case, my research programme exploring the structural determinants of health inequalities and the communicative strategies for addressing these inequities) as gibberish, du Fresne demonstrates his lack of credibility as a journalist. He doesn’t really understand the scholarly process, much like other demagogues in this category who seek to find relevance through organised attacks based on heuristics.
The process of academic peer review, albeit with its multiple limitations, based on the participation in a rigorous peer review process by a community of scholars, establishes the credibility of knowledge. Within the academic community of experts, knowledge is contested, theories are offered and tested, and concepts subjected to empirical examination in an ongoing process of scholarly engagement. Any journalist writing about academic research programmes is expected to do the homework to understand how scholarly knowledge is produced, be ready to study the research programme, and equip oneself then to report on it. This process of engagement calls for deep reading, based on rigour. Of course, for bloggers such as du Fresne, this sort of painstaking and rigorous work is not conducive to generating superficial memes that speak to the conspiracy web.
Du Fresne cherry picks some examples from my research programme:
“The second conclusion we can reach on the basis of his profile is that Dutta is adept, like many of his ilk, at tapping into public funds – in this case from the AHRQ, which is part of the US Department of Health, and the National University of Singapore (NUS). The poor working schmucks whose taxes fund these institutions have no knowledge of, and even less control over, the radical agendas they enable.”
Once again, to comment upon specific research projects would call for actually educating oneself on the nuts and bolts of the research (not just google a webpage!). The US$1.5 million grant, funded by the Agency for HealthCare Research and Quality that he refers to, built on my research programme on the culture-centered approach, a framework I have developed over two decades of community engaged-health communication research that is recognised as a significant programme of research that has shaped the discipline, was designed to co-create a framework for disseminating the evidence-based comparative effectiveness research on heart health medications among the underserved African American communities in Lake and Marion Counties of the US. African American communities in the US experience disproportionate burdens of heart disease.
In this backdrop, the community-led culture-centered intervention, co-created through partnership with a range of African American organisations, and evaluated through a quasi-experimental community-based design, was effective in building community knowledge of heart health prevention and treatment. This intervention is an example of the sort of social impact generated by theory-driven scholarship. It is therefore both ironic and absolutely reflective of the disenfranchising agenda of white supremacy that du Fresne would target the AHRQ funded programme, framing it as being driven by a radical agenda (more on this in a follow-up piece).
You might ask, ‘Why does du Fresne pick on the AHRQ-funded intervention?’ For propagandists in the Alt-Right ecosystem, community health initiatives led by racially marginalised and historically oppressed communities is radical agenda. For these propagandists, reducing inequities in health outcomes is radical agenda. For the propaganda infrastructure of hate, historically marginalised communities having a voice in decision-making is radical agenda. Because the social order they so miss and would like to continue perpetuating is one where white supremacy rules, uncontested and unchallenged.
As I noted earlier, such propaganda in Aotearoa also has to erase the history of organising against health inequalities by Māori and the extensive body of Kaupapa Māori-based literature challenging these health inequalities to somehow make up the propaganda narrative that such ideas of health justice are imported ideas from the US, all the while parroting the US-based white supremacist agenda.
Professor Mohan 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-centered, community-based projects of social change, advocacy, and activism that articulate health as a human right. He is a member of the board of the International Communication Association.
Our work at CARE: Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation is held up by the support of an entire collective. We take this opportunity to express our gratitude to the outgoing Pro-Vice Chancellor of Massey Business School, Professor Stephen Kelly. Professor Kelly’s leadership and strong support for our impact-based research have been integral to sustaining our journey.
Bio: Anjum Rahman is the founder of the Inclusive Aotearoa Collective Tāhono. She is a chartered accountant with over 25 years’ experience, working with a range of entities in the commercial, farming and not-for-profit sectors.
She also commits to various volunteer roles in the community. She was a founding member of the Islamic Women’s Council of New Zealand, an organisation formed in 1990 to bring Muslim women together and represent their concerns, and is currently the media spokesperson. She has also been a founding member and trustee of Shama, Ethnic Women’s Trust, which supports ethnic minority women through its social work service, life-skills classes and community development. She has worked in the area of sexual violence prevention both as a volunteer and as part of Government working groups. Anjum is a Trustee of Trust Waikato, a major funder in the Waikato Region. Anjum has been an active member of the Waikato Interfaith Council for over a decade, a trustee of the Trust that governs Hamilton’s community access broadcaster, Free FM. She is a member of international committees dealing with violent extremist content online, being the co-chair of the Christchurch Call Advisory Network and a member of the Independent Advisory Committee of the Global Internet Forum for Countering Terrorism. She is also a member of the Charities and Not for Profit Commitee of Chartered Accountants Australia New Zealand.
CARE proudly welcomes Prof. Tanmoy Bhattacharya, Head Department of Linguistics, University of Delhi, as CARE ‘s visiting academic for the month of June 2023.
CARE extends a warm invite to all to join Prof. Tanmoy Bhattacharya’s lecture on Traditional Children’s Games in India: Reviving and Renewing Precolonial Inclusive Practices scheduled on 20th June 2023 in Manawatu in collaboration with Palmerston North City Library & Manawatu Multicultural Council (MMC)
See event details below:
CARE VISITING LECTURE SERIES: Traditional Children’s Games in India: Reviving and Renewing Precolonial Inclusive Practices with Prof. Tanmoy Bhattacharya, University of Delhi
Talk Abstract
Traditional Children’s Games in India: Reviving and Renewing Precolonial Inclusive Practices
In this talk I question the western disability studies theories of inclusion and show they can be unpacked and informed through simple notions of innovations through informality. Various traditional Indian children’s games are analysed to show how they teach us ways of including the disabled child in innovative ways. The talk addresses both the theory and politics of the condition of postcoloniality through an “attribute of subordination” reflected in the changing character of traditional children’s games in India.
DATE: 20th JUNE 2023 | TIME: 12:00 PM NZST
Venue: Second Floor, Palmerston North City Library-Central Library
@CAREMasseyNZ@mjdutt invites you to join our Visiting Lecturer talk by Prof. Tanmoy Bhattacharya @tanmoylinguist@UnivofDelhi on Traditional Children’s Games in India: Reviving and Renewing Precolonial Inclusive Practices on 20 June @ 12PM 2Flr @pncitylibrary Links below (1/4)
It is our pleasure to congratulate Christine Ngā Hau Elers for successfully defending her powerfully transformative dissertation, “Theorising Māori health and wellbeing in a whakapapa paradigm: Voices from the margins” with flying colours, passing without amendments. The dissertation was co-supervised by Professors Mohan Dutta and Helen Moewaka-Barnes.
The external reviewers, Distinguished Professor Graham Hingagaroa Smith, Professor Debashish Munshi, and Professor Shaunak Sastry commented about the brilliance of the work and the intervention it creates in the world at the intersections of Kaupapa Māori and the CCA. They noted the depth of the generative narratives emergent from her engaged scholarship, the rigour of her research design, and the theoretical robustness of the conceptual framework emergent from the scholarship. Distinguished Professor Graham Hingagaroa Smith pointed to the pathbreaking nature of the dissertation in opening up pathways for addressing health disparities and addressing upstream structural determinants of health.
Christine is the first Māori wāhine and Indigenous scholar-activist to have led and completed a dissertation that brings the decolonising register of the CCA in dialogue with Kaupapa Māori.
Writing from within an Indigenous land struggle that she participated in with her body, she demonstrates with her dissertation what it means to theorize with her body on the line. All three reviewers commented on the concept of authenticity as a theoretical contribution that grows out of her work, and that is depicted powerfully in the methods through which she engages the dissertation.
Celebrating the dissertation, noted Professor Dutta, “Personally, I learned over the last four years from Christine what it means to struggle with integrity against a settler colonial structure that shapes the vastly unequal health outcomes. She undertook multiple layers of challenges and faced them with courage as she undertook the journey of listening to Māori voices that are systematically erased by the settler colonial structure.”
We at CARE are proud of you Christine and proud of your work that demonstrates the organising role of Indigenous communication in building infrastructures for social justice and resisting climate colonialism.
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
