Tag: #AcademicFreedom

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Professor Mohan Dutta receives 2024 Global Communication Award

Professor Dutta has been recognised for his pioneering work in de-westernising communication research and promoting social justice through community-led initiatives.

Professor Mohan Dutta.

Professor Mohan Dutta, Dean’s Chair Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University has been named as the winner of the 2024 Global Communication Award from the National Communication Association (NCA).

The Global Communication Award recognises distinguished communication scholarship that de-westernises ways of knowing and doing, focuses on regions, communities, or spaces outside of the United States (US) and Europe, integrates and cites international and global scholars, theories, approaches and/or methodologies in their scholarship and amplifies the global ecologies of knowledges.

Through his scholarship spanning three decades, Professor Dutta has created new openings for communication research and theory of/from the Global South, decentring the North Atlantic dominance of communication studies. He developed the culture-centred approach as a communication theory for conceptualising the ways in which communities of the Global South have been historically marginalised by the intertwined processes of colonialism, racial capitalism and imperialism.

His research programme, created in partnership with communities struggling against these marginalising forces, seeks to build voice infrastructures for community participation and decision-making in struggles for just futures. The academic-community partnerships he has created and sustained across the globe foster spaces for mobilising for social change.

From partnering with Adivasi (Indigenous) communities in Eastern India to build Indigenous-led community education programmes and cultural resources, to partnering with youth in the US Midwest to co-design an anti-tobacco advertising campaign and partnering with communities in Highbury and Feilding in Aotearoa New Zealand in co-creating community-owned food systems, violence prevention programmes and communication advocacy campaigns, the impulse of Professor Dutta’s work is rooted in securing justice.

The award citation states, “Dr Dutta evinces a deep commitment to social justice as a transnational project and has assiduously worked to forge ethical ties across different geopolitical terrains. Thus, Dr Dutta’s work continues to inspire scholars from marginalised communities, exemplifying the qualities of this award.”

An image excerpt from the IChooseHighbury campaign co-created by the Highbury Advisory Rōpū, built by tangata whenua community researchers at CARE in partnership with the community in Highbury.

Spanning 17 countries and four continents, the scope of Professor Dutta’s research and leadership, evidenced in his directorship of CARE, fosters the communication capacities of communities experiencing systemic disenfranchisement. Across local, national, regional and global spaces, the work of CARE builds sustainable linkages and connections among struggles for justice. The impact of Professor Dutta’s scholarship is evident in the power of community-led advocacy in influencing policies addressing social injustices. The community-led research collaborations he has built have shaped a wide array of community development projects, including community-owned food systems, hospitals, Indigenous cultural resources, educational infrastructures, systems for clean drinking water and community- and worker-owned advocacy and activist campaigns.

Professor Dutta says the award is a recognition of the global impact of the world-class research being carried out at CARE.

“It’s a collective of researchers, community organisers, advocates, activists and civil society organisations that actually carry out the work in community. The steadfast support of Massey University fuels our research programme.”

Since its relocation to New Zealand in 2018, CARE has carried out over 50 community-led social change projects addressing the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) around no poverty, good health and wellbeing, reduced inequalities, climate action, zero hunger, clean water and sanitation, sustainable cities and communities, peace, justice and strong institutions and partnerships for the goals.

The most recent scholarship of CARE, on challenging Islamophobia, builds partnerships with communities and civil society organisations in mapping online and offline Islamophobia, developing community-led culture-centred digital literacy programmes challenging Islamophobia and strengthening community capacities in securing peace. White papers and policy briefs derived from the research have played critical roles in shaping public policies around social cohesion and anti-racism.

The activist-in-residence programme, white papers and community and public dialogues offer templates for community-engaged scholarship with global reach. In addition, CARE regularly hosts international researchers, community organisers, civil society organisations and students from across the globe who are interested in learning about the culture-centred approach to social change. So far, it has trained over 100 researchers, community organisers and peer leaders on the principles and methods of the culture-centred approach. A documentary featuring the work of CARE is available here.

The international reach of Professor Dutta’s mentorship has been recognised with the Aubrey Fisher Mentorship Award and the NCA Health Communication Division’s award for outstanding contributions to promoting equity and inclusion. He also received the NCA Presidential citation for his contributions to de-centring the whiteness of the discipline through his public scholarship and activism.

Professor Dutta’s scholarship has also been recognised with the prestigious Charles H. Woolbert Research Award, the NCA’s Golden Anniversary Monograph Award, Applied Communication Award, the Bridge Award for Excellence in Connecting Crisis and Risk Communication Research and the International Communication Association’s Applied Public Policy Communication Researcher Award.

He is a Distinguished Scholar of the NCA and Fellow of the ICA.

About the National Communication Association (NCA)

The NCA advances communication as the discipline that studies all forms, modes, media and consequences of communication through humanistic, social scientific and aesthetic inquiry. The NCA serves the scholars, teachers and practitioners who are its members by enabling and supporting their professional interests in research and teaching.

Dedicated to fostering and promoting free and ethical communication, the NCA promotes the widespread appreciation of the importance of communication in public and private life, the application of competent communication to improve the quality of human life and relationships and the use of knowledge about communication to solve human problems. The NCA supports inclusiveness and diversity among their faculties, within their membership, in the workplace and in the classroom, and supports and promotes policies that fairly encourage this diversity and inclusion.

NCA’s annual awards will be bestowed on several distinguished members at the NCA 110th Annual Convention in New Orleans, Louisiana. Below is the list of those who will be honored at the awards presentation.

2024 National Award Winners

#ProfessorMohanDutta #GlobalCommunicationAward #NCA #CAREMassey #MasseyUniversity #CARECCA #CommunicationScholarship #DeWesternization #GlobalSouth #SocialJustice #CommunityEngagement #CARE #MasseyUniversity #CulturalCenteredApproach #VoiceInfrastructures #CommunityPartnerships #SocialChange #UNSDGs #Islamophobia #PublicScholarship #EquityAndInclusion #AcademicFreedom #CommunicationResearch #GlobalImpact

Source: Massey News- Professor Mohan Dutta receives 2024 Global Communication Award – Massey University & NCA

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Opinion: The Free Speech Union: Leaping from climate surveys to moral panic

Wednesday 18 September 2024 by Professor Mohan Dutta

Photo credit: Skitterphoto via Pixabay.

The trope of academic freedom in danger is a critical resource in the organised attack of the far-right on the modern university. One of the core techniques of the far-right in its efforts to destabilise academic institutions, is cook up a frenzy around free speech – intentionally conflating free speech issues with academic freedom. As an exemplar of the communicative inversions performed by the far-right, the panic around academic freedom is actually a critical tool in catalysing attacks on the academic freedom of decolonising practices in the university environment. What the far-right, and the underlying infrastructure of white supremacy is triggered by, is that universities are slowly transforming, starting to acknowledge that centuries of colonial epistemic violence have erased the knowledge infrastructures of colonised peoples.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, as I have demonstrated in my analyses, the Free Speech Union uses ideologically motivated faulty surveys to create panic around academic freedom. With a fundamentally incorrect understanding of academic freedom (the freedom of academics to teach and publish in their areas of expertise) that conflates it with free speech, the Union constructs its propaganda around specific ideological issues (Te Tiriti o Waitangi, gender justice, and so on) which are at the heart of the far- right’s culture war propaganda in Aotearoa.

In its most recent campaign, the Free Speech Union has turned to releasing leaked climate surveys to construct the argument that academic freedom is under threat in Aotearoa. Deploying the tactical tool of leaks, it builds an affective register around academic climates, suggesting these environments are threatening academic freedom.

In August, the Free Speech Union targeted the Law School at Auckland University of Technology (AUT), placing its propaganda around a leaked climate survey (to David Farrar, yes, the same David Farrar that runs the debunked Free Speech Union survey on academic freedom) that suggested faculty dissatisfaction. Commenting on the selective excerpts from the survey published on David Farrar’s blog, noted Jonathan Ayling, the Chief Executive of the Union:

“Academics are being criticised and punished for speaking out, causing them and others to resort to self-censorship. Again, results from an internal law school survey displayed very low levels of satisfaction. This included 30% claiming they feel uncomfortable reporting inappropriate behaviour and more than one-in-three respondents experiencing bullying in the past six months.”

Mr Ayling’s blog then reports on a letter sent out to the Minister of Education and the AUT Vice-Chancellor. When you look closely at the items shared on Mr Farrar’s blog however, there is not a single reported item on the blog that substantiates the claim “academics are being criticised and punished for speaking out.” You also won’t find an item that actually measures self-censorship.

In other words, the frame around threat to academic freedom that is part of the moral panic crafted by the Free Speech Union in its press release and the letter to the Minister of Education is not substantiated empirically. There is no evidence of academics being punished for speaking out, as Mr Ayling claims.

Professor Mohan Dutta.

Mr Farrar’s blog embellishes the ideological reading of the survey with leaked emails and speculations. The survey creates the opening for attacking the Dean of Law at AUT who had spoken out against the attack on the teaching of Tikanga Māori. Writes Mr Farrar: “Now readers will recall that the Dean of Law is Khylee Quince and she attracted a lot of publicity when she called a senior KC a racist dinosaur who should go off and die in the corner.” The blog wraps up by further constructing the Dean as threat to academic freedom:

“As you can see the results for the Law Faculty are much much lower than AUT as a whole. So this would suggest the major issue is not the central administration, but the faculty management itself. I am told by sources that everyone knows what the major problem is, but people are too scared to say so.”

Note here the slippage from the report of a leaked climate survey to hearsay – the architecture of gossip in: “everyone knows what the major problem is, but people are too scared to say so.”

It is worth noting the targeting of the AUT Dean of Law, Māori academic Khylee Quince, is part of a broader campaign targeting senior Māori academics (often women) who have spoken out publicly against the white supremacist structures that make up universities in settler colonial Aotearoa New Zealand, and their organised campaigns directed at erasing the decolonising registers that have been built through decades of struggle. The ideologically motivated campaign around academic freedom mobilised by Mr Farrar and Free Speech Union works on slippages to construct the narrative of academic freedom under threat. Implicit in this, is the positioning of Te Tiriti o Waitangi as a threat to academic freedom in Aotearoa.

Indeed, the academic climate of settler colonial universities, embedded in whiteness and mobilised to uphold white supremacy, has worked historically to erase decolonising registers of knowledge generation. Prevailing norms of whiteness have devalued and undermined Indigenous knowledge claims, often working aggressively to silence decolonising scholarship. The voices of Indigenous and postcolonial academics have historically been silenced, with the academic freedom to do decolonising scholarship severely constrained by the norms of whiteness, upheld by notions of civility and norms of communication within white academic structures.

As universities in Aotearoa New Zealand, as with universities across settler colonial spaces globally, have started their decolonising journeys around reconciliation and recognition of Indigenous rights, the far-right white supremacist campaign seeking to silence these efforts has worked incessantly to construct decolonisation as a threat to academic freedom. The implicit and explicit targeting of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the positioning of Te Tiriti in opposition to academic freedom must be read within the broader architecture of the global proliferation of white supremacist backlash against decolonisation. Any conversation on academic freedom must begin with the recognition that the far-right panic around academic freedom is a threat to the academic freedom of academics studying, teaching, researching and publicly engaging on decolonisation, postcolonial theory, critical race theory etc. It must also be noted that academics teaching and researching in these areas have historically faced diverse intersecting forms of marginalisation, harassment, and threats to their academic freedom.

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.

Article Source: Massey News

URL: https://www.massey.ac.nz/about/news/opinion-the-free-speech-union-leaping-from-climate-surveys-to-moral-panic/

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CARE Director’s Opinion: The right-wing version of academic freedom and communicative inversions by Prof. Mohan Dutta

For the far-right, free speech is the discursive trope organised to silence speech. This communicative inversion, the turning of materiality on its head through discursive tropes, is a communicative tool deployed by the right to hold up and perpetuate a broader culture of hate that targets Indigenous, people of colour, gender diverse, women, and diversely abled academics.

When the Newsroom story, Academics divided on their own freedoms, made its way into my mailbox, I was looking forward to reading it. The story was behind a paywall, and I had to wait until noon to read it, when thankfully a colleague kindly forwarded the text of the story to me. The story reported from a survey commissioned by the Free Speech Union and carried out by Curia Market Research. Curia boasts many clients including Pfizer, Microsoft, and the National party. In its opening page, the company pitches itself as having run polling services for New Zealand Prime Ministers and opposition politicians.

The Free Speech Union was formed initially as the Free Speech Coalition in response to the cancelling of an event at an Auckland Council-owned venue to be held by the far-right white supremacists Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux. Although it claims support from both sides of the political and ideological spectrum, the positions expressed by the Free Speech Union since its formation in 2018 seem to be concerned with the safeguarding of a particular form of free speech- the freedom to speech of those occupying positions of privilege. This form of speech is organised to target and silence the speech, health and safety of those at the margins of societies.

In multiple instances where the Free Speech Union has run an organised campaign, the campaign seems to be driven to safeguard the expressions of white, patriarchal, colonial structures.

The podcasts on the website of the Free Speech Union seem to be predominantly concerned with what it terms “American style culture war” and “woke culture”.

It seems the “chilling effect” the Union is concerned about is the speech of those in hegemonic positions of power. The Union’s narrative constructing the fear of being cancelled is driven to safeguard those identity positions in power that have historically and in contemporary contexts perpetuated the silencing of the raced, gendered, colonial margins.

In December 2021, the Union created an academic freedom fund in support of two academics who were being investigated by the Royal Society for a letter they wrote to the New Zealand Listener disputing the scientific legitimacy of Mātauranga Māori. When I received the survey from the Free Speech Union, I ignored it because of the seeming parochial ideological investments of the Union. Speaking with and witnessing the social media accounts of other ethnic minority, Indigenous, and gender diverse colleagues, I observed similar responses.

It was the same reason I had earlier ignored the invitation from the Union to an interview on the film The Kashmir Files. The Union platformed Roy Kaunds, a Hindutva ideologue who has been called out by Indian diaspora activists for his Islamophobic speech. Mr Kaunds previously appeared on the far-right hate infrastructure, Counterspin Media. The Kashmir Files has been critiqued for its role as a propaganda device in spreading Islamophobia, and Hindutva ideologues have deployed the film to produce and circulate Islamophobic hate speech, reflected in calls to carry out genocide of Muslims and organised rape of Muslim women.

It seemed that I was on the radar of the Union as an academic with a different viewpoint (in the words of the person who called me), and yet I hadn’t registered a word of solidarity from the Union over the six or seven months my academic freedom was being threatened by the supporters of Hindutva, a far-right nationalist political ideology, here in Aotearoa. Mr Kaunds, the Union’s proponent of Free Speech in the context of The Kashmir Files was part of the communicative infrastructure targeting my academic freedom in the context of Hindutva.

The Newsroom article did not tell us much about the sample of the reported survey, the sampling strategy, and the demographic and ideological characteristics of the sample. Moreover, my concerns about source credibility related to the survey are validated by the survey items that were reported in the article. For instance, the article suggests 21 per cent of respondents score 0-2.5 on a 10-point scale in indicating the freedom to “question and test received wisdom.” Without further elucidation of what the item means by received wisdom, the reader is left to guess what the item is pointing toward. In other words, the perception of academic freedom reflected by the item seems to depend on what the operationalisation of “received wisdom” is.

The far right’s attack on justice-based scholarship is often legitimised through the language of freedom to test “received wisdom,” held up by the communicative construction of “woke culture” as a strategy to further marginalise voices at the margins. Indeed, the item may be interpreted to support the preconfigured agenda of the Union, that there is an “American culture war” problem in Aotearoa New Zealand. The items that follow, freedom to debate or discuss “gender and sex issues” and “treaty issues,” give away the ideological agenda of the Union. We learn that 50 per cent of the academics feel silenced about debating treaty issues (20 per cent scoring 0-2.5 and 20 per cent scoring 2.6-5.0 on a 10-point scale). We also learn that 47 per cent of the academics feel silenced debating about gender and sex issues (27 per cent scoring 0-2.5 and 20 per cent scoring 2.6-5.0 on a 10-point scale).

These items once again don’t really elucidate much. They remain vague about the aspects of these issues where academics seem to be experiencing chilling effects.

The focus on these two areas seems random, unless read from the ideological agenda of the far-right here in Aotearoa. For the far-right discursive infrastructures, “gender and sex issues” and “treaty issues” are key sites for perpetuating hate that is targeted at the margins. The freedom of speech here is deployed specifically to legitimise and circulate hate. The language of “cancel culture” is discursively deployed to erase and silence articulations from the raced, classed, gendered margins of the settler-colonial state, silencing the voices and academic freedom of those at the margins.

Who are the academics experiencing chilling effects in discussing “sex and gender” and “treaty issues?” Unless the academics responding to these items on the survey are experts in these areas, the concept of academic freedom in these areas doesn’t extend to them. A physicist’s academic freedom to make statements about “treaty issues” or “sex and gender” is as legitimate as my claim about academic freedom to make pronouncements about the muon G-2 experiment. We cannot tell from the news story whether the academics experiencing chilling effects in discussing these issues are area experts.

In the absence of details about the sample (including subject areas) and analysis of the findings disaggregated by area of scholarship, one might speculate given the context that the academics who responded to the survey are not experts in the areas of “sex and gender” and “treaty issues.” Lacking such detail, the survey could be read as a politically motivated campaign to deploy the tropes of “cancel culture” and “wokeism” to target the academic freedom of scholars at the intersectional “margins of the margins.”

In a political climate where the far-right has weaponised diverse forms of attacks on academic freedoms to uphold the hegemonic structures of whiteness, patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism, the Free Speech Union’s survey of academic freedom is an exemplar of communicative inversion, directed at perpetuating a chilling climate in the name of promoting academic freedom.

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.

Article Source: https://www.massey.ac.nz/about/news/opinion-the-right-wing-version-of-academic-freedom-and-communicative-inversions/

#RightWing #AcademicFreedom #CommunicativeInversions #CAREMassey #CARECCA #MasseyUni #CAREOpEd