Wednesday, June 7, 2023

NZ: a blank canvas for stokers of the culture wars

Ever heard of Professor Mohan Dutta? No, neither had I until a few days ago, when his name popped up on my computer screen. He occupies the Dean’s Chair in Communication at Massey University’s School of Communication, Journalism and Marketing, and what follows is his academic profile:

Based on his work on healthcare among indigenous communities, sex workers, migrant workers, farmers, and communities living in extreme poverty, Prof. Dutta has developed an approach called the culture-centered approach that outlines culturally-based participatory strategies of radical democracy for addressing unequal health policies. Based on academic-activist collaborations, the culture-centered approach uses fieldwork, resistive strategies for performance and dialogue-based reflexive participation to create entry points for listening to the voices of communities at the global margins. At the core of his research agenda is the activist emphasis on provincializing Eurocentric knowledge structures, and de-centering hegemonic knowledge constructions through subaltern participation. He has received over $4 million in funding to work on culture-centered projects of health communication, social change, and health advocacy. Recently, he completed a $1.5 million grant funded by the Agency for HealthCare Research & Quality (AHRQ) to develop a culturally-centered health communication project on heart disease among African American communities in the Lake and Marion counties of Indiana. This community-grounded project interrogating the unhealthy structures that constrain the health and wellbeing of African American neighborhoods in the US became the basis for multiple organic projects rooted in the aspirations in the community for health and wellbeing. At NUS, he received over $2 million in funding to run culture-centered projects of health across Asia, including projects on food insecurity in West Bengal, poverty and health in Singapore, health among migrant workers in low skilled sectors, health of transgender sexworkers, health among Malays, and cardiovascular health and marginalization. At Massey, he looks forward to building the work of CARE in the areas of indigenous health, health and migration, and poverty.

The social impact in Mohan Dutta's work bridges activist interventions and academic knowledge production, delineating the tensions, divergences and convergences when academics, activists, and communities come together in co-creating transformative practices. He is interested in theorizing the nature of productive practices of academic performance situated at the intersections of subaltern politics, activist commitments, and academic research. Professor Dutta explores these tensions in academic-activist-community collaborations through his own experiments with collaboration and solidarity.

In addition to teaching, writing and conducting fieldwork in collaboration with activist groups, Prof. Dutta enjoys spending leisure time with … [I edited this bit to protect his family’s privacy] and an extended family of performers and activists; stimulating conversations with his advisees, usually over meals; organizing opportunities in radical democracy with grassroots groups; and participating in creative production, script writing, and direction for 360 degree campaigns. In his most recent performance work, he has served as the visiting artistic director for Rittwick, a grassroots group in West Bengal, India working on performance for social change. He has also directed the "Singaporeans Left Behind" "Voices of Hunger" and "Respect our Rights" campaigns and documentary films. Prof. Dutta is the winner of the 2016 International Communication Association (ICA) Applied/Public Policy Communication Research Award, and the 2018 Outstanding Health Communication Scholar Award. He serves on the Advisory Panel of the World Health Organization (WHO) Cultural Contexts of Health (CCH) group.


What are we to make of all this? The first and most obvious point is that parts of it are written in a dialect that most people would find almost incomprehensible. That is its purpose. 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. The university system is awash with this gibberish – a fact that would be comical if we weren’t paying for it.

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. 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.

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.

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.

Am I unfairly picking on Dutta? After all, there are dozens – hundreds? – of other academics like him, all pushing an agenda that’s fundamentally hostile to the capitalist, democratic system that most New Zealanders were brought up with, believe in and support. North Americans in particular have proved adept at burrowing into our academic institutions and stoking the culture wars. I suspect they’re quietly thrilled at having found a blank canvas on which to leave their ideological imprint – a place where lecture theatres are full of gullible, know-nothing students waiting to have their empty minds filled with whatever pernicious tosh their teachers serve up to them. The tragedy is that New Zealand's cultural cringe – the deeply ingrained conviction that people from other countries must know more than we do – allows this to happen. The capture of our academic institutions by activists and disrupters from the extreme Left has gone unchallenged.

22 comments:

  1. You are not being unfair.

    Every academic should be accountable to what they state as this is the essence of challenging the 'science'. Science is never settled, otherwise it would not be science...

    Sadly neo-marxists hate being challenged as they see their 'science'as unchallengable (the idealise it like it is unchangable absolute cult like doctrine).

    Academics from overseas do not have a better 'understanding' of affairs because they are from elsewhere....the internet and worldwide connectivity to information made that concept irrelevant.

    It is the Universities themselves that have fostered these academics into existence within their walls and this among other issues is why we now see Otago, Victoria and Waikato shedding staff......if only they would shed the academics that contribute nothing to academia.

    I have a feeling Massey will be next.

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  2. Get on the gravy train Karl!

    Here, I'll get you started. Go here: https://thatsmathematics.com/mathgen/

    And generate yourself a peer reviewed research paper.

    I'm fairly sure Dutta did something similar to generate that godawful wordsalad of his.

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  3. Russell ParkinsonJune 7, 2023 at 1:03 PM

    I bet he wrote his own profile too.

    People like this are a good argument for withdrawing state funding from universities and letting them stand or fall on their own merit and use to society.

    I'm guessing courses for Doctors, Engineers, Surveyors, Lawyers, various scientific fields and accountants would survive. Do we need the rest?

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  4. Crikey, for $400 let alone $4,000,000 I reckon I could create a background piece that no-one understands.
    Any offers?

    Keep peeling back the layers Karl.

    Ken Maclaren

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  5. Most absurd is that his role is explicitly in Communications. The primary trend in genuine communications (and in law) has been towards "plain English", ie transparency and clarity. He writes woke BS. Let's hope he's first against the wall in the next round of academic funding cuts..

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  6. I worked for over 50 years as a pharmacist.

    A core part of my work was to explain complex medical and pharmaceutical terms in clear English so that patients could actually understand what they were taking and how it worked’

    Then, when I read something like this:-

    “At the core of his research agenda is the activist emphasis on provincializing Eurocentric knowledge structures, and de-centering hegemonic knowledge constructions through subaltern participation.”

    I realise how the English language can be twisted and tortured into something incomprehensible. Obviously the writer of this gibberish intends to confuse and baffle the reader.

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  7. Agree completely, Huskynut !!

    It really is Laugh out Loud that he has a role in "communications".
    This is George Orwell 1984 doublespeak.

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  8. We had a recent PM with a degree in communications. She learned well.

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  9. Why do I laugh out loud when reading this sort of drivel - while others, namely folks already brainwashed to woke culture and thinking, lap it up with complete understanding and admiration??

    I believe the reason for that is that these others lack ordinary common sense! These ideologues have become convinced of their own, hubris-laden infallibility as thinkers - and so have come to despise the "common sense" of the majority of humankind : their "common" sense is so vulgar - another English meaning of "common". And these smug pharisees are so grateful for not being common like the rest of us.

    But truth will out eventually. I do have a lot of faith in humankind's common sense.

    Thank you, Karl, for bringing this out.

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  10. Which is why I applaud the impending collapse of our universities, as the financial crises at Otago and Victoria foreshadow They have been hollowed out by host-devouring Far Left parasites, and young people are voting with their feet. The idea of the university, a relic of the Middle Ages, is finished. They will increasingly be replaced by specialist institutions for training doctors, engineers and other valued professions. The humanities are dead, totally colonized by neo-Marxists. Sad, but there it is.

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  11. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  12. I spent some time looking into CARE's funding. It was one of the most difficult organisations that I had ever investigated, in terms of determining the ultimate sources of funds. I haven't fully mapped it yet, but I can say with confidence that, despite various front organisations - NGOs donating to NGOs donating to charities - that one of the funders in the background is the hedge fund Blackrock.

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  13. Geoffrey ChurchmanJune 7, 2023 at 10:14 PM

    "School of Communication"?! The first few paragraphs are a good example of utter communication failure: incomprehensible mumbo jumbo.

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  14. ChatGPT would have done a better job if he had given it the opportunity.

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  15. Yes, ihcpcoro,

    Our EX Prime Minister - (also Child Povvidy Minister) had a degree in communication. Like the above post, she was skilled at avoiding communicating anything apart from her Leftist doctrine.

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  16. We seem to be splitting into two types of English.

    One is the common speech, primarily of germanic words with some french, littered with slang. The speech of the prole, the blue collar and the majority of New Zealand.

    The other is the highly latinate, complex language of the university and the government department. It is littered with dense, long latin and greek words which have long since lost their original meaning with the disappearance of latin and greek knowledge. Yet it is the language which the priestly university educated caste use to communicate and signal their intelligence.

    The whole trick here is to know how to interpret this complex language. God smite the Universities.

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  17. Thank goodness some academic egg-head is working on de-centering hegemonic knowledge constructions through subaltern participation. This, as well as finding the time for 360 degree campaigns. Onya buddy.

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  18. I agree with what you say. Though Mohan Dutta has raised the issue of Hindutva within New Zealand, essentially cultural Hinduism, but with overtones or undertones of Hindu nationalism and extremism to the exclusion of other cultures within India. It is interesting to read about it in India. There are enough issues within NZ already. I think it is wise to be aware of Hindutva and how it may influence sectors of NZ society.

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  19. @Anonymous

    Dutta goes after nationalists because he is a communist and in service to global capital (the two are no longer exclusive).

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  20. I made this video: Hipkins on co-governance; Spoonley; Dutta explains why it makes sense (if you swallow it). Followed by Robbie Nichol. It could have been Tova or Ben Moore from Businessdesk (as I read his MA Thesis) or John Campbell (he seems that way inclined). Then Paul Spoonley on his carreer with a split where Gad Saad discusses his tribute to EO Wilson (the culture wars go back to the 70's). Finally Paul Spoonley admits he knew nothing about extremism (evolutionary psychology has an answer to everything, (including a theory on racism that is simply about alliance tracking; the black female Kemi Badenoch was "the darling of the Right" according to the BBC).
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABafTrZuJ1o&t=327s

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  21. White supremacy is built into the structure of the Australian state that has historically been organized around violence directed toward aboriginal communities.
    http://culture-centered.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-institutionalized-structure-of.html

    Even if they shot all the Aboriginals, in what way would the Australian state have been "organized around" them.
    Perhaps he sees the Australian state tripping over dead bodies everywhere.
    Perhaps he loathes the Australian state and starts from there, working backwards.

    If you argue decolonisation or talk of white priviledge is a form of attack on white people he calls that a "communicative inversion".

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  22. The article that the above comment links to is unsigned but appears to have been written by Mohan Dutta.

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