Browsing by Author "Dutta MJ"

Now showing 1 - 17 of 17
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    A Community-Based Heart Health Intervention: Culture-Centered Study of Low-Income Malays and Heart Health Practices
    (Frontiers Media S.A., 2020-03-31) Kaur-Gill S; Dutta MJ; Bashir MB; Ahmed R
    This paper reports the formative research findings of a culture-centered heart health intervention with Malay community members belonging to low-income households. The community-based culture-centered intervention entailed working in the grassroots with community stakeholders to tailor a heart health campaign with and for low-income Malay Singaporeans. Community stakeholders designed and developed the heart health communicative infrastructures during six focus group sessions detailed in the results. The intervention included building smoking cessation information accessible to the community, the curation of heart healthy Malay centric recipes, and developing culturally responsive information infrastructures to understand a myocardial infarction. The intervention sought to bridge the gap for the community where there is an absence of culturally-centered communicative infrastructures on heart health.
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    Communication Inequality and the Technopolitical Structure of Platform Work: Aotearoa New Zealand Platform Workers During COVID-19
    (University of Southern California, 2024-01-30) Salter LA; Dutta MJ
    Drawing on the culture-centered approach (CCA), we conducted 25 in-depth interviews with Aotearoa New Zealand rideshare and delivery drivers, demonstrating how the technopolitical structure of platform work intensified communication inequality, and resultingly, precarity, during the COVID-19 crisis. Although literature has recognized that the platform has become the place of employment, less researched is how this makes it the place of information distribution, handing power to the platform operators, while contributing to the precarity of platform workers. The concept of communication inequality has been underapplied to considering the intersections between the structure of platform work and worker precarity. A thematic analysis concentrates on 4 key themes linked to the centralization of information flows through the platform architecture: information restriction, indirect management, unilateral term-setting, and accentuated precarity. We conclude by arguing for more research on platform work from a communication perspective that foregrounds the voices of workers.
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    COVID-19, Authoritarian Neoliberalism, and Precarious Migrant Work in Singapore: Structural Violence and Communicative Inequality
    (Frontiers Media S.A., 2020-08-20) Dutta MJ; Sastry S
    Drawing upon an ongoing ethnography with low-wage migrant workers in Singapore, this article builds on the theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach (CCA) to explore the experiences of the workers amid COVID-19 outbreaks in dormitories housing them. The CCA foregrounds the interplays of communicative and material inequalities, suggesting that the erasure of infrastructures of voices among the margins reproduces and circulates unhealthy structures that threaten the health and well-being of the working classes. The voices of the low-wage migrant workers who participated in this study document the challenges with poor housing, poor sanitation, and food insecurity that are compounded with the absence of information and voice infrastructures. Amid the everyday threats to health and well-being that are generated by neoliberal reforms across the globe, the hyper-precarious conditions of migrant work rendered visible by the trajectories of COVID-19 call for structurally transformative futures that are anchored in the voices of workers at the margins of neoliberal economies.
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    Culturally Centering the Voices of Transgender Sex Workers in Singapore: Health, Materiality and Violence.
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2024-06-25) Dutta MJ; Mahtani R; Ho V; Sherqueshaa S; Thomas S; Jalleh-Hosey AA; Pitaloka D; Zapata D; Elers P
    The transgender sex worker experience of health in Singapore is multidimensional, working at the intersections of culture, social class, and gendered marginalization. Drawing on in-depth interviews with transgender sex workers in the context of Singapore's extreme neoliberalism and located within a larger culture-centered intervention that emerged through an academic-activist-community partnership, this study foregrounds the everyday meanings of health among transgender sex workers who are marginalized. We offer a discursive register for theorizing violence as disruption of health. Participants narrate health as the negotiation of stigmas coded into their everyday lives, the forms of material violence they experience, and the struggles with accessing secure housing. The theorizing of violence as threat to health by transgender sex workers shapes the health advocacy and health activism that takes the form of a 360 degrees campaign. This essay pushes the literature on the culture-centered approach (CCA) by centering voice as the basis for structurally transformative articulations amidst neoliberal authoritarianism.
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    Culture-Centered Processes of Community Organizing in COVID-19 Response: Notes from Kerala and Aotearoa New Zealand
    (Frontiers Media S.A., 2020-07-29) Dutta MJ; Elers C; Jayan P; Basnyat I
    The culture-centered approach (CCA) foregrounds the organizing role of communities at the "margins of the margins"of the globe as the spaces for identifying the structural challenges to health and well-being and for co-creating community-anchored solutions to these challenges. Pandemics such as COVID-19 render visible the deep-rooted inequalities across and within societies, seeded and catalyzed by over three decades of variegated neoliberal reforms. The trajectories of COVID-19 outbreaks as well as the effects of COVID-19-related policies render visible the inequalities that are written into the neoliberal organizing of political economy. Community participation is scripted into the neoliberal framework as an instrument for depoliticizing community and utilizing it as a channel for disseminating top-down individual behavior change messages. Drawing on the examples of community organizing in Kerala where the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has actively co-created an infrastructure for socialist organizing, and Iwi-led Maori checkpoints in Aotearoa New Zealand, we delineate the features of transformative community organizing. Community organizing in the CCA is political, foregrounding community sovereignty as the basis for resisting neoliberal health structures. Community struggles for communication equality thus point to alternative forms of organizing health and well-being that challenge and seek to dismantle neoliberal governmentality.
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    Digital platforms, Hindutva, and disinformation: Communicative strategies and the Leicester violence
    (Taylor and Francis Group on behalf of the National Communication Association, 2024-04-30) Dutta MJ
    The digital infrastructure of Hindutva seeds, circulates and amplifies Islamophobic hate, interacting bidirectionally with brick-and-mortar violence. This paper examines the circulation of Hindutva on digital platforms (Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Telegram) around the intercommunal violence that emerged in Leicester in September 2022. Based on a digital ethnography of Twitter, interconnected digital platforms, and Hindutva media (Hindutva-related digital video channels such as Citti Media on YouTube, mainstream broadcast media such as NewsX, and text-based digital platforms such as OpIndia), the analysis theorizes the global flow of Hindutva across geographically dispersed contexts, connecting the diaspora with India, creating an uninterrupted communication infrastructure around the frame of the “Hindu in danger,” simultaneously intersecting with white supremacy in producing and amplifying Islamophobic hate.
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    Editorial: Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19): Pathophysiology, Epidemiology, Clinical Management and Public Health Response
    (Frontiers Media S.A., 2021-11-30) Doolan DL; Kozlakidis Z; Zhang Z; Paessler S; Su L; Yokota YT; Shioda T; Rodriguez-Palacios A; Kaynar AM; Ahmed R; Samy A; Bradby H; Kalergis AM; Dutta MJ; Kogut M; Zhang S-Y; Petrosillo N
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    Editorial: COVID-19: risk communication and blame
    (Frontiers Media S.A., 2024-01-05) Bouguettaya A; Ahmed R; Diers-Lawson A; Dutta MJ; Team V; Agarwal V
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    Editorial: Food systems communication amid compounding crises: Power, resistance, and change
    (Frontiers Media S.A., 2022-09-28) Gordon C; Hunt KP; Dutta MJ; Peterson TR
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    Experiences of Muslims in India on digital platforms with anti-Muslim hate: a culture-centered exploration
    (Frontiers Media S.A., 2024-09-02) Dutta MJ; Pal M; Roy S
    This manuscript examines the experiences of Muslims in India with hate on digital platforms. Extant research on Islamophobia on digital platforms offers analyses of the various discourses circulating on digital platforms. This manuscript builds on that research to document the experiences of online hate among Muslims in India based on a survey of 1,056 Muslims conducted by Qualtrics, a panel-based survey company, between November 2021 and December 2021. The findings point to the intersections between white supremacist and Hindutva Alt-Right messages on digital platforms, delineating the fascist threads that form the convergent infrastructures of digital hate. Moreover, they document the extensive exposure of Muslims in India to Islamophobic hate on digital platforms, raising critical questions about their health and wellbeing. The paper wraps up with policy recommendations regarding strategies for addressing online Islamophobic hate on digital platforms.
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    mHealth, Health, and Mobility: A Culture-Centered Interrogation
    (Springer Science+Business Media B.V, 2018-01-04) Dutta MJ; Kaur-Gill S; Tan N; Lam C; Baulch E; Watkins J; Tariq A
    In this chapter, we examine the interplays of the symbolic and the material in the constructions of mHealth. By attending to the key themes that play out in discourses of mHealth, we examine critically the ways in which power plays out in the structuring of mHealth solutions. The articulation of mHealth as instrumental to generating positive health outcomes in communities across Asia erases the contexts within which mobile technologies are constituted. mHealth interventions reproduce the logics of the state and the market, reproducing communities as homogeneous and monolithic sites of top-down interventions.
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    Mobilities, Communication, and Asia| Mobilities in Asia — Introduction
    (USC Annenberg Press, 2018-10-25) Dutta MJ; Shome R
    Asia is, and has been, a site of multiple mobilities—of media, peoples, and ideas. These various mobilities in and across Asia that this Special Section addresses are significantly imbricated in relations of communication and power. Yet they have not received adequate attention in media and communication studies or in the expansive scholarship on mobilities, which has largely remained focused on the North Atlantic West. This introduction makes a case for the importance of addressing relations of mobilities in Asia and understanding how relations of communication and power inform, and are informed by, such mobilities.
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    Resisting an unfolding genocide: reflections from radical struggles in the Global South
    (Taylor and Francis Group on behalf of the National Communication Association, 2024-03-20) Dutta MJ
    This essay theorizes radical struggles at the world’s end, emergent from registers of organizing against colonial–imperial–capitalist violence in the Global South. Working through the ongoing genocidal violence carried out by Israel in Gaza, I explore the role of voice infrastructures in the Global South as the spaces where Global South theories are imagined, tested, and continually transformed. The tenets of the culture-centered approach (CCA), reflected in the everyday organizing work of the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), guide the conceptualization of the relationship between theorizing and struggle as embodied practice. For radical organizing to materialize at the world’s end, I argue the urgency of reorganizing the relationship between struggles and theorizing, cultivating a rhetoric and politics of suspicion, enacting sovereignty, forging connections, and sustaining a politics of preparation.
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    Situating Health Experiences: A Culture-Centered Interrogation
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2023-12-22) Elers P; Dutta MJ
    Culture-centered studies of health communication de-center the theorization of health as an individual behavior and reveal the structural conditions that shape inequalities in health outcomes. The present study examines the ways in which space and housing shape experiences of health in a low-income site in Auckland undergoing radical redevelopment. We draw from a culture-centered project undertaken in 2018-2021 predominantly among Māori and Pasifika peoples involving 60 initial in-depth interviews, seven focus groups, a series of filmed interviews, and 32 additional in-depth interviews conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. The residents' narratives foregrounded the detrimental health impact of inadequate housing, financial constraints, transience, and displacement that severs ties to place and community. These findings reveal the relationship between housing challenges, economic marginalization, and neoliberal capitalism, highlighting the need for policy interventions to address housing as a fundamental determinant of health disparities among marginalized communities.
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    The algorithmic big Other: using Lacanian theory to rethink control and resistance in platform work
    (2023-01-01) Salter LA; Dutta MJ
    Despite burgeoning literature on platform work, there has been a lack of scholarship which carefully considers what we mean by the terms control and (particularly) resistance in the context of algorithmic management. This article draws on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to take a step back and interrogate what exactly we mean by these terms in a setting where increasingly the entity being resisted against is an artificially intelligent machine. This approach offers a nuanced way of thinking through the subjective effects of having an algorithm as a boss, and we argue for its benefits and applicability in the age of the algorithmic episteme. Through the key concept of the Algorithmic big Other, we update Lacan’s classic concept to consider what happens when the Other no longer articulates master signifiers through discourse. What we term collective hysterical resistance, aimed at creating spaces for new forms of knowledge and subjectivity, should re-orient towards enlarging the incomputable, the blind spot of the algorithmic episteme.
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    The United Nations (UN) Card, Identity, and Negotiations of Health among Rohingya Refugees
    (MDPI (Basel, Switzerland), 2023-02-15) Rahman MM; Dutta MJ; Plaza Del Pino FJ; Ugarte-Gurruxaga MI
    Being persecuted and expelled from Myanmar, Rohingya refugees are now distributed throughout the world. The Southeast Asian nation of Malaysia has been a preferred destination for Rohingyas fleeing Myanmar's state-sponsored genocide and more recently in a bid to change their fates from the refugee camps in Bangladesh. Refugees are one of the most vulnerable groups in Malaysia and often face dire circumstances, in which their health and wellbeing are compromised. Amidst a plethora of structural challenges, Rohingya refugees try to claim some of their rights with the aid of the UN card (UNHCR ID cards) in Malaysia. Guided by the culture-centered approach (CCA), this study examined the perspectives and experiences of healthcare among Rohingya refugees while living in Malaysia, now resettled in Aotearoa, New Zealand. The participants' narratives showed that the UN card not only materialized their refugee status in Malaysia but also offered them a way of living in a world where documents anchor the materiality of health.
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    Theorising Māori Health and Wellbeing in a Whakapapa Paradigm: Voices from the Margins
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2024-07-16) Elers C; Dutta MJ
    Whakapapa is an Indigenous metatheoretical framework; a phenomenon of metaphysical and social connections embedded in Indigenous epistemology unique to Aotearoa New Zealand (Aotearoa NZ). This research foregrounds the innate connection between Māori, land, health, and wellbeing as an expression of Whakapapa, nuanced through the layering of lived experience and sensemaking of 30 Māori participants, situated in dialogue with the culture-centered approach (CCA). Noting the erasure of Māori voices from the hegemonic frame of health communication in the settler colonial state, we sought to understand health and wellbeing meanings, challenges and solutions as articulated by Māori participants at the margins of Indigeneity. Drawing on the CCA approach to health communication, the manuscript highlights the relationship between Whakapapa and voice. The dialogs emergent from in-depth interviews place the CCA in dialogue with the Whakapapa paradigm, foregrounding the role of voice democracy in creating anchors to health and wellbeing among Māori, rooted in tino rangatiratanga (sovereignty). The articulations of Māori health voiced from/at the margins are offered as interventions into the large-scale health inequities experienced by Māori in Aotearoa NZ.