Browsing by Author "Dutta MJ"
Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
Results Per Page
Sort Options
- ItemCommunication 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 MJDrawing 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.
- ItemDigital 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 MJThe 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.
- ItemEditorial: 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
- ItemResisting 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 MJThis 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.
- ItemSituating Health Experiences: A Culture-Centered Interrogation(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023-12-22) Elers P; Dutta MJCulture-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.
- ItemThe algorithmic big Other: using Lacanian theory to rethink control and resistance in platform work(2023-01-01) Salter LA; Dutta MJDespite 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.
- ItemThe 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 MIBeing 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.