Journal Articles

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/7915

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Author: search.filters.author.Dutta MJSubject: search.filters.subject.COVID-19

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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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    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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    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.