Journal Articles

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

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Author: search.filters.author.Dutta MJ

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 21
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    Living Through Food Rations: A Culture-Centered Study With Rohingya Refugees
    (USC Annenberg Press, 2025-07-07) Rahman MM; Dutta MJ; Elers P
    The Rohingya people, an Indo-Aryan Muslim ethnic group from Myanmar, have faced decades of discrimination and repression, rendering them the world’s largest stateless community. Grounded in the culture-centered approach, a critical methodology that positions culture, structure, and agency in dialectical relationships, this study explores the issue of food scarcity among Rohingya people residing in refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Drawing from ethnographic research and 41 in-depth interviews with Rohingya refugees within these camps, 3 key themes were identified: Inadequate access to food, monotonous and culturally inappropriate food, and resorting to selling food. These findings depict how food scarcity is a direct contributor to poor health and works to inhibit agency in the pursuit of health and well-being in the refugee camps, informing a discussion about the interplay of communicative and material inequalities.
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    Anticolonialism and qualitative methods for culture-centered interventions
    (Oxford University Press, 2025-08) Dutta MJ; Basu A; Kaur-Gill S; Dutta D; Pal M; Basnyat I; Metuamate S; Pokaia V; Elers P; Mandal I; Mandi R; Baskey P; Mookerjee D; Sastry S; Robb J; Carter A
    In this essay, we a collective of Indigenous, Black, and migrant Global South scholars engaged in experiments with the culture-centered approach (CCA) draw on our lived experiences amidst struggles against land grab, neoliberal extractivism, and capitalist exploitation to outline a framework for qualitative methods as anticolonial politics. We begin by exploring the interplays of colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism that have shaped the origins and uses of qualitative methods toward serving extractive agendas of global capital. This critique serves as the basis for outlining the key principles of the CCA, turning to voice, storytelling, and embodied action as the basis for situating qualitative methods amidst anticolonial struggles that resist settler colonialism and extractive neoliberal neocolonialism. Through our review of diverse culture-centered interventions, we explore the roles of voice infrastructures in anticolonial resistance, outlining the contribution made by the CCA to decolonizing research methods by offering a theoretical-methodological framework for communication interventions for social justice.
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    Preventing Violence in the Disability Margins: A Culture-Centered Study in Aotearoa
    (y Oxford University Press on behalf of International Communication Association, 2025-07-13) Dutta MJ; Elers P; Zorn A; Brey S; Metuamate S; Pokaia V; Jayan P; Rahman M; Hashim S; Liu J; Nematollahi N; Sharif ASBM; Teikmata-Tito C; Whittfield F; Holdaway S; Jackson D; Kerr B; Raharuhi I
    Disabled people are overrepresented as victims of sexual violence and family violence, but are often excluded from research and the development of communication campaigns, laws, and interventions. Grounded in the culture-centered approach, we undertook 77 qualitative interviews with predominantly Māori (Indigenous) and low-income disabled individuals to identify primary prevention needs for reducing family and sexual violence. Participants articulated disability as being structural, intersectional, and layered with erasure, contributing to conditions that perpetuate violence. Erasure and the resulting loss of agency were pervasive across diverse disabilities and participant groups, with Māori bearing a disproportionate burden. Emergent in the participants’ narratives were strategies around addressing communication inequalities and grounding prevention resources within local community contexts, set against structural determinants of violence perpetuated by the settler colonial State. This study challenges the hegemonic approach to addressing sexual violence and family violence, revealing a relationship between communicative and material forms of violence.
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    ‘I am not complete without my family’: a culture-centred exploration of meanings of health and well-being among migrant Indian nurses in Aotearoa New Zealand
    (Taylor and Francis Group on behalf of the Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand Communication Association (AANZCA), 2025-02-17) Jayan P; Dutta MJ; Thaker J
    In Aotearoa New Zealand, the voices of migrant nurses are often overlooked and marginalised despite being visible in the economy. This manuscript uses a culture-centred approach to centre the voices of migrant Indian nurses on understanding their meanings of health and well-being. Contrary to the Western models, which position health as individual accountability, the thirty in-depth conversations with migrant Indian nurses point towards the importance of collective in maintaining health and well-being. The dialogues with participants revealed three main themes: the family and community as interwoven to health and well-being, migration and the hidden health cost of family disconnection, and the significance of culturally appropriate food in maintaining health. This study contributes to health communication theory and practice by providing insights into the health and well-being meanings of migrant nurses, centring their voices as replacements to neoliberal, dominant paradigms of health.
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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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    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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    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.
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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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    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.