Journal Articles
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/7915
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Item Living Through Food Rations: A Culture-Centered Study With Rohingya Refugees(USC Annenberg Press, 2025-07-07) Rahman MM; Dutta MJ; Elers PThe 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.Item 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 AIn 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.Item 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 IDisabled 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.Item 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 SThis 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.Item Academic-community solidarities in land occupation as an Indigenous claim to health: culturally centered solidarity through voice infrastructures(Frontiers Media S.A., 2023-05-25) Elers C; Dutta M; Kaur-Gill SIn this work, we explore the role of land in Indigenous theorizing about health, embodied in a land occupation that resisted a climate-adaptive development project imposed on the community from the top down by the local government. The proposed development project of building a stop bank on the Oroua River sought to alienate Māori from the remnants of the land. Embedded in and emerging from a culture-centered academic-community-activist partnership, an advisory group of Māori community members om the “margins of the margins” came together to participate in the occupation of the land to claim it as the basis for securing their health. This study describes the occupation and the role of our academic-activist intervention in it, theorizing land occupation as the root of decolonizing health emerging from Indigenous struggles for sovereignty (Tino rangatiratanga). The community advisory group members brought together in a culture-centered intervention, collaborated in partnership with the academic team, generated video narratives that resisted and dismantled the communicative inversions produced by the settler colonial state to perpetuate its extractive interests and produced communicative resources that supported the land occupation led by the broader Whānau. This study concludes by arguing that the culture-centered approach offers a meta-theory for decolonizing health communication by building voice infrastructures that support Indigenous land struggles.Item 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 SDrawing 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.Item 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
