Mohan Dutta
Bengali, South Asia
Professor Mohan Dutta conducts research on decolonising solidarities, justice-based organising, migrant health, grassroots democracies, effects of hate on health at the margins, and health as a human right. His research and community-led activism span seventeen countries including Aotearoa, India, Singapore, Nepal, Bangladesh, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, United States and China. He also examines far right and authoritarian threats to academic freedom across global registers and strategies for countering hate.
He is Dean's Chair Professor of Communication and the Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), developing culturally-centered, community-based projects of social change, advocacy, and activism that articulate health as a human right.
Fighting Fire with Water – a way to navigate organised hate
As a public scholar doing theory work at the intersections of activism, community and social justice, I have experienced and negotiated diverse registers and forms of hate. From white supremacist attacks to Zionist propaganda campaigns to Hindutva mobilizations targeting my scholarship, infrastructures of hate targeting my academic freedom are held by a political economy deeply embedded in the intertwined forces of neoliberal capitalism and colonialism. In this conversation, I will draw upon the embodied experiences of challenging hate to trace strategies for building local-global solidarities anchored in te Tiriti justice and anti-racist theorizing.
