Professor Mohan Dutta
Director of the Centre for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) Professor Mohan Dutta will deliver the invited lecture Care as Research, Research as Care: Listening at the Margins through the Culture-Centered Approach as part of the USF Humanities Institute's Faculty Fellows series for 2026 to 2027.
The series' theme this year is ’Care as Praxis’, exploring the role of care in research, teaching and social change.
Professor Dutta is the originator of the culture-centred approach to communication, which has been developed through more than two decades of research, alongside communities at the margins in more than 50 sites across 17 countries.
His lecture will explore how the work of feeding, supporting and caring for others, and the knowledge held by those who do this work, are often undervalued, and how research can better reflect community knowledge and experiences.
"Care holds our societies together and is valued the least. The work of feeding, washing, holding and tending falls to women, to migrants, to workers racialised and classed into the jobs no one else will do. The apparatus that extracts from those lives is the same apparatus that decides their knowledge does not count as evidence."
Professor Dutta says the culture-centred approach challenges traditional models of research by placing communities at the centre of the process.
"The researching body is trained to acquire, measure, take and leave with the data. Care as research turns that around toward listening that is answerable to the communities doing the speaking. It is slow and reciprocal work and in my experience the transformation begins when community members hold the agenda, set the questions and decide what the research is for."
The lecture builds on CARE's international partnerships focused on health justice and community-led social change, as well as Professor Dutta's work with Māori, Pasifika, migrant and working-class communities in Aotearoa New Zealand.
The lecture is free and open to students, faculty, staff and the wider community. USF faculty will lead a question-and-answer session following the lecture.
The lecture will be held on Friday 18 September from 9am to 11am NZST. You can watch the lecture online by registering at: https://tinyurl.com/CareAsPraxis
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