Professor Mohan Dutta PhD, MA, B. Tech (Hons)

Qualifications

• Doctor of Philosophy - University of Minnesota (2001)
• Master of Arts - North Dakota State University (2001)
• Bachelor of Technology (Honours) - Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (1995)

Research Interests

My research is built on the culture-centered approach (CCA), the framework I developed to explain how communities at the margins co-construct cultural meaning in their interactions with the structures that organise their lives. Through the interplay of structure, culture, and agency, the CCA traces how subaltern communities resist the systems that silence them and build the voice infrastructures through which they author their own change. I pursue this across more than fifty community sites in seventeen countries, working through ethnography, survey methodology, and performance. The foundational concepts are set out in my book Communicating Health: A Culture-Centered Approach (Polity Press).

Over two decades I have extended the approach well beyond its origins in health. The same lens now drives my work on communicative inequality and poverty, on digital Islamophobia and the transnational architecture of Hindutva, and on the far right's assault on health equity. Anti-racism sits at the centre of this work. In Aotearoa I name whiteness and white supremacy as infrastructures of settler colonialism, and I read the demand for civility as an instrument through which liberalism disciplines anti-racist and decolonial dissent, work grounded in a genuine honouring of te Tiriti o Waitangi. I trace how structures of whiteness co-opt Indigenous communicative guides such as mana, hollowing them of their political force and turning them into instruments for silencing dissent. This scholarship is tied to practice: I served as Lead Facilitator for the Tauiwi Caucus of Aotearoa's National Anti-Racism Action Plan, building tauiwi solidarities with Māori sovereignty. My research on academic freedom documents the architecture that silences critical scholars, work for which I chaired the National Communication Association's Taskforce on Academic Freedom and Tenure and received the association's Presidential Citation. My work on artificial intelligence, data justice, and open science reads data infrastructures as sites of structural violence, arguing for data sovereignty and the remaking of knowledge production in the service of communities at the margins.

I am the author or editor of eleven books and more than 180 peer-reviewed journal articles, published in Communication Theory, Health Communication, and HCR, among others. The program is developed across Communicating Social Change: Structure, Culture, and Agency (Routledge), Voices of Resistance (Purdue University Press), and a forthcoming volume on COVID-19 that completes the culture-centered trilogy. This work has been recognised with the Lawrence R. Frey Award for Distinguished Communication and Social Justice Activism Research and the Global Communication Award from the National Communication Association, the lifetime distinctions of Fellow of the International Communication Association and Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association, and the Gerald M. Phillips, Charles H. Woolbert, and Lewis Donohew awards.

The work is sustained by competitive funding across four continents, including the US$1.499 million Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality project with African American communities in Indiana, the S$1.965 million grant that founded CARE at the National University of Singapore, and the NZ$2.5 million establishment of CARE at Massey, alongside grants from the New Zealand Ministry of Justice, the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office, and the MacArthur Foundation.

Thematics

21st Century Citizenship, Design – for Commerce, Community and Culture, Health and Well-being, Future Food Systems

Area of Expertise

Field of research codes
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Studies (200201): Communication and Media Studies (200100): Communication Studies (200101): Cultural Studies (200200): Cultural Theory (200204):
Health Promotion (111712):
International and Development Communication (200103): Languages, Communication And Culture (200000):
Maori Health (111713): Medical And Health Sciences (110000):
Postcolonial Studies (200211):
Public Health and Health Services (111700)

Keywords

Research Expertise

Theoretical frameworks
Culture-centered approach (CCA); critical health communication; communication for social change; communication for development; participatory communication; postcolonial theory; subaltern studies; decolonial theory; critical cultural studies; structure-culture-agency; voice and voice infrastructures; communication sovereignty; theories of marginalisation; radical democracy; critical theory; neoliberalism and communication.

Health and equity
Health communication; health equity; health disparities; health inequalities; poverty and health; social determinants of health; cultural determinants of health; political economy of global health; global health policy; health activism; public health communication; healthcare access and marginalisation.

Social justice and power
Social justice communication; racism and anti-racism; whiteness and white supremacy; critiques of whiteness; civility and civility discourse; settler colonialism; te Tiriti o Waitangi and decolonisation; caste; Islamophobia and digital Islamophobia; Hindutva and religious nationalism; the far right and communication; structural violence; advocacy and activism; social movements; community organising and mobilisation.

Critique and co-option
Critiques of co-option; co-option of social justice; co-option of diversity, equity, and inclusion; corporate and institutional appropriation of resistance; Māori communication and co-option; co-option of Indigenous voice; depoliticisation of decolonisation.

Communities and contexts
Migrant and refugee health; migrant worker communities; Indigenous communication; Māori and Pasifika health equity; Global South; Aotearoa New Zealand; South and Southeast Asia; India; Singapore; community-engaged and community-based research.

Digital, data, and AI
Digital divide and digital inequality; digital activism; platform politics; data justice; data sovereignty; data colonialism; artificial intelligence and society; critical AI studies; open science; misinformation and disinformation; online harassment.

Methods
Culture-centered methodology; critical ethnography; participatory action research; community-based participatory research; qualitative research methods; in-depth interviews; focus groups; reflexive and interpretive methods; survey methodology; structural equation modelling; PhotoVoice; digital storytelling and visual methods; performance and theatre for social change; community-engaged documentary film.

Applied and public communication
Applied communication; public policy communication; social change campaign design; public relations; public engagement and public scholarship; academic freedom.

Completed Projects

Languages

• Bengali
  Last used: Currently
  Spoken ability: Excellent
  Written ability: Excellent
• Hindi
  Last used: Currently
  Spoken ability: Average
  Written ability: Average

Teaching Statement

To teach is to care, and to care is to learn together. I walk into every classroom as a co-learner, holding the conviction that knowledge is co-constructed in dialogue rather than delivered from a podium. An ethic of care anchors my pedagogy. I want students to feel met as whole people, to be listened to before they are assessed, and to find in the classroom a space safe enough that they can take the intellectual risks through which real growth happens. Teachers are guides who catalyse our growth as human beings, and so I ground my teaching in awareness, self-reflection, and the slow, reciprocal work of helping others find and trust their own voice.

Care, for me, is never a reason to lower the demand. It is the condition that makes the highest demand possible. The same ethic that holds students gently also asks them to push hard at the boundaries of what we know. Drawing on Gayatri Spivak, I treat education as the interrogation of our privileges, the privileges that limit what we can co-create with others and that, once examined, open new possibilities of transformation. To learn well is to let our certainties be unsettled, and to build, together, theory that none of us could have reached alone.

My courses integrate theory and practice in the context of contemporary global problems. I weave critical, postcolonial, and subaltern studies through everything I teach, situating each within the search for entry points for structural transformation. There is a continuous movement between theory and practice, with the aim of building higher-order theory that is instructive in the co-creation of participatory spaces for listening to subaltern voices and for de-centering the West-centric hegemony of communication knowledge. A strong element of deconstruction runs through my teaching, paired with an emphasis on reflexive and ethnographic methods for carving out spaces of solidarity with marginalised communities. The engagement with critical theory and the Subaltern Studies project becomes an entry point for advocacy, for the politics of social change, and for culture-centered praxis.

It is with this commitment to advocacy and change that I teach service learning courses engaging undergraduate and graduate students directly in confronting the structures of inequity under neoliberalism. These courses produce projects of academic-community solidarity that address real policy and programme issues faced by disenfranchised communities, so that students learn to build knowledge with communities rather than about them. The classroom becomes a rehearsal for a more just world, a place where care and rigour are the same gesture, and where learning together is itself a practice of structural change.

This is the teaching I have tried to live across two decades and three continents, and it is the work I value most. I have been honoured to see it recognised through awards at the graduate and undergraduate levels, but the recognition I hold closest is the trust of the students and community partners who have co-created these spaces with me.

Graduate Supervision Statement

I supervise graduate students in the same spirit that I teach: through an ethic of care that holds the whole person while pushing hard at the boundaries of what we know. Supervision, for me, is a relationship of trust built over years. I listen first, I meet students where they are, and I commit for the long term to their growth as scholars and as people. The aim is not to produce replicas of my own work but to help each student find the question that is theirs to ask, and then to walk alongside them as they learn to answer it with rigour, courage, and voice.

This care is most consequential for students from the margins. I have given much of my supervisory life to opening pathways of academic mobility for those whom the structures of the academy were never built to admit: first-generation scholars, students from the Global South, Māori and Pasifika students, and students carrying the knowledges of their communities into a discipline that has too often silenced them. I treat their standpoints as intellectual resources rather than deficits, and I build the scaffolding, the funding, the co-authorship, the networks, through which they can move into and through the academy on their own terms. Supporting Indigenous student pathways is central to this commitment, grounded in honouring te Tiriti o Waitangi and in the conviction that a decolonised discipline must be built by Indigenous scholars themselves.

The proof of this approach is in where my students are now. Those I have mentored hold faculty positions and lead research programs at universities across the world, shaping the fields of health communication, critical and cultural studies, and communication for social change. I take more pride in their trajectories than in any work of my own. This mentorship has been recognised with the discipline's highest honours for graduate supervision, including the Aubrey Fisher Mentorship Award from the International Communication Association and the Dale E. Brashers Distinguished Mentor Award, alongside the Outstanding Graduate Faculty Award earlier in my career.

My supervisory interests sit within the culture-centered approach and span communicative inequality and health, poverty, racism, and settler colonialism, decolonial and postcolonial methodology, subaltern studies, digital activism and platform politics, data justice, and the politics of voice. I welcome students working with ethnographic, participatory, and community-engaged methods, and those building theory through solidarity with communities in struggle. Students drawn to performance, documentary, and other creative forms of inquiry will find a home in my supervision as well.

I bring to Massey more than two decades of graduate supervision beyond Aotearoa. At Purdue University I built and supervised a thread of postcolonial and critical-cultural scholarship in the doctoral program, and at the National University of Singapore I supervised graduate students while directing the founding of CARE. Across these institutions the constant has been the same: standing beside students as they grow into independent scholars, and building the infrastructures of care and mobility through which the next generation carries the work forward.

Current Doctoral Supervision

Main Supervisor of:

• Jude Mutugalage - Doctor of Philosophy
  Fear appeals embedded in the cigarette packaging and its effect on smokers’ quitting behavior with a moderating effect of Social Norms.
• Mamae Tuanewa-Takerei - Doctor of Philosophy
  E Kimi Ana Ahau: Reimagining autoethnography as a decolonizing register
• Dheerika Sharma - Doctor of Philosophy
  Words over Weapon: A culture-centered community-led approach to mitigating communal violence.
• Shucen Yi - Doctor of Philosophy
  Exploring digital health among empty nest elderly in China - A Culture-Centered Approach
• Pooja Jayan - Doctor of Philosophy
  Exploring meanings of health and wellbeing among migrant Indian nurses in Aotearoa New Zealand using a Culture Centered Approach

Completed Doctoral Supervision

Main Supervisor of:

• 2025 - Samiksha Pattanaik - Doctor of Philosophy
  A culture-centered exploration of India’s Community Health Workers’ meanings of the COVID-19 pandemic and the role of mobile technology in response strategies
• 2024 - Md Mahbubur Rahman - Doctor of Philosophy
  Construction of health among the Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: A Culture-Centred Approach
• 2024 - Andrea Zorn - Doctor of Philosophy
  Entrepreneurship and its Meanings for Low-Income Women in Aotearoa: A Culture-Centred Approach
• 2023 - Christine Elers - Doctor of Philosophy
  Theorising Maori meanings of health and wellbeing in a whakapapa paradigm: Voices from the margins

Co-supervisor of:

• 2021 - Flora Galy-Badenas - Doctor of Philosophy
  Gender and ethnicity in politics: An intersectional approach to French and New Zealand media coverage

Other Links

• Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation - This is the homepage of CARE, the Center I direct at Massey.
• Opinion Piece - This is a collaborative opinion piece with the activist-in-residence Murdoch Stephens on the Christchurch attack and calls for free speech.
• Interventions from the Global South podcast - This is the link to the "Interventions from the Global South" podcast I host for the International Communication Association (ICA).
• Civil Society Solidarity: Hindus for Human Rights - This is the solidarity statement in support of me and CARE for our work on Hindutva extremism offered by Hindus for Human Rights.
• Keynote Speech at The International Conference on Language and Social Psychology (ICLASP) 2022 - Titled "Cultural centering as decolonizing hegemonic structures," the talk explores the organizing role of radical democracies in the grassroots as the basis of structural transformation.
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• 2025 NCA Caroll C Arnold Distinguished Lecture - Amidst the global consolidation of power in the hands of economic and political elites, our collective capacities to imagine just futures are our sources of sustenance.
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