Mohan J Dutta is Dean’s Chair Professor of Communication at Massey University (New Zealand), and Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) directing research on culturally-centered, community-based projects of social change communication.
Professor Dutta teaches and conducts research in international health communication, critical cultural theories of health and social change, poverty and unequal health outcomes in the backdrop of neoliberal policies, health activism in globalization politics, indigenous cosmologies of health, subaltern studies and dialogue, and public policy and participatory social change communication. Currently, he serves as Editor of the “Critical Cultural Studies in Global Health Communication Book Series” with Routledge, Specialty Chief Editor of the Health Communication section of the open access journal, Frontiers in Communication, and sits on the editorial board of seven journals including Communication Theory, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, and Annals of the International Communication Association. Before arriving to NUS, he served as Associate Dean of Research & Graduate Education in the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University, a Service Learning Fellow, and a fellow of the Entrepreneurial Leadership Academy. Also at Purdue, he served as the Founding Director of the Center for Poverty and Health Inequities (COPHI), where he continues to hold an Affiliate appointment.
Professor Dutta holds a Bachelor of Technology (Honors) in Agricultural Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, and a PhD in Mass Communication from the University of Minnesota. He began his career at Purdue University in 2001, was tenured in 2005, and became Full Professor in 2009. In June, 2010, he was appointed as the Lim Chong Yah Professor of Communication and New Media at the National University of Singapore (NUS), and formally joined NUS as Professor of Communication in July, 2012.
Mohan Dutta’s research examines marginalization in contemporary healthcare, health care inequalities, the intersections of poverty and health experiences at the margins, political economy of global health policies, the mobilization of cultural tropes for the justification of neo-colonial health development projects, the meanings of health in the realms of marginalized experiences in highly underserved communities in the global South, and the ways in which participatory culture-centered processes and strategies are organized in marginalized contexts to bring about changes in neo-colonial structures of global oppression and exploitation. Engaging in dialogues with subaltern communities at the global margins in imagining alternative spaces that resist neoliberal formations forms the crux of Professor Dutta’s academic and activist projects. At the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), Professor Dutta leads 19 culture-centered projects spread across 7 countries exploring the roles of listening, participation, and dialogue in creating infrastructures for alternative rationalities of health and wellbeing. These projects highlight the role of local cultural practices in transforming health, and in strengthening community-state relationships in securing community access to infrastructures of health and wellbeing. Ultimately, Professor Dutta hopes that this work offers an entry point for transformative communicative practices and networks of solidarity that connect the imaginaries of the global South in offering alternative structures of global organizing grounded in the spirits of justice, equality, and dignity.
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 