About Interventions from the Global South
Interventions from the Global South brings together activists, community organizers, change makers and intellectuals from/of the Global South to imagine together the registers for theorizing communication and co-creating transformative practices that address the large scale inequalities, climate change, depleted democracies and the ongoing hyper-precarization of labor witnessed globally. Dialogues in the series explore Southern concepts of solidarity, connectedness, and resistance that agitate against the twin forces of capitalism and colonialism to imagine and bring into being other worlds in the future. Drawing inspiration from the movement for communication rights that emerged from the non aligned movement (NAM), the decolonizing frameworks emergent from these conversations offer the foundations for paradigm shifting theorizing that foregrounds diverse Indigenous and locally situated concepts, dismantling the cognitive epistemicide that has historically erased knowledge from/of the Global South.
About the hosts
Mohan Dutta
Mohan J Dutta is Dean's Chair Professor of Communication and the Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) at Massey University in Aotearoa New Zealand. Working with local communities across diverse regions of the Global South, his research program develops culturally-centered, community-based projects of social change, advocacy, and activism that organize around health as a collective human right, situated in the commons. Building grassroots solidarities with communities at the margins of extractive economies, Professor Dutta experiments with multimodal communication interventions that challenge the marginalizing structures of capitalism and colonialism, working across diverse registers of indigeneity, migration and precarious labour, poverty, racism, and climate change. The framework of academic-activist-community solidarities developed at CARE builds a theory of participatory radical democracy emergent from the empiricism of the everyday struggles for dignity, life and livelihood in the Global South, and serves as the foundation for forging South-South networks that catalyze global social change. Professor Dutta is a Fellow of the International Communication Association (ICA), Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association (NCA), and recipient of the ICA Applied/Public Policy Research Award.