Events

Join the Faculty Fellows for a lecture and Q&A with Mohan J. Dutta, joining virtually from New Zealand. This event is free to attend and refreshments are provided.

This talk positions care as research as fundamentally the labour of learning to listen, a practice that calls for a shift in the orientation of the body—from its outward turn toward the impetus to extract, to an inward turn toward the act of listening that is held accountable to communities.

Drawing on the culture-centered approach, I theorise this reorientation as slow and reciprocal work, learning over time to respond to the calls that emerge from within communities rather than to the demands imposed upon them from outside. Here the devaluation of care and the erasure of subaltern knowledge emerge from the same colonial-capitalist logic, one that trains the researching body to acquire, measure, and take. Research-as-care offers instead a praxis of co-construction that reorganises who is heard, on whose terms, and toward what transformation, reframing care as a mode of knowing, relating, and remaking the structures that render care at once indispensable and disposable.

About the Speaker: 

Mohan J. Dutta is Dean’s Chair Professor of Communication at Massey University and Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), where he develops community-led approaches to social change, health justice, and social transformation. His activist scholarship, recognized through more than 30 international awards, works alongside communities at the margins across diverse global spaces to build communicative infrastructures that advance voice, dignity, and collective organizing, rooted in the ethic of care.  

How can literary and visual clues lead us to a new understanding of care? Join the Faculty Fellows and Megha Anwer from Purdue University for a film screening and discussion of Ship of Theseus (2012) directed by Anand Gandhi. The film explores questions of identity, justice, beauty, meaning and death through an experimental photographer, an ailing monk, and a young stockbroker. This event is free to attend and refreshments are provided.

About the Speaker:

Megha Anwer is Assistant Vice Provost for Research and Scholar Development at Purdue’s John Martinson Honors College and Clinical Associate Professor at the Department of English. She is a theorist of literature and visual culture. Her research areas include contemporary postcolonial literature, global cinema, Victorian literature and visual culture. Her co-authored book, Screening Precarity: Hindi Cinema and Neoliberal Crisis in Twenty-first Century India, published by University of Michigan Press came out in 2025. She also has a co-edited volume, Bollywood’s New Woman: Liberalization, Liberation, and Contested Bodies (Rutgers UP, 2021).

In her courses, Dr. Anwer invites students to engage with literary and visual cultural productions—literature, film, photography, digital media, popular culture. She treats the classroom as an investigative pathway into the world, where students can better understand its complexity and their individual and collective place within it. She encourages students to explore the interconnected of ideas, trace how ideas travel and morph, to revisit the past, re-see the present, and imagine new configuration of the future.