CARE: Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation

Announcing the CARE Spring 2026 speaker series: Gender and Democratic Organizing in the Face of Fascism.

Across the globe, fascist politics consolidates itself through attacks on women, on q***r communities, on migrants, on communities at the margins. It is also from these very margins that the most vital democratic organizing is taking shape, in feminist movements, in q***r solidarities, in subaltern struggles that build the infrastructures of voice sustaining democracy. This series at the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), Massey University, gathers four scholars whose work shows us how communication, culture, and collective organizing hold open democratic futures in authoritarian times.

We will be in conversation with Karin Gwinn Wilkins, Dean of the School of Communication at the University of Miami and author of Communicating Gender and Advocating Accountability in Global Development; Bernadette Marie Calafell, Professor of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon and Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association; Darshana Sreedhar Mini of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, author of Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India; and Iccha Basnyat, Professor of Global Health Communication at George Mason University, whose scholarship works at the intersections of culture, gender, and health across South and Southeast Asia.

The conversations will be held online and in person at Massey University, and all are welcome. Dates, times, and registration details will follow soon.

At a moment when authoritarian power seeks to silence the margins, these four scholars remind us that democracy is made and remade through the everyday labor of organizing, and that the struggles of those rendered disposable are where its future is being written.

https://www.massey.ac.nz/about/news/massey-academic-to-deliver-keynote-at-inaugural-anti-racism-education-conference/

Massey academic to deliver keynote at inaugural anti-racism education conference Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University Professor Mohan Dutta will deliver a keynote address at the inaugural Weaving Anti-racist Futures in Education conference in Auckland this weekend. The conference will explore how schools can better respond to racism and create more inclusive learning envir...

We invite you to the next talk in the CARE Lecture Series. Prof Tanmoy Bhattacharya, Professor and Head of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Delhi, will speak on "Naming an Abusive Practice" at 12.00 noon on Thursday 2 July 2026, live-streamed from CARE here at Massey University in Palmerston North.

Registration is open for the ICA 2026 Oceania Hub: Communicative Equality against Empire — Socialism, Anticapitalism, Anticolonialism, Antiimperialism. We have an amazing set of panels and look forward to seeing you at the Hub.

https://pay.massey.ac.nz/products/register-and-pay-for-the-ica-2026-hub-conference

6–7 June 2026 · Sir Geoffrey Peren Building, Massey University, Te Papaioea Palmerston North, Aotearoa New Zealand. Hosted by the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE).

Two days. Six panels. Three workshops. A Hub-to-Hub dialogue with Chulalongkorn University. A closing Living Lexicon of Liberation. All sessions sequential, no parallel scheduling, so the conversation builds across the two days rather than fragmenting.

We convene this Hub at a moment when communication studies is being asked, again, to choose its side. The dominant frameworks that organise our field — neoliberal multiculturalism, depoliticised inclusion, technocratic dialogue — have proven structurally incapable of naming the genocide in Gaza, the carceral violence of settler colonial states, the manufacture of Islamophobic and Hindutva publics, the platformed extraction of labour and life. The Hub names empire as a structuring condition of communicative life and asks what voice sovereignty looks like when the international discourse archive is itself an instrument of empire.

We will hear from scholars and movement workers across Aotearoa, Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Iran, Palestine, China, Spain, the United States, and Thailand. Tai Tawhito Tai Tipua on constitutional and economic transformation in Aotearoa. Towards Media Repair with Poppy de Souza, Tanja Dreher, Sukhmani Khorana. Radical community organising as communicative practice. Bodies on the line. Refusal as method.

Register and pay through the Massey Web Payments link below. The Hub is open to scholars, students, community organisers, journalists, and movement workers.

https://pay.massey.ac.nz/products/register-and-pay-for-the-ica-2026-hub-conference

Come and name empire with us.

COMING FRIDAY · 29 MAY · 12 NOON NZST
CARE Lecture Series

The Rise of Islamophobia in the Digital Ecosystem in the Anglosphere: A Culture-Centred Analysis

The digital ecosystem in the Anglosphere has become a critical infrastructure for the production, circulation, and amplification of Islamophobic hate. Muslim communities carry its everyday weight, from harassment and surveillance to the threat of violence.

This lecture draws on a decade of culture-centred research at CARE: multi-sited digital ethnographies, large-scale survey data on Muslim communities' experiences of online hate, computational analyses of platform discourse, and forensic mapping of co-ordinated inauthentic networks. It closes by outlining infrastructures of voice, evidence-based platform advocacy, and decolonial coalition-building across Muslim, Indigenous, and racialised communities.

Live on this page from 12 noon NZST.
Also streaming on YouTube: www.youtube.com/
More on CARE: https://carecca.nz/

Open to all. No registration required. Please share with anyone in your networks who would find it useful: students, journalists, community organisers, platform researchers, civil society colleagues.

Read CARE Director Prof. Mohan Dutta's interiew on the rise of the far-right in Aotearoa New Zealand, the import of far-right policies and politics from the US, and the threat to academic freedom.

“Attempts to silence scholars”: Mohan Dutta warns of coordinated far-right campaigns against academic freedom Academic Mohan Dutta says coordinated harassment campaigns targeting his research and public opinions on social media are escalating, raising serious concerns about academic freedom and scholar safety amid the threat of organised political intimidation.

Subject: CARE Lecture Series | Associate Professor Pradip Thomas | Wed 13 May, 12 noon

Tēnā koutou katoa,

The Center for Culture-Centred Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) warmly invites you to the next talk in our CARE Lecture Series.

Associate Professor Pradip Thomas (School of Communications and Arts, University of Queensland) will deliver a live-streamed lecture titled:

"Making Sense of Digital Justice: Some Observations"

Date: Wednesday, 13 May 2026
Time: 12.00 noon (NZST)
Format: Live-streamed

Watch live on:
• CARE page: www.facebook.com/CAREMassey/
• CARE YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/

About the talk
This presentation explores modalities of digital justice that Pradip has worked on across his scholarship, drawing primarily from India while also engaging with global activism for social justice. The lecture works through digital justice as a public commitment, digital justice as struggle, digital justice and connectivity, and digital justice as activism against the power of Big Tech, animated by four cases:

1. FOSS-based alternatives in Kerala
2. Gig workers and social justice
3. Community connectivity, Janastu, Karnataka
4. Data Centre activisms

About the speaker
Pradip Ninan Thomas is at the School of Communications and Arts, University of Queensland. He has published extensively on the politics of data, the political economy of digital communications, and communications for social change. His latest book, Data Centre Entanglements, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2026.

We hope you will join us for what promises to be a generative conversation on the politics of the digital and the possibilities of justice from below.

For more on CARE: https://carecca.nz/

Ngā mihi nui,
Professor Mohan J. Dutta
Director, Center for Culture-Centred Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE)
Dean's Chair Professor in Communication
Massey University | Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa

We are thrilled to announce that Massey University has once again been ranked in the Top 150 in the world for Communications & Media Studies in the QS Subject Rankings 2026!

🥇 And we're 1st equal in New Zealand once again– a huge achievement that reflects the quality of our programmes, our world-class academics, and our talented students.

From applied communication, creative communication, public relations, media studies, radio and podcasting to digital media, journalism, and strategic communication – our students are gaining the skills that matter in today's fast-changing media landscape. Most vitally, our teaching is anchored in our world class research, immersion in communication practice and community engagement.

A massive congratulations to our incredible team in the School of Humanities, Media & Creative Communication, and to every student and graduate who has contributed to this success!

👏