Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies News

New Book Analyzes “Occupy” Movement

July 5th, 2012

Now available to order, Voices of Resistance: Communication and Social Change by Mohan J. Dutta, explores voices of resistance from across the globe and presents a theoretical framework for understanding topical, popular resistance movements such as Occupy Wall Street. The book emphasizes the core idea that creating spaces for listening to voices of resistance fosters openings for the politics of social change—interweaving the stories of the local, the national, and the global.

Based on the re-presentations of disparate voices from global margins, each section of the book documents the various ways through which positions of power are resisted through communication processes, strategies, and tactics. Dutta’s case study approach makes Voices of Resistance: Communication and Social Change useful supplementary reading for advanced undergraduate or graduate classes in disciplines such as political science, communication, and media studies, and the ethnographic method gives a human face to political and social movements that are otherwise difficult to conceptualize.

Mohan J. Dutta is a professor of communication and Director of the Center on Poverty and Health Inequities (COPHI) at Purdue University. Spanning over one hundred articles and six books, his research examines marginalization in contemporary health care and the ways in which participatory, culture-centered processes and strategies are organized in marginalized contexts.