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

16/10/2026

Top 2% of scientists worldwide. That’s something to celebrate 🎉👏

Congratulations to our College of Humanities and Social Sciences researchers recognised in the 2025 Stanford-Elsevier Top 2% Scientists List!

The rankings recognise researchers whose work is among the most highly cited in their fields, looking at both career-long impact and citations received during 2025.

Recognised for career-long impact:
Pro Vice-Chancellor Professor Cynthia White, Professor Mohan Dutta, Professor Regina Scheyvens, Professor Christine Stephens and Professor Bruce Glavovic.

Recognised for citations in 2025:
Professor Mohan Dutta, Professor Regina Scheyvens, Professor Christine Stephens, Professor Bruce Glavovic, Associate Professor Dianne Gardner and Professor Julia Becker.

The researchers’ work spans communication, education, psychology, public health, resource management, linguistics, tourism and disaster research.

Congratulations to all our researchers recognised!

14/10/2026

Please join us for the release of this CARE white paper.


Thursday 15 October 2026 · 12.30pm NZST

Enclosure by Metric: A Culture-Centered Critique of the Tertiary Education Strategy 2025–2030

White Paper Series Release — in dialogue with Dr Sean Phelan

The Tertiary Education Strategy 2025–2030 sets out what tertiary education in Aotearoa is for, and it does most of that work through numbers: targets, returns, employment outcomes, measures of value. This white paper reads the strategy through the culture-centered approach and asks what gets fenced off when education is costed as a pipeline into the labour market — whose knowledge stops counting, whose futures stop registering, and what happens to the Te Tiriti obligations that cannot be expressed as a performance indicator. Sean Phelan joins CARE Director Prof. Mohan Dutta to take the argument apart and push on it.

Dr Sean Phelan is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities, Media and Creative Communication at Massey University, Wellington. His recent research examines how far reactionary culture-war discourse draws its energy from hostility toward universities and toward critical scholarship in the social sciences and humanities, and his book Wild Antagonism: How the far right claimed critique will be published by Edinburgh University Press in May 2027.

Join on Zoom: https://massey.zoom.us/j/82396418635

09/10/2026

Professor Mohan J. Dutta, our Director, has been placed among the world's most-cited scientists in the 2025 standardised citation indicators released through the Elsevier Data Repository.

In Communication and Media Studies he ranks 15th in the world on career citations and 25th on citations recorded in 2025 alone. He is first across Oceania, second across the Asia-Pacific, and inside the top 0.09% of the 16,468 scholars the dataset indexes in the discipline.

The culture-centred approach took two decades to build, and the communities it concerns built it alongside him. Across seventeen countries, people who had been told their knowledge did not count as knowledge made the arguments these papers carry. That insistence is what the citations are counting.

Congratulations, Mohan. Ngā mihi nui.

28/09/2026

Massey Communication is ranked in the top 100 in the world — the 76–100 band in ShanghaiRanking's Global Ranking of Academic Subjects 2026, and the only New Zealand university on the Communication list.

Rankings count publications. What they don't show is where that work is done: in community gardens, in kitchens, on marae, in migrant homes, alongside the people whose voices the academy has spent a century talking about rather than with.

That is what CARE does, and it is what our students learn. Social change communication. Community engagement and participation. Social justice. Health communication. Antiracism.

To every community that has worked with us — this is your ranking too.

📷 Planting day with our community partners.

23/08/2026

This Thursday, 27 August, at 12 noon NZST, CARE hosts Professor Bernadette Marie Calafell for a live lecture in our Gender, Democracy and Fascism series.

The talk is titled "Pleasure Activism, Reprehensibility and Possibility," and it asks where we might find spaces of community resistance and existence in kink against authoritarianism and fascism.

Join us on Zoom at https://massey.zoom.us/j/87123162599

05/08/2026

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.

01/07/2026

https://www.massey.ac.nz/about/news/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...

29/06/2026

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.

22/06/2026

We at CARE express our gratitude to our many international partners, research collaborators, community organizer interlocutors, civil society mobilizers and community advocates who shape our global research impact.

03/06/2026

Registrations are open for the ICA 2026 Oceania Regional Hub, Communicative Equality against Empire, hosted by CARE at Massey University in Te Papaioea Palmerston North on 6 and 7 June 2026.

Two keynotes from Dr Josephine Varghese and Dr Mahdis Azarmandi, alongside six panels, two workshops, a roundtable linking five ICA regional hubs across the Global South, a CARE master class on radical community organising, and a closing Living Lexicon of Liberation.

Reduced rates are available. Register and pay: https://pay.massey.ac.nz/products/register-and-pay-for-the-ica-2026-hub-conference