What's wrong with the framework of "judging?"

Very often in health and development communication efforts targeted at the Third World, we hear our First World colleagues say things such as "We ought to be able to judge certain practices as inherently bad, ought we not?" Take for instance the Taliban's treatment of women in Afghanistan. According to these colleagues, we ought to be able to critique the Taliban and it's treatment of women. One of the things I would however like to point out in this context is that it was after all this impetus for freeing the women of Afghanistan from the Taliban regime that played out in US war efforts in Afghanistan.

That the Taliban's treatment of women needs to be critiqued is a legitimate point. I would, however, like to add to this criticism by further suggesting that we also ought to locate our critique of the Taliban and its practices within the broader sociohistorical context of the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the role of the US in equipping the warlords in Afghanistan and supporting the Taliban. Attending to this sociohistorical discourse draws our attention to the broader violence of colonial politics that plays out in the lives of Afghan women and in their resistive struggles.

Therefore, for my First World colleagues who are so inclined to want to judge because they can't simply help not taking a stance about the atrocities in the Third World, I suggest that you begin by starting to understand the broader context of structural violence within which these atrocities are located. I also suggest that you interrogate the neo-colonialist agendas of such discourse (for instance the discourse of freeing Afghani women to intervene in Afghanistan) and the ways in you which you participate in that. I also suggest that when talking about the helpless women of the South, you begin by looking at the works of organizations such as RAWA. Finally, I suggest you interrogate your own positions of privilege and the ways in which such colonialist discourse maintains your position of privilege.

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems with w...

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor On the architecture of the Aotearoa culture-war machine, and the danger it poses to a democracy heading into 2026 There is a particular cadence to the afternoon on which the career of a senior Māori journalist at TVNZ is finished. It is unhurried. It begins with a tweet — in this case, a single image of a typed statement, posted by Maiki Sherman, the now-former political editor of TVNZ, on the afternoon of Friday, 8 May 2026, announcing that she had parted ways with the broadcaster. The post was terse, dignified, and final. As RNZ later reported , Sherman wrote that the scrutiny of the previous week had placed enormous pressure on her and rendered her role "untenable." The first wahine Māori to lead a major broadcaster's political team was gone. The story that finished her had not, ten days earlier, existed in any newspaper, on any wire, on any website you would consider mai...

The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

Search This Blog