Reflections on Field Trip to Willing Hearts

The day at Willing Hearts started with a trip first down to the kitchens where we had a behind-the-scenes look at the preparation of food. It was a spectacular sight as we get to observe exactly how huge the operations are just so that beneficiaries will not go starving. The number of volunteers that are present is huge and it was heart-warming to know that students were also there to help out in the cause. As we talked to a few of the volunteers at Willing Hearts, we got to know more about the beneficiaries and the amount of help that they receive from others to continue their operations.

With the new understanding in how the day-to-day operations are like, we helped to load up the packed food and headed out to help distribute the food. At each and every stop that we went to, it was hard to identify the people that required the food had it not been pointed out to us. These elderly were just every single one of us. There was nothing on them that identified them as those needing help. They were just like any other ordinary person you see on the street.

After distributing the food, we had the opportunity to take a look at the living conditions of the underprivileged. It seemed as though there was an effort to hide the true situation of those living in those rental flats as the corridors were constantly being cleaned by cleaners. As I've visited these, whilst it didn't strike me that the living conditions were small in size, it struck me that there was little or almost no help given to them.

This trip made me think whether the social security nets set up by our government is truly enough and whether there are enough help being given to those that have fallen through the cracks in the social security nets. It was definitely an eye-opening experience for me and I will definitely keep this experience close to me.

Lim Bing Le

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 wit...

Upper caste Indian women in the diaspora, DEI, and the politics of hate

Figure 1: Trump, Vance and their partners responding to the remarks by Mariann Edgar Budde Emergent from the struggles of the civil rights movement , led by African Americans , organized against the oppressive history of settler colonialism and slavery that forms the backbone of US society, structures around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) formed an integral role in forging spaces for diverse recognition and representation. These struggles around affirmative action, diversity, equity and inclusion were at the heart of the changes to white only immigration policies, building pathways for migration of diverse peoples from the Global South. The changes to the immigration policies created opportunities for Indians to migrate to the US, with a rise of Indian immigration into the US since the 1970s into educational institutions, research and development infrastructures, and technology-finance infrastructures. These migratory structures into the US were leveraged by l...

The Projection Machine: Epstein's Intellectual Network and the War on Trans People

The anti-transgender activist Posie Parker in Aotearoa NZ An Industry Built on Inversion Anti-transgender hate is an industry. Not a movement, not a moral concern, not an organic uprising of worried parents — an industry, deliberately constructed, lavishly funded, and strategically deployed to protect the interests of the powerful men who finance it. And like most industries built on fear, it requires a credible monster. Transgender people — a community representing roughly one percent of the population, facing disproportionate rates of poverty, violence, suicide, and discrimination — have been selected for that role with remarkable precision. The 2025–2026 release of the Jeffrey Epstein files has made something newly visible that was always structurally present: the men who built the ideological infrastructure of anti-trans politics are, in many cases, the same men — or the direct intellectual descendants of the same men — who moved through the social world of a convicted child sex tr...

Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Search This Blog