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The idea of Pink Dot: Freedom to love

As a foreigner, I am marked as the outside of the nation state. The space of regulated protest at Hong Lim Park has been quarantined, with identity checks. The barricades around the park will ensure that foreigners like me are outside of the designated space. The thinking goes somewhat like this: foreigners like me ought to have no interest in and influence on the social change processes within the nation state. We are here to contribute to the economy as productive migrants, not to have a voice in societal, cultural, and political processes. The barricade as a symbol is also a marker of the outside of the nation. The foreigner is a participant in the economic sphere of the nation and simultaneously excluded from the societal change processes within the nation. As an irony, the very idea of Pink Dot, "freedom to love," challenges the boundaries that are put up by markers of identity. Binaries such as citizen/foreigner are inverted by the invitation to freedom

Why communicators are the targets of authoritarianism

Authoritarianism perpetuates its hegemonic power and control through the control over the narrative. Stories make up the bases of the regime's power. The reproduction of the regime is legitimated through the production of specific truth claims that form the narrative bases of the regime's rule. The regime tells stories that are central to its justifications of its repressive strategies. Stories of security threats. Stories of economic opportunity. Stories of transformation brought about through the power and control of the regime. The continuation of the power of the regime is enabled through the manufacturing of these specific narratives that form the bases for the various forms of control enacted by the regime.The consent of the subjects of the regime to its authoritarianism is sought and accomplished through the telling of stories of positive transformations brought about by the regime. The tools of repression are necessary at a violent time of the national hist

Cultural Studies without Structure: Co-optation of the Critical in Neoliberal Academe

Much of the current scholarship of cultural studies is a necessary and important accompaniment to diverse forms of neoliberal transformations of politics and economics globally. The emergence of cultural studies in communication in the 1990s is also juxtaposed in the backdrop of the hegemony of neoliberalism as the organizing framework of thought. What role then did cultural studies play in the context of neoliberalism? The ascendance of cultural studies in academia as "the" critical has taken over the performance of critique through cultural descriptors. These cultural descriptors most often are disengaged from questions of structure(s), and by occupying "the" critical space, they draw attention away from the everyday necessities of critiquing neoliberalism and challenging it. Cultural Studies, performing as sites of radical difference within academic institutions, on one hand, position themselves as oppositional sites. On the other hand, the lack of enga

The White (Wo)man as Saviour

I can feel the brownness of my skin, in your gaze. In your desire, to uplift the burden of my brown soul. I can feel the brownness of my skin, in your touch. In your passion, to fill the primitive depths with your light. I can feel the heat of your bomb, under my skin. In your declarations, to democratize the backward ways of my life. Inspired by my reading of Raka Shome's "Diana and Beyond."

Caste privilege "Made in India"

The shiny advertising slogans of "Make in India" tell the story of a modern India, a rapidly growing IT sector, the rising knowledge management industry, and the burgeoning private industry feeding India's growth story. The convent-educated, MTV-watching, Nike-wearing twenty-something is the face of this new India. Aspiring. With dreams of the Big Apple. The pulse of the nation's imagination. Promising in his appeal as the digitally skilled workforce of the new India, the twenty-something presents the image of a global cosmopolitanism. Technologically-savvy, social media-adept, YouTube-conversant. The gloss of modernity is a well performed facade, however. The Domino's, Levi's, and Coldplay obfuscate the casteism that pervades the everyday being of this twenty-something India. Rituals of touch, codes of purity, and practices of boundary-marking define his inner life. He follows the rituals spelt out by his parents. Participates in the custo

The field is not just data: Reflecting on cultural centering

1996. I began fieldwork in Jangal Mahal, among Santali communities experiencing disenfranchisement both materially and symbolically. As a scholar interested in health outcomes and community participatory processes for securing health, the lived experiences of community members with extremely limited access to health resources was an entry point for developing communicative spaces where community members could come together and articulate their health needs, and seek out a variety of material solutions for addressing these needs. Amid the extreme forms of marginalization, disenfranchisement from access to resources, discourses of resistance often appeared in community narratives as strategies for securing access to health. When these narratives of resistance took material form in 2006, I stopped writing about my field sites as a decision that seemed natural to one of the key tenets of the culture-centered approach: reflexivity. Reflexivity in this context meant that I ha

For a daughter.

When a daughter is just being a child, "Oh no, look at her. Intransigent. Needs to be disciplined." You tell me. When a son is just being a child. "This is how sons are, he is just being a child" You laugh.

Engagement amid structural silences.

Engagement taxes the body of the engaged academic. Some days, when the body is tired, and the spirit has been beaten up by the insistence of structures to be impervious, the engaged academic wonders: What is the price we pay for engaged scholarship? Engagement assumes a sense of willingness/openness of structures "to" engage. Engagement also assumes the continued openness of communities at the margins to engage, to come to conversations, especially when their lived experiences with engagement often teaches them to not trust structures, to not have hopes in the possibilities of making spaces within structures. In this dance between community life and organized structures of social life, the engaged academic negotiates power, the privilege of the engaged position, and the challenges that come with it. Because in so much of my earlier writings I attend to Spivak's evocative concept of "privilege as loss," in this post, I will attend to the

Challenging the corporatist logic of social impact

Society and impact are the two definitive constructs that make up the concept of social impact. Yet, this very nature of social impact that is guided toward the question of social good and the role of knowledge in contributing to social good is increasingly obfuscated from corporatized metrics for measuring social impact and from the benchmarks put forth by university administrators speaking to this corporatized structure of Universities globally. In this narrowly corporatist view, social impact is defined and measured in instrumental metrics that serve the interests of transnational capital. The guiding principles for articulating and evaluating social impact are narrowly constrained within corporatist agendas. Metrics such as industry engagement, patents, and revenue generated are thoughtlessly calculated and put forth as metrics of social impact. Inherent in these uncritical adoption of corporatized metrics is the fundamental rift between social impact and the corporate a

The heartlessness trap of the meritocratic rhetoric

The meritocratic rhetoric works well in cultivating an ideal of providing opportunities for those with merit. The very notion that if you have merit you can move through social structures is seductive. In extolling the virtues of merit as individual ability and sheer hard work, the meritocratic rhetoric obfuscates the structures that constitute merit. Merit, however, does not exist in a vacuum. It is produced in societal structures, amid overarching inequities and differentials in distribution of power that define what is merit and then reward certain forms of merit. Merit is a product of social networks and circles of influence. The ability of an individual is cultivated in relational ties, and in socially held bonds. These socially held bonds are further cultivated in schools of merit-making. For instance, the sites of educating merit are themselves further sites of producing elite networks of the meritorious that can then leverage these networks for a wide variety of

Culture as reproducing structures

Structures often reproduce their oppression through the trope of culture. The concept of context is brought about to justify another oppressive policy or another disenfranchising aspect of the status quo. For the status quo, culture is a tool, one that conveniently allows the powerful to bypass critical interrogation. To the extent that structures can render structural oppression as culturally situated, the conversation on transforming structural inequities is deflected. There are no basis for the organizing of social change as the structurally constituted inequity is constructed as cultural. The explanatory framework of culture thus emerges as a tool that reproduces the marginalization of the disenfranchised, consolidating power in the hands of the status quo. One such example of the reproduction of the culturalist narrative to justify and reproduce violence is the "Asian cultures" frame. The depiction of "Asian cultures" as justifications for structural