The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  The 56-Inch Chest and the Empty Chair Twelve years, three terms, one and a half billion people, and not a single follow-up question Let us begin with the inventory, because the inventory is impressive. Narendra Modi has a 56-inch chest. He told us so himself, back when he was still auditioning, and the measurement has been doing heavy lifting ever since.  He has filled Wembley and a stadium in Houston. He has been beamed by hologram into dozens of villages at once, a man so committed to being seen that he learned to be in four places simultaneously before the technology was really ready.  He once wore a suit with his own name woven repeatedly into the pinstripes, in case anybody in the room lost track of whose suit it was. He has an app.  He has a stadium named after him, which he inaugurated, presumably while wearing the suit. He has stared down two nuclear-armed neighbours. He has flattened an opposition, hollowed an election commission, and turned a national ...

  Why I Write These days, not always, but sometimes, I sit down to write and I worry. About the fresh bout of targeting. The fresh round of abuse. The fresh set of complaints filed with my employer, and the messages that say they will kill me, end me in New Zealand, or have me deported. These anxieties are real, and they have a documented basis. Only the other day, a school venue where I was scheduled to give a talk was doxed by white supremacists, set on by a member of the Free Speech Union Council. As I get older, it honestly gets tiring.  The writing must still be done. The writing is often about things that are difficult to hold. The organised targeting of Muslims. The machinery of settler-colonial forgetting. A bill that arrives in Parliament carrying the language of definition and clarity while doing the work of erasure. I write, send the piece out, and then get on with the day, because the writing is only ever a small thing set against the size of the structures it na...

If universities mean what they say about student thriving, it is our moral duty to build the infrastructures that enable student learning. Amidst the global attack of the far right on universities, mainstreamed through policy capture by the far right, and here in Aotearoa through the infrastructures of the Free Speech Union and mainstream political parties such as ACT and New Zealand First, it is critical that Universities organise to safeguard learning spaces.  And it is particularly critical that university administrators are held to account to do their jobs in enabling student learning. What the students said In June, Massive, the magazine of Massey's students, polled the campuses ahead of the election . The rest of this blog post is going to build on what was reported, albeit noting that it is an unofficial election poll, and without the information on the polling method. More than seventy percent gave their party vote to the Greens.  Not one respondent named National, A...

  The Party in the Lecture Hall ACT has imported the American far right's war on the professor, and its weapon of choice is the language of comfort and safety The notes travelled fast. They began in a first-year law lecture at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland, where Professor Treasa Dunworth was doing what law professors across the democratic world do every day, walking her students through a piece of legislation, in this case the Treaty Principles Bill, and offering her expert interpretation of its purpose and its politics. Within hours, those notes had crossed from the pedagogical space of the classroom to the Facebook page of a member of Parliament, Dr Parmjeet Parmar, ACT's tertiary education spokesperson, and from there to the official page of a governing party. Parmar named the professor, accused her of misinforming and brainwashing her students, and asked her followers a question dressed as concern: "Would you feel comfortable speaking up?" Fig...

  Shane Jones has said racist things about migrants. On the Kia Ora Modi rally, he is the one telling the truth I write from Palmerston North, where I have spent the last nine years directing a research centre that studies how communities at the margins are silenced, and how the ideologies that silence them travel. For more than two decades, across community sites in seventeen countries, my research has traced the global circulation of Hindutva, the political ideology of Hindu supremacy that animates Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party and its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. So when Shane Jones stood before the New Zealand First convention this month and told the Labour Party, National Party, ACT Party and Green Party that "the next time you go to an ethno-nationalist rally to receive a foreign leader, take off your knee pads," I found myself in the uncomfortable position of recognising that the most accurate public description of the Kia Ora Mo...