The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  When Enough of Us Stand The last thing I wrote ended with a man alone in a doorway, which is to say it ended with me, and I meant it as defiance. If I am honest, it was also a little lonely. Then the essay went out into the world and the world wrote back. A message arrived in the small hours, from someone I have never met, in a city I will probably never see. I will stand with you, it said, and nothing more. I read it at my desk in Palmerston North with the house asleep around me and the Manawatū running dark past the window, and I felt the arithmetic of the thing shift under my feet. The doorway that had held one was now holding two. This is how it begins. It always begins this way, with a number so small it looks like nothing to the people who count in millions. One is easy to dismiss. One is a man shouting into a feed engineered to drown him. But one becomes two the moment a single other person decides the shouting is worth joining, and two is already a different kind of fac...

  Why I Stay There is a particular sound a phone makes when a swarm arrives. It is a stutter, a fast run of notifications that does not let up, that keeps coming while you hold the thing in your hand and watch your own name turn into a target. I have heard it more than once. I have learned what lives inside it. Death threats. My home address, posted for strangers to keep. The venues of my lectures, named so that someone might come. Rape threats aimed at the women in my life. The flat medieval promise that I will be hanged. I have read these in the small hours of a Palmerston North night, in a quiet house, with my children asleep down the hall and the Manawatū running dark past the window, and I have felt the precise thing the swarm is engineered to make a person feel, which is alone. I know how these swarms are built, because I study them for a living. I have watched a sitting member of parliament point the machinery at me and then sit back while it ran. That is the part people o...

  An Emmy & The Rage of the Few I learned of it before the house had woken. Autumn comes early to Palmerston North, and at that hour the light is the colour of weak tea, sliding low across the Manawatū. The dogs had not stirred. I was holding a phone, which is a foolish way to receive good news, and there it was. Prime Minister , the documentary about Dame the Rt. Hon. Jacinda Ardern, had taken the Emmy for best documentary. I have watched the film three times. It breaks me in the same place each time, and each time I let it, because some things are worth being broken by. I came to this country in 2018. When I was head hunted in 2017, I was Provost Chair Professor and Head of Communications and New Media at the esteemed National University of Singapore, and there were other offers in front of me, the kind that arrive on heavy letterhead and measure a man by his salary band and his citation count. I turned them down for a cluster of islands at the bottom of the world. I did it ...

  The Far Right Wants You Stupid: The Attack on the University as a Project of Extreme Capital There is a question I want to put on the table before anything else, because everything that follows depends on how we answer it. Why does the far right hate the university? Not the polite version of the question, the one that treats campus culture wars as a clash of values or a debate about free speech. The structural version. Why has the dismantling of tertiary education, the discrediting of academics, the slashing of public university budgets, and the manufactured panic about woke indoctrination become a core, repeating, well-funded feature of far-right politics across the world, from Florida to West Bengal to here in Aotearoa? The answer I want to defend is simple to state and uncomfortable to sit with. The far right hates the university because the university is one of the last places where a person from a subaltern community can learn to name the structure that subordinates them. ...

  When white mediocrity calls the IITs a "junk house": what the trolls reveal about the long afterlife of empire By Mohan J. Dutta, Dean's Chair Professor of Communication, Massey University; Director, Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) Over the past several months I have been the target of a coordinated online harassment campaign in Aotearoa New Zealand. The campaign has many themes, but a small and revealing strand keeps surfacing in the comment threads: jabs at my education. "World renowned, I think not, he has an Indian degree." "Must have graduated from one of those fake degree factories." "What even is IIT, some Indian junkhouse." "Never heard of it." These comments are not, in any meaningful sense, claims about the Indian Institutes of Technology. They are claims about who is permitted to be taken seriously in a Western public sphere, and whose credentials are presumed to be counterfeit...