The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  What the Frightened Man Saw A fieldwork conversation, a photograph from a marae, and what a minority learns to read in the symbols a state agrees to stand beside. He was afraid before he had said anything worth being afraid of. We had been talking for a long time — the kind of fieldwork conversation that circles its subject for an hour before it lands — when he told me, a Muslim man of Indian origin, that the ideology he thought he had left behind had followed him here, to Aotearoa, and that it had begun to seep into the very institutions meant to keep him safe. I asked him what made him think so. He went quiet, and the temperature of the room changed. Evidence, for a man in his position, is not a neutral thing to hand across a table. To name what you have seen is to make yourself visible to it. After a while he reached not for a document but for a picture — a photograph taken on a marae, stored on his phone — and slid it toward me. Look , he said. Look who is standing there. I w...

  A Southern Grammar of Peace Amid the upheavals of this moment, the frontiers where China, India, and Pakistan meet still hold a buried vocabulary for connection. The work is to recover it from below. Every evening at the Wagah border, just before the sun goes down, two crowds gather to scream at each other across a painted line. On the Indian side at Attari, on the Pakistani side at Wagah, soldiers in fanned cockscomb headgear march toward a pair of iron gates, kick their boots higher than their heads, and lower their national flags in a choreography of furious symmetry. The crowds roar. Loudspeakers push the chants of one nation into the ears of the other. Then the gates clang shut and everyone goes home to dinner, cooked and eaten in the same Punjabi that is spoken on both sides of the wire. I have watched that ceremony. I have also watched the faces in the stands. What the spectacle performs is hatred. What it cannot hide is recognition. The people shouting across the line ...

  My statement delivered in ICA 2026 Oceania Hub. Aotearoa New Zealand.  For two days in Palmerston North, on land that tangata whenua never ceded, scholars and movement workers from Palestine and across the colonised world gathered under one banner: communicative equality against empire. We studied how voice is organised, who is made audible and who is made to disappear, how the infrastructures of speech are built to serve power. Then we turned to our own house. Silence in the face of empire is complicity. The Oceania Hub of the International Communication Association condemns the Executive Committee's prolonged institutional silence on the catastrophe in Palestine. For nearly two years after October 2023, as Gaza endured mass killing, forced displacement, the deliberate destruction of universities, hospitals, and entire knowledge ecosystems, and what numerous international legal authorities have named as genocide, the ICA's leadership chose strategic muteness. When a state...

  The metrology of consent: the Edelman Trust Barometer and the manufacture of crisis Each January, timed to the gathering of corporate and political elites at the World Economic Forum, the public relations conglomerate Edelman releases a global index it calls the Trust Barometer. The business press reports its findings as readings drawn from a sealed and disinterested instrument. Surveying tens of thousands of respondents across more than two dozen countries, the barometer issues an annual verdict on the degree to which populations trust four institutions, government, business, media and the non-governmental sector, and that verdict then circulates through editorials, keynote decks and policy briefings as the empirical baseline for elite deliberation on the legitimacy of democratic life. The presentation is metrological. The operation is governmental. The barometer does not record a pre-existing distribution of public trust. It manufactures trust as a calculable object, installs...

  The Threat in the Mirror How Empire Manufactures China — and What an Indigenous Diplomacy Offers Aotearoa Mohan J. Dutta — The Margins Review Every year, on schedule, New Zealand is instructed to be afraid. In its 2025 threat assessment the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service named China "the most active" agent of foreign interference in the country — an escalation from the "complex intelligence concern" of the year before — and in June 2026 it warned that Chinese operatives were recruiting New Zealanders through job sites and professional networks. The reports arrive pre-headlined. Our newsrooms recite them in the grammar of inevitability. The threat is not demonstrated; it is declared. And in the declaring, it becomes the weather: ambient, unarguable, simply the condition under which a small Pacific nation is now told it must live. This essay examines that machinery. I want to read the media construction of China, and of the Chinese threat, through a ...