The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

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...

  You Do Not Mess With Academic Freedom On a March evening in 2025, Mahmoud Khalil was walking home from dinner with his wife in New York when plainclothes agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement took him into custody. Khalil, a Palestinian activist and a recent graduate student at Columbia University, held a green card. He had helped lead campus protests against Israel's military assault on Gaza, and for this the Trump administration sought to deport him, invoking the foreign policy provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act. He spent more than one hundred days in detention. He is free now, though still fighting removal, and he has gone on the offensive in the courts, filing suit under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 against Trump officials and against private organisations, the Heritage Foundation, Canary Mission, and Betar among them, alleging a coordinated campaign to punish him for his advocacy. Sit with the details of that evening. A man returns from dinner with ...

  Why Are You Here Chanting "Jai Shri Ram"? The Contradictions of Diaspora Hindutva A procession winds through a street in Melbourne. A rally fills a park in Edison, New Jersey. A stadium in Auckland rises to its feet. The chant is the same everywhere: Jai Shri Ram. In India over the past decade, this invocation of Ram has been remade from a devotional greeting into the war cry of Hindu majoritarianism, shouted at lynchings, painted on bulldozers, hurled at Muslims as a demand for submission. Underneath the footage circulating online, a local commenter reaches for the oldest line in the nativist playbook: if you love India so much, why are you here? Why don't you go back? The question is racist. It casts the Brown immigrant as a perpetual outsider, welcome to write code and pay taxes but never to belong, and it carries a particular hypocrisy in settler colonies such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand, nations built on the dispossession of ...