The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  Solidarity is our weapon: what the US courts are teaching us about defending academic freedom On the morning of 8 July, sitting in my study in Palmerston North while on leave, I read the Eleventh Circuit's ruling striking down Florida's Stop WOKE Act. The judgment landed in my inbox alongside the usual traffic of a life under attack: media queries about Hindutva, updates from a union colleague on strategies of resistance to attacks on the scholarship of whiteness, the residue of a coordinated harassment campaign traced to a Free Speech Union Council member.  I read Judge Britt Grant's words twice. A state that forces an official government line into a college classroom, the court held, imposes exactly the "pall of orthodoxy" that a free society cannot tolerate. A district court had earlier called the law "positively dystopian."  I have spent three decades building the culture-centered approach, listening to subaltern communities from Santali villages...

    "I Feel Unsafe" Is Not an Argument There is a sentence that has learned to end conversations. It arrives in a committee room in the late afternoon, or in an email marked confidential, or in a complaint that has passed through three offices before it reaches you. Someone has made a claim. Someone else, rather than answering the claim, says they feel unsafe, and the room rearranges itself around the words. What was an argument a moment ago becomes a matter of management. Chairs are pulled back. Voices drop. The inconvenient question is folded away, gently, the way you fold away something that has embarrassed everyone by being said. I have watched this happen many times now and have come to understand it as a small ceremony of our age. And it needs to be called out for what it is: a strategy for suspending argumentation. I begin by acknowledging that feeling is real, and I am not in the business of doubting anyone's interior weather. But a feeling is not a verdict, an...

  All Roads Lead to Purdue I arrived in West Lafayette in the summer of 2001, in that thick Indiana heat that settles over the corn and does not lift, a young man with a freshly minted PhD and the cadences of Kharagpur still wet in his mouth. The land was flat to the horizon. The Wabash moved slowly past the town, brown and patient, the way rivers move when they have decided there is nowhere urgent to be. I had come from a different geography of the mind, from May Day marches and street theatre, from a Bengali left that taught me to read the world as a fight over who gets to speak, then north into the harshest winters of Fargo, then into the snowbound empirical registers of Minnesota, where the University of Minnesota had trained me to measure the world before I had learned to question the measure. Now I stood in the heartland of the American Midwest, in a department whose name carried, in our discipline, the weight of scripture. They say all roads lead to Purdue. In communication...

  Marketing as the Con Third in a sequence — a university's ledger, and the impunity beneath the brand If the first of these essays anatomised the empty language of neoliberal management, and the second named the smooth figure who has built a career out of speaking it, this one follows the money. Because marketing is the conman's purest trade. Marketing is, by definition, the management of the gap between what a thing is and what it is said to be. In an honest institution that gap is small, and marketing is barely more than description — you say what you do, because you do it. In the con economy the gap is the whole point. The institution stops investing in the thing and starts investing in the saying of it; it pours its resources into the sign and starves the referent the sign was supposed to point at. To see how this works, and to see why it is allowed to keep working, it helps to do the one thing the con is built to prevent. It helps to open the books. So imagine a univer...

  The Century of the Conman A companion to Future-Ready for Nothing. He walks in suited and booted, and the room makes space for him the way the tired make space for anyone who promises them rest. They have come in from their classrooms, from their marking, from the small daily defence of a thing they still love. Some of them came early. One of them has a pen uncapped and ready. They are good people, most of them, worn soft at the edges by years of doing more with less, and they have learned to hope the careful way you learn to hope after hope has cost you. The water is already poured. The lights are already down. He steps into the dark and fills it with light. The slides bloom behind him, gold and weightless, and his voice moves through the room the way warmth moves through a cold house, room by room, until one by one the faces lift. He has read the books they sell between the gates at the airport, and he gives the people their own words back to them, buffed until they shine, s...