The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  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 campus, 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 communicat...

  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...

  Future-Ready for Nothing: The Bullshit Grammar of Neoliberal Crisis Management There is a sentence that now appears, in one variation or another, in every university strategy document, every consultancy pitch, every leadership job advertisement, every transformation roadmap that crosses my desk.  It promises to address complexity, improve performance, and build resilient, future-focused solutions.   Read it once and it sounds like competence. Read it twice and the floor drops out. There is nothing underneath. The sentence is a surface with no depth, a grammar with no referent, a confident voice speaking into a void it has manufactured and then volunteered to manage. I want to take this language seriously precisely because it asks not to be taken seriously, because its power lies in sliding past the reader before the reader can ask the only questions that matter.  Address complexity of what ? Improve performance for whom , measured against what , in service of whi...

  Whiteness Knows How to Stick The far right didn't defeat antiracism. Liberal multiculturalism had already disarmed it — learning, along the way, to speak in the borrowed registers of mana, care, and decolonisation. Picture a boardroom. The table is mostly Pākehā, or it is a leadership group that has carefully arranged a few brown faces along its edges, the way you might arrange cushions. Someone, finally, says the difficult thing. They name the pattern. Who keeps getting hired. Who keeps getting promoted. Whose voice carries the room, and whose keeps getting "circled back to." And before the sentence is even finished, the chair leans in — warm, almost tender — to remind everyone that this is a mana-enhancing space. That we hold one another with manaakitanga here. That perhaps this feedback could be reframed . That the kōrero has become a little unsafe. And just like that, the room closes. The person who named the racism is now the problem. Not for what they said, ...