The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  F*#%K Civility. Civility is the velvet glove. Peel it back and you find the fist. The word comes most often from the mouths of people who already own the microphone. They hold the endowments. They sit on the boards of trustees. They keep the donor lists and tune the algorithms that decide whose voice travels and whose dies quietly in the feed. When they demand civility, they want your dissent delivered pre-neutered. Strip out the anger. Strip out the urgency. Strip out the moral clarity that might actually shift something. Speak softly, in their register, at their pace, and whatever you do, leave the furniture where it is. The trick is old, and it has worn every costume. Plantation owners demanded it of the enslaved. Colonial administrators demanded it of the colonised. Factory bosses demanded it of strikers, and the dominant castes demanded it of those they pushed to the edge of the village. Today the loudest demand comes from far-right political networks and a billionaire cl...

  The Franchise: How the Free Speech Union Brought Trump's War on the University to Māori Psychology On 2 October, at Pipitea Marae in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, the two professional bodies of New Zealand psychology will apologise to Māori for the systemic racism of their discipline. The Free Speech Union has spent the winter trying to turn that apology into an indictment. Its 30 July media release asked whether Dr Arna Mitchell, a Māori clinical psychologist whose Viewpoint the College of Clinical Psychologists removed from its journal, was "the wrong kind of Māori." It called the removal tidying the file before the audit. Look at who is speaking. The organisation was born in 2018 to fight for a speaking tour by two alt-right ethnonationalists . It has taken money from the Atlas Network , the Washington-based hub of free-market think tanks. Its international umbrella sits inside a Trump State Department funding package for "Maga-aligned" causes. That organisation...

  The Dashboard Turns Around Evaluating the managerial university, part one On a Wednesday afternoon in late October the school meeting assembles in a teaching room that still smells of the morning's tutorial. Twenty-two academics sit in chairs bolted to writing tablets designed for the forearm of a twelve-year-old. At two minutes past the hour the Associate Director of Student Recruitment, Growth and Pipeline (Domestic and International) arrives with a laptop, a colleague whose title nobody catches, and a slide deck in the university's approved shade of teal. The first slide says Enrolment Insights . The second shows the Bachelor of Arts in Ethnic Studies down eighteen percent on last year, a red arrow pointing at the floor with the grim confidence of a dowsing rod. The explanation takes forty minutes. Demand has softened. The market has shifted. Gen Z is choosing differently. Ethnic studies, the Associate Director suggests with the sympathetic tilt of the head reserved for...

 The professionalization of critical theory has produced its own grotesque parody: a generation of scholars who perform radicality the way a brand performs authenticity. What was once the ruthless critique of everything existing has been reduced to a repertoire of rhetorical gestures, a competitive display of theoretical sophistication, and an endless policing of positions within a closed academic marketplace. The result is not emancipation but a petty, jealous, clique-ridden apparatus that reproduces the very forms of domination it claims to unmask. Look closely at the field and the pathology is obvious. Argument is no longer measured against the stubborn materiality of social reality or the force of a better analysis. It is measured against the capacity to signal the correct degree of suspicion, to deploy the latest conceptual vocabulary with the right affective intensity, and to position oneself advantageously within the networks that control journals, conferences, and hiring. “...

  Whose 88 Percent? A Rejoinder to Kishore Mahbubani Refusing the West is one task. Refusing democracy is another, and the second is being smuggled in under the first. In April 2020 the men who built Singapore's towers were locked inside them. Twelve to twenty to a room, in dormitories on the industrial edges of the island, hundreds of thousands of migrant construction and shipyard workers were sealed behind fences while the rest of the city was told to stay home. By the end of that year, more than nine in every ten of Singapore's recorded COVID-19 infections belonged to men living in those dormitories. The rest of the country had a pandemic. The dormitories had an epidemic, administered by the state that had built them, and the men inside had no vote, no union, no newspaper of their own, and no path to citizenship in the country whose skyline they had poured by hand. I keep that image in front of me when I read Kishore Mahbubani's latest essay for the Institute of Art a...