Feelings and reactions on week 2

I realized my reactions will be different for week 2 because sitting in on class and discussing the readings definitely has an influence on your thought process and eventually on your response, anyway, here we go...

On performances…I believe as much as every person has their preferred channel of expressing themselves to the outside world (e.g. acting, painting, singing, writing, or through communication), we also have our preferred way/channel of receiving the expressions from others. An example of this might be that an individual loves to read plays by Shakespeare, yet, going to see a play acted on stage is just not their cup of tea. In the context of health and illness and with an individual expressing their true feelings, I think it is crucial, that more than one way of expressing/ receiving exists. Like that, more people have the chance to comprehend the content of one's inner feelings and this opens another "door" to engage in dialogue.

On politics...when I was younger I hated politics. Even today I am not too fond of it but I realized that politics run this world and there is no way to get around them. Political systems need to be challenged constantly in order to provoke changes in the system. With that in mind, it becomes even more scary to see that marginalized groups whose voices are constantly silenced don't even stand the slightest chance to provoke this change. And the ones who have the power to provoke changes don't see an interest in doing so, because for them to be happy no change is needed. They are also the ones who have the ruling over everything else because their power can channel anything the way they want it to be - even I feel powerless looking at it from that perspective and as German native I am not even considered to be part of a marginalized group. I can only imagine how these individuals must feel.

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...

The Suit Walks the Corridor

The Suit Walks the Corridor At ten past nine on a Monday the corridor on the top floor of the administration building fills with the sound of expensive shoes. The carpet up here was laid in the last refurbishment and still gives slightly underfoot, the way a good hotel lobby does, and the doors along it close with the soft, well-engineered thud of a German car. Along this carpet, in the direction of the lift marked Executive, comes the suit. It comes in navy and in charcoal, in the odd daring pinstripe, in the female version too, a tailored jacket over a silk shell, and heels that announce themselves on the tile of the lift lobby a full three seconds before the person arrives. The suit carries a flat white from the good cafe, the one that closed the student cafe to open, and a lanyard that swings with the confidence of a thing that opens doors. The suit passes the framed founding professors, who were photographed in gowns and look, at this distance, like a row of disapproving pe...

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems with w...

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