More reflections on Macaulay's Children: Who teaches the social sciences and humanities?

What should be the commitment of the humanities and social sciences in Asia in covering concepts and ideas rooted in Asia?

How should these commitments play out in the composition of research and teaching faculty in Departments located in Asia?

How is the project of de-Westernization to be accomplished when the majority of the teachers and researchers that inundate the Asian academe happen to be from the West or are trained in the West?

How is the project of de-Westernization to be accomplished if the majority of the decision-makers who offer leadership are from the West?

In other words, How does the question of representation play out in the composition of Departments and Faculties of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences located in Asia, and in the composition of leadership roles and structures within Departments, Colleges, and Universities?

What is the desirable composition of a Department of say Communication located in Asia?

And what are the implications of faculty composition on what gets taught, the readings that get included, and the relevance of these readings to the lived experiences of students we teach?

These are vital questions to consider when participating in discourses of pedagogy, centering, and de-centering.

I personally struggle with these questions as the Head of a Department of Communications and New Media located in Asia.

How are my visions, understanding of pedagogy, and engagement with the local specificity of communication informed by my lived experiences as a South Asian, my training as a Western academic, and the contradictions between these locations as well as the possibilities of synergy between these positions?

How are my understandings of what it means to teach communication shaped by lived experiences that are rooted in specificities of ontology and epistemology centered in Asia?

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...

The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

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