Humility as a research ethic

A culture-centered project is a journey in humility, an ongoing process of "learning to unlearn" the theories, concepts, and tools one has been taught to learn to excel in the academic pursuit of success.

To listen to voices of communities at the margins of the social system of which the academic is a part, one has to look carefully at one's own position as an academic within this network of privilege. To look at and carefully examine one's own position is to acknowledge the confluence of structures that reproduce this privilege, the very structures that also produce under-privilege. What are my privileges, how have and how are these privileges produced, and how do I benefit from these privileges? How do my privileges produce under-privilege?

In other words, privilege and under-privilege are two sides of the same coin.

Because I am privileged, because I occupy a position of privilege, someone else is positioned as without privilege. In this sense, I as an academic am part of the problem of the production of the margins. This acknowledgment hopefully marks the beginning of a lifelong journey of research practices that seek to interrogate the unequal production and circulation of privilege in social systems.

To work with the margins therefore, my acknowledgment of the circuits of privilege and the ways in which these circuits of privilege profit from the production of the margins is a starting point. Through this acknowledgment, I as a researcher can begin to see how privilege is produced and tied to distributions of power in society. My ability to have a voice is intertwined with the erasure of multiple other voices from multiple other positionalities.

For this close reflection that turns the lens on the academic and on his/her location at the center of knowledge production, cultivating humility is a necessity. The practice of humility as research ethic teaches the researcher/activist/advocate the impossibility of representation while throwing open the challenges of re-presenting articulations from the margins to interrupt into the structures.

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 ...

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 Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor On the architecture of the Aotearoa culture-war machine, and the danger it poses to a democracy heading into 2026 There is a particular cadence to the afternoon on which the career of a senior Māori journalist at TVNZ is finished. It is unhurried. It begins with a tweet — in this case, a single image of a typed statement, posted by Maiki Sherman, the now-former political editor of TVNZ, on the afternoon of Friday, 8 May 2026, announcing that she had parted ways with the broadcaster. The post was terse, dignified, and final. As RNZ later reported , Sherman wrote that the scrutiny of the previous week had placed enormous pressure on her and rendered her role "untenable." The first wahine Māori to lead a major broadcaster's political team was gone. The story that finished her had not, ten days earlier, existed in any newspaper, on any wire, on any website you would consider mai...

The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

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