Thoughts on solidarity and supporting student activists to #EndSexualHarassment

A corrupt university system with administrators that are deeply complicit in perpetuating a culture of sexual harassment and faculty predatory behaviour surveils, hounds and punishes student activists for bringing the sexual harassment to light and for speaking up against sexual harassment.

For all its PR speak about remedies, it is this truth that we must hold close, and continue to agitate to dismantle the culture of sexual harassment. We must also organize to protect those, especially student activists, whose bodies are on the line.

A corrupt system that is deeply complicit in perpetuating sexual harassment blames me, the CCA, and CARE for teaching students to organise on sexual harassment. It gives us and the CCA too much credit.

And most importantly, deeply complicit in technocratic authoritarianism, it fails to see the agentic capacity of students.

It is the role of Ministry of Education and the Minister of Education specifically to protect student activists that bring sexual harassment to light from retaliatory behavior.

Parents and taxpayers must hold the Minister and the Ministry accountable for any retaliatory behavior.

Any administrator that retaliates against a student must RESIGN or must be made to step down.

Public activism and participation are vital to hold the state accountable to bringing about changes to cultures of sexual harassment. Parent activism as public activism is vital to safeguarding our future generation and in nurturing their right to voice.

It is vital that parents speak up and organise in the face of university repression targeting students. It is vital that journalists closely attend to instances of retaliation and build public registers to document these instances.

It is only with multi-pronged activism and advocacy that we will see change in entrenched cultures of sexual violence.

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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