On gratitude: The everyday practices of gratefulness

Over the week, in our monthly college magazine, I read the story of a colleague retiring. The story talked about how this colleague was such a key part of our college.

I was overwhelmed with powerful emotions reading the story.

A sense of sadness gripped me. The sadness seemed to appear like a tsunami, lifting me up in a tide of emotion.

Reading the story, I realized suddenly how I had been putting off sending a "thank you" note to this colleague for the past several weeks to tell them how much I appreciated their kindness and their presence in the college.

The rhythms and demands of building and sustaining community-academic-activist partnerships often mean that I am negotiating multiple commitments. Amidst these commitments, which are complicated by the various hate groups that target our anti-racist work at CARE, I end up spending a large part of my labor fire fighting.

But perhaps that is an excuse I give myself for not adequately expressing my gratitude to people that I ought to be expressing my gratitude to.

I was reminded in the week how this colleague offered a beautiful lesson in the possibilities that could be.

Over the past several months, they would make it a point to check on me and send their good wishes.

One evening, as the day was wrapping up, and I had called her to follow up on some documents, she shared with me the challenges in our personal lives in challenging the racism and hate that seem to flow into our familial and community networks.

The conversation was healing because it foregrounded this understanding that there are so many of us who are doing the everyday work of challenging hate. In different forms, in different contexts, across different organizing structures mobilized by the virality of hate on digital platforms.

These everyday practices of kindness are reminders of the reason why we challenge the organizing politics of hate.

As I write this note of gratitude, I am reminded of its power in imagining the possibilities of another world.

Another world that is rooted in the many possibilities of love.

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...

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