Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Internationalization is the anchoring buzzword of the neoliberal university in search of accelerated and ever-expanding forms of profiteering.  The neocolonial expansion of the neoliberal university is constituted in the ongoing search for new markets.  These new markets offer the revenue streams that hold up the contemporary neoliberal university. Amidst the large-scale and widespread public defunding of public higher education, the turn to privatization of the university is upheld by international markets. Internationalization as a strategy for the education sector is the backbone that ensures the survival of the sector amidst the continuing assaults by cascading neoliberal reforms.  International students often pay two to seven times the fees paid by domestic students, ensuring the cash flow of the university. Simultaneously, universities have turned to establish international campuses to build financial models of revenue generation. The model here is one of the univer...

by Balamohan Shingade The Indian News Editor interviewing mainstream politicians in Aotearoa I’ve just received a thinly-veiled threat from an Auckland outlet called the Indian News. It's in response to the story I'd shared with the Herald on being the target of a conspiracy theory by a Hindutva (Hindu Nationalism) platform, which tried to establish a link between me and the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence. (See Aotearoa Alliance of Progressive Indians's website for more on the conspiracy theory , part of a far-right strategy of propagating hate). Today's piece in the Indian News (February 17th, 2022) is built around a key deceit. In reference to the Herald report, the editor-in-chief writes that the Herald "has quoted some staged, fake narratives of a couple of gullible anti-Hindu and anti-India left leaning youngsters. [...] it only confirms any doubts of some bigger and nefarious designs working behind the scenes, against Hindus and the Indian nation....

Dutch East India Company: Getty Images Academia as a colonizing structure is built on the extraction of knowledge from communities.  In the academic study of resistance, community struggles, social movements, and transformative organizing turn into data, as sources of information to be extracted.  Embedded within the colonial architecture of the modern University, the academic study of activism and resistance strategies replicates the colonial habits that are widespread in the everyday organizing of academia.  Intrinsic to the organizing of the academic study of activism and resistance is the lack of commitment to the actual labor of the struggle in the community.  Resistance as the field is an object to be mapped out, categorized, and drawn out into conceptual threads. Hegemonic theories of resistance thus draw on the actual production of distance between the academic and the struggle, normalizing the lack of commitment among academics. This lack of commitment takes...