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On gratitude: It takes a collective to sustain justice-based scholarship



Solidarity with Hong Kong protestors event organized by CARE, with colleagues and activists

One of the profound lessons in carrying out justice-based scholarship is the role of a wider collective. 

My public scholarship and the public scholarship of CARE would be just about impossible without the embodied support and nourishment offered by an entire infrastructure of care. 

This infrastructure holds us in joy, kindness, and security, comforting us amidst the targeted attacks, and nourishing us with strength and courage. 

To articulate claims for justice and to raise questions that challenge the status quo requires academics and our wider networks to turn within and beyond to find courage. 

In my journey with struggles to raise claims at the "margins of the margins," the courage I draw upon is rooted in the wider collective. 

It emerges from the many friendships with activists who embody courage in their questioning of structures, who offer insights into strategies for sustenance, and who offer guidance on ways to raise uncomfortable questions in spite of the threats. These activist networks come together amidst crises to plan strategies of resistance and to sustain these strategies. 

From late-night conversations to strategic planning over weekends, infrastructures of activist organizing have offered ongoing resources for challenging the forces that seek to silence us.

When CARE and I have been targeted with a wide array of threats including organized campaigns by powerful political and economic forces, our capacity to speak has been sustained by the creative pathways of resisting repression that have been voiced by activists. 

The lessons we learn from our collaborations with activists are vital to sustaining the capacity of CARE to articulate claims for justice.

Also, courage for me emerges from the wider affective network of support offered by the leadership of my university, who stand by their commitment to building the space for raising claims to justice. In a neoliberal climate where senseless managerialism has shaped the broader approach to risk management in universities, my University is special in the powerful ways in which it has committed itself to sustain justice-based scholarship. 

This translates into steadfast assurances of support and sustenance even as the university has negotiated threats that are directed at it because of my public scholarship. Without the support of my university for academic freedom and to enabling justice-based public scholarship, both CARE and I would struggle to challenge the forces that seek to silence us.

Most vitally, justice-based scholarship is sustained in the dignity, struggles, and organizing of communities at the global "margins of the margins." 

That repression of voices at the margins is one of the most powerful strategies for sustaining and perpetuating inequalities is a recognition that shapes the struggles at the global margins. From feminist struggles among landless, Dalit (oppressed caste) women against land grab to the struggles of oppressed caste communities and Muslims in the diaspora, to the struggles against exploitation among low-wage migrant workers to Indigenous struggles against land grab, courage forms the basis of organizing at the "margins of the margins." 

For those at the margins who have been systematically denied access to resources and erased from spaces of participation, turning to courage is an everyday act that challenges the silencing strategies catalyzed by those with economic and political power. That articulations for justice must be raised in the face of extreme repression turns to courage as an everyday resource. 

It is this collective courage held in communities at the margins that forms the bedrock of justice-based scholarship. It works as a reminder that for structural transformations to take place, inconvenient questions must be raised. 

Academics with the freedom, privilege, and resources to raise these questions must fundamentally intervene into the structures of power and control. Such interventions are fundamentally necessary when we place ourselves in academia as seeking to address social justice in our research programmes.

Ultimately, collectives and communities are the essential ingredients of scholarship seeking to make an impact on the unequal terrains of power and control that constitute injustices globally, nationally, and locally. This recognition is vital in de-centering the individualized model of scholarship that prevails in the academe, and in turning toward the role of academia in working alongside struggles in seeking justice, working collectively and collaboratively to transform structures.

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