The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

Note: At the onset of this blogpost, I express a sense of profound sadness in witnessing the violent attack on Charlie Kirk, the message that sends for political culture, and the broader culture of violence we witness in the U.S. This violence has become an infrastructure of U.S. culture, replete with an aggressive gun culture (school shootings, attacks on public spaces), attacks on politicians, and deep polarization brought about through disinformation weaponized on digital platforms. In the analysis that follows, I have attempted to offer contextual analysis rather than lifted quotes and also linked to the show materials for the readers to follow. I have over the last two years Chaired the Taskforce commissioned by the National Communication Association on Threats to Academic Freedom and Tenure.  As part of the work, our taskforce has documented systemic patterns of attacks on academic freedom and tenure. One of the key players in this organized attack on teachers, researchers, a...

The recent assassination of Charlie Kirk, a prominent American far-right activist and founder of Turning Point USA, has sparked a wave of coverage in New Zealand’s mainstream media. Outlets such as "Stuff", "The New Zealand Herald", and TVNZ have reported on Kirk’s death, often framing him as a charismatic conservative figure who galvanized young voters in the United States, particularly within Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.  However, this coverage has been strikingly selective, painting a sanitized portrait of Kirk that conveniently erases his deeply troubling legacy of inflammatory rhetoric, attacks on academics, promotion of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, and contributions to a climate of violence.  As a scholar of communication and advocate for decolonizing media narratives, I argue that New Zealand’s mainstream media’s whitewashing of Kirk’s legacy perpetuates a dangerous erasure of his role in fostering division and harm, reflecting a broader failur...

The patriarchal landscape of North India, interwoven with the ideological currents of Hindutva, thrives on deeply rooted cultural practices that devalue women and perpetuate gender-based violence. Central to this matrix is the preference for the male child, a cultural artifact that intersects with Hindutva’s nationalist agenda to amplify misogyny and justify systemic oppression.  In the North Indian states from Bihar to Rajasthan, where these dynamics are acutely visible, the triad of sexual violence, family violence, and alcoholism sustains a cycle of harm, exacerbated by disinformation and propaganda that falsely attribute the determination of a child’s sex to the mother. North Indian upper caste men thrive on this disinformation, playing the victim while perpetuating systemic sexual, physical, and family violence. The relentless capacity of caste privileged Hindi-Hindutva men to manufacture the oppressed male victim forms the infrastructure of moral degeneracy and violence, disp...

Anchored in the culture-centered approach (CCA), which I have championed as a framework for amplifying marginalized voices and knowledges against colonial and hegemonic structures, the convergences between the Māori argumentation tradition and the diverse Indian argumentation traditions—Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Adivasi, and Dalit—reveal a shared commitment to relationality and resistance.  Māori whaikōrero, the eloquent oratory of the marae invoking ancestors and environmental ties, finds resonance with Indian traditions of dialogical exchange, all of which reject adversarial Western debate in favor of collective meaning-making rooted in cultural and communal contexts. The Māori practice of whakawhanaungatanga (building relationships through dialogue) aligns with Hindu nyāya and Buddhist vāda, where argumentation, as seen in the Nyāya Sūtras or Pali Canon debates, seeks harmony and contextual truth rather than domination, mirroring CCA’s emphasis on subaltern epistemologies as deco...

Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke delivering her powerful performance of haka The radiant leadership of Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, a young Māori MP, exposes the fragility of whiteness in Aotearoa, as white supremacist frameworks respond with envy to her unapologetic advocacy for tino rangatiratanga. The response of the infrastructure of whiteness to her brilliance also exposes something else, the deep undercurrent of jealousy that forms the ecosystem of white fragility. Jealousy, that visceral pang of resentment, is a quiet undercurrent in the everyday life of settler colonialism.  It festers in mundane interactions, in workplaces, academic halls, and social media feeds, often cloaked in civility or passive aggression. Whiteness, the hegemonic values of white culture, propped up as universal, continually deploys jealousy under the performance of civility. Jealousy works as an everyday tool for the expression of white rage at the excellence of people of color.  An excellent public spea...