The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  The Metaphor That Came From Inside the Cell Decolonisation as an act of listening, and where it meets anti-imperialism Mohan J. Dutta The Margins Review August 2026 I. The bomb that fell on the prison On 23 June 2025 an Israeli missile struck the Evin prison complex in Tehran. It took the hospital ward. It took the section where transgender prisoners were held. It took the visitor centre, which is the one room in any prison built for love rather than for control. That building is where this argument begins and it is where the argument ends. Inside those walls the Iranian state was doing what it does to people who defy it. Above those walls a state armed and financed from Washington was dropping ordnance on the entire structure, guards and prisoners together, and calling it liberation. The people in the cells lived both of those things on a single afternoon. There is nowhere on earth to stand from which that afternoon looks simple, and any analysis arriving at simplicity h...

  A Bill for Cat, and for every scholar who gathers Opinion. Mohan J. Dutta In the winter of 2020, with the campuses closed, a conference that should have filled a lecture theatre in Auckland went online and filled something larger. More than three hundred people from ten countries logged in over three weeks to talk about fat studies, a field that asks what happens to human beings when a society decides their bodies are a disease. The woman who convened it, Dr Cat Pausé , had built that field in this country almost single-handedly over fourteen years. She convened its first conference here in 2012, its second in 2016, and now its third. She co-edited the Routledge international handbook that will define the discipline for a generation. She did all of this from a provincial campus at the bottom of the world, and she made that campus a place the world looked to. Cat also understood that law is where scholarship becomes protection. Colleagues remember her working to have fatness recog...

  Our Collective Futures, an Asian Future In the year 630, a young monk from the Tang capital of Chang'an slipped past imperial border guards and walked west. Xuanzang crossed the Taklamakan by night, nearly died of thirst in the desert, was robbed in the mountain passes, and arrived, after years of walking, at the gates of Nalanda in what is now Bihar. He stayed for years. He studied Sanskrit grammar, logic, and Yogacara philosophy under the abbot Shilabhadra, debated with scholars from across the known world, and then carried more than six hundred manuscripts back to China on the backs of horses. He spent the rest of his life translating them. When he died, a million people are said to have attended his funeral. I return to Xuanzang often, because his journey holds a truth that the current architecture of global power works very hard to make us forget. The relationship between India and China is among the oldest sustained dialogues in human history. For close to two thousand ye...

  The Refuge A career guide for the academic who has run out of ideas The catering arrives before the consultation document does. This is the first thing to understand about a restructure, that the sandwiches are ordered with more care than the disestablishment list, and that in a room nobody in this meeting has ever entered it has already been settled which colleagues will be carrying a box of books to their cars by the end of the quarter. The slides are up before anyone sits down. There are four of them. One is a photograph of students laughing on a lawn beneath a sky that has never appeared over this campus. One is a graph with no numbers on the vertical axis. One says Enabling Our Future. The fourth thanks everyone for their engagement, which has not yet occurred, and will not. There is a young academic in that room who has quietly worked out that they are never going to write anything anybody wants to read. The thesis was pulled from the fire by a generous supervisor. The t...

  The Price of a Student's Voice ACT went to three student debates, listened to students describe the cost of their own training, and came back with a policy to defund the associations that hosted them. Somewhere in Palmerston North this morning a nursing student is paying for a hospital car park out of a StudyLink loan. She will complete around eleven hundred unpaid hours on the wards before anyone is legally permitted to call her a nurse, and she will complete them while cutting back the supermarket shifts that pay her rent. A midwifery student across town faces two thousand four hundred hours. A social work student faces nine hundred and sixty. In health alone, some twenty-one thousand students hand over in the order of eleven and a half million unpaid hours every year to the institutions the rest of us fall into when we are frightened and unwell. Last week ACT's education spokesperson attended three pre-election debates hosted by student associations at Victoria, Otago a...