AGITATE! Celebrates Professor Shailaja Paik’s Recognition as a MacArthur Fellow!

“By studying the inequalities and the dehumanization of people, we can provide new ways to think about universal humanity and universal emancipation.”

This agitational insight comes from the historian Shailaja Paik, whose ingenious, creative, and rigorous inquiries into histories of caste, gender, and sexuality in modern India through the lives of Dalit women, have transformed forever the ways in which we research and write the workings of power and the making of struggles from the margins. AGITATE! celebrates Paik’s recognition as a 2024 MacArthur Fellow, alongside twenty one other inspiring figures, including the poet Jericho Brown, the filmmaker Sterlin Harjo, the legal scholar and public policy researcher Dorothy Roberts, and the disability justice activist Alice Wong. The MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the “genius grant”, is a $800,000, no-strings-attached grant for individuals who have shown exceptional creativity in their work and the promise to do more.

This well-earned acknowledgment of Shailaja Paik’s agitational contributions to established systems of knowledge production marks a key moment in global higher education. Even as we breathe amid genocidal wars, Paik’s work demands that we imagine, expand, and deepen the possibilities of knowledge and critique through struggle—so that we might enable the creative reclaiming and thriving of all that has been systematically marginalized, humiliated, and crushed—both within and beyond the spaces from which the struggle emerged. We look forward to continuing to learn from Professor Paik’s courageous work and to embracing the intellectual and political challenges that she offers in search of universal humanity and universal emancipation.