Essay Article

Teleportation | عَبْرَة

Ola Saad Znad
This image presents a wide, elevated view of a sprawling city bisected by a large river, under a bright, somewhat hazy sky. The overall impression is one of a historic city with layers of

“Yes, Baghdad and I haven’t seen each other since the war, but am I brave enough to change its perfect image in my memory? The walls of Baghdad extend their reach to me, protecting the only solid memory I have of the place I love, where my roots run deep. These walls keep me wondering: what would my life be if I had never left my home?”

इंसानियत का लॉकडाउन

Richa Nagar and Richa Singh
This image, titled 'Singh-Nagar-3.jpg', captures an overwhelming scene of a massive crowd of people and numerous buses on a wide road, likely a highway or major thoroughfare,

The title of this piece translates to—Humanity in Lockdown. It documents the plight of migrant workers who fled Indian cities en masse, the deepening religious divide, and intensifying poverty in the context of COVID-19 pandemic and the nation-wide lockdown that was instituted in April 2020.

Step, step, breathe

Sophie Oldfield
This image is a minimalist, high-contrast drawing on a black background, featuring two stylized figures rendered in thick white lines. Each figure consists of a solid white, roughly circular shape at the top

I started running eight years ago as a way to be in my city, in Cape Town. Step, step, breathe (video above) shares how running gave me a way to move through Cape Town, to see it anew, and to participate in it.

SKMS Code of Conduct

Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan (SKMS)
This is a wide, horizontal banner image with a light, off-white background. It features bold text in the upper half and a dense, abstract crowd of figures along the bottom edge.

A code of conduct for Code of Conduct for Researchers, Writers, Filmmakers and Others Interested in Working with the Sangathan. By the Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan (SKMS)

जसिन्ता को पढ़ने पर …

Vishal Jamkar and Richa Nagar
This image captures a vibrant communal gathering in a rural setting, likely a village, under a bright, overcast sky. The scene is dominated by two traditional-style buildings and a large group of people,

The essay in Hindi emerged organically over the course of several months as we jointly engaged with Jacinta Kerketta’s submission to AGITATE!. It continued to find inspiration from her ideas and poetry as it grew from our verbal discussions into Vishal’s diary, and then into a co-authored reflection and essay. To try to convey in English all of the contents of what has evolved in the preceding pages seems far too mechanical to us. Therefore, we offer here a summary of our engagement with Jacinta, chiefly for those readers who do not read Hindi.

A Haunting, Howling Chup: Literature and Ecology of Violence

Abdul Aijaz
This image is a stark, monochromatic line drawing, primarily in black ink on a plain white background, with subtle accents of thin red lines. The composition is highly dynamic, creating a strong sense of depth and

Reflecting on Chup, Abdul Aijaz asks, “How do you tell a tale that resists narration and yet screams to be told? How do you weave a narrative around a ‘chup’ that  is haunted by what it cannot say. How to share a story that so clearly unveils what it does not tell?”

New Narratives of Old Wars: Testimonios from the Co-Madres of El Salvador

Heider Tun Tun, Ruby Steigerwald, and Inez Steigerwald
This black and white photograph features two women, identified as Patty and Alicia, standing side-by-side and smiling warmly. On the left is Patty, a younger woman with dark, short, wavy

Heider Tun Tun, Ruby Steigerwald, and Inez Steigerwald write about how the testimonios of Co-Madres in El Salvador resist war narratives and break the conspiracy of silence about the scale of death, violence, and displacement during years of civil war in El Salvador.

Fracturing Threads, Again

Keavy McFadden
This is a wide-angle landscape photograph taken from a high vantage point, looking down over an expansive river system and its surrounding flood plain during autumn. The overall mood is serene and slightly muted, under a

Over two years after the formal close of my own participation in the course, I sit at my desk pouring over the material documents produced by the multiple iterations of Stories, Bodies, Movements, attempting to think about what my own contribution to this volume might look like. In returning to the course in the context of AGITATE!, I seek not to preserve the journey or archive the experience but rather to think about what it means politically, theoretically, conceptually to revisit and extend the work at the heart of Stories, Bodies, Movements. What is the afterlife of the embodied pedagogical commitment of the class? 

A Cold Place: Notes on Antiblackness and the Neoliberal University

Kidiocus King-Carroll
This watercolor painting, titled "Art-by-Simi-scaled.jpg," depicts a powerful scene of protest and triumph against a backdrop of a tall, white, multi-storied building, likely

A set of notes or jottings that are autobiographical, analytical, historical, and deliberately incomplete, but articulate King-Carroll’s understanding of the University and the world that surrounds it as an antiblack, neoliberal space that Black graduate students must exist in a fugitive relationship to.