Essay/Article Archives

इंसानियत का लॉकडाउन

Richa Nagar and Richa Singh

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.

Teleportation | عَبْرَة

Ola Saad Znad

“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?”

Step, step, breathe

Sophie Oldfield

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.

Act One: The Multan Railway Station

Abdul Aijaz

Reflecting on his journey with Chup, Abdul Aijaz writes about how stories come together in surprising ways.

SKMS Code of Conduct

Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan (SKMS)

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)

चुप्पी की बोली: एक मंथन

Richa Nagar

Richa Nagar interweaves collective reflections of Parakh Theatre group and Chup’s audiences in Mumbai.
Roman transliteration by Gwendolyn Kirk & Richa Nagar.

जसिन्ता को पढ़ने पर …

Vishal Jamkar and Richa Nagar

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

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

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.

A Letter to the Stories, Bodies, Movements Team

Surafel Wondimu Abebe

To the Stories, Bodies, Movements team,
It was a great pleasure and honor to watch Fractured Threads tonight.

Poetics is Political: Politics and Poetics of Difference Across the Borders of the Nation-States

Papori Bora

Papori Bora highlights how the political condition of Palestine resonates with the Northeast (India)—a global interconnected history of violence of colonialism and its aftermath in the life and politics of postcolonial nation-states, shared in histories of modes of governance, militarization, racial projects, and capitalist development.

Fracturing Threads, Again

Keavy McFadden

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?

Brownness and Being in the Twenty-First Century

Joy Mazahreh

Joy Mazahreh writes about what it mean to be Palestinian and Brown, and bear witness to the death and devastation of her homeland.

“Did they drag you here?”: Challenges of Existing as an International Student in the United States

Ana Cláudia dos Santos São Bernardo

Drawing on higher education experiences in Brazil and as an international student of color in the U.S. neoliberal university, Santos São Bernardo writes of the expectation of gratitude and thankfulness placed on international students and what it means to reject it.

Violent Invisibilities: The Battle for Hmong and Southeast Asian American Legibility in Higher Education

Kong Pheng Pha, Kaochi Pha, and Dee Pha

Hmong American scholars reflect on ongoing violent systems of racial inconspicuousness that Hmong and Southeast Asian American students continue to experience in the neoliberal and corporate university.

Moving Toward Transitional Pedagogies: The Second Sight of Graduate Students of Color in the Neoliberal University

Ezekiel Joubert III

This essay proposes transitional pedagogy as a methodology for scholars of color in neoliberal academia.

Toward a Marginal Understanding of Object Being in the Neoliberal University

Emily Mitamura

This piece offers a series of joined meditations on violences of the neoliberal university through conceptions of object-being, romance, imagination, and newness.

A Cold Place: Notes on Antiblackness and the Neoliberal University

Kidiocus King-Carroll

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.

Unruly Subjects: On Student Activism, the Neoliberal University, and Infiltration

José Manuel Santillana Blanco

This essay explores the (im)possibilities that students of color and indigenous students have in resisting the Neoliberal University that operates as an institution of power and knowledge production predicated on white supremacy, settler colonialism, and global capitalism.

Razing the Anti-Ebony Tower: An Academic ‘Grammar Book’

Rahsaan Mahadeo

This essay rejects the notion that for negatively-racialized students learning, laboring, and living in the anti-ebony tower is a privilege.

Within and Without the Settler University: Reflections on Decolonization, Spirituality and Research as Ceremony

Marcelo Garzo Montalvo

This essay asks us to consider how the neoliberal university is always already a settler university and the ways in which indigenous ways of knowing can help us we reimagine education as a process of unlearning settler modernity.

Essay Article