Suffocation: A Journey Through Academia
Laura Kim
This article is a part of AGITATE! Vol 6 (2026): Pedagogy of Hope
In Fall 2024 and Spring 2025, students in Richa Nagar’s courses embraced journeys of unlearning and relearning that focused not only on grappling with concepts, frameworks, processes, and events but also with the foundational modes through which we learn and evolve in and as a community. They explored intersectional critiques of systems and institutions, examining the mutually constitutive nature of sociopolitical, ecological, and epistemic justice, while engaging anti-disciplinary approaches to anticolonial, anti-racist, and anti-caste struggles. In interweaving systemic analysis with intimate stories and creating a space for theorizing-doing-feeling, students embraced a poetics and praxis of collectivity and movement. Ultimately, they questioned the promise of mastery that many classrooms seek to instill and confronted the positionalities, contradictions, and violences that shape how we collectively imagine justice.
In Suffocation: A Journey Through Academia, Laura Kim takes the risk of naming the intimate processes by which speech and silences are enabled and foreclosed in the classroom. Created as a final project for the course, Introduction to the Study of Gender, Women, and Sexuality, Laura first shared a draft of this zine with classmates, inspiring a discussion that produced generative discomforts and reflections. Laura’s courageous intervention did not just spark discussion but unsettled our process of learning and in turn reshaped how the class understood speech, silence, and responsibility. In doing so, Laura invited all who were present to reconsider how we show up and engage in co-creating shared intellectual and political space.
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