INVITATION | PANEL DISCUSSION(S) | THE HIGHER EDUCATION IN INDIA | SESSION 1 ON MAY 2,2021

[Savitribai intersectional Study Circle Nalsar]

INVITATION

Dear All, 

Today, as we weigh nothing but the hurt and injury that the loss of love and intimacy has offered in these times of despair, we extend to you this invitation as we offer our heart and the intimacy of growing together. Growing together has become a distant reality, which was recently reflected in the atrocious nature of teaching performed by an Assistant Professor of IIT-Kharagpur in an online preparatory class for the SC/ST and PWD students. Find the video of the class here .As much as this casteist nature of teaching is an atrocious act of an upper caste professor, it is also a fact of the brahmanical and racist power structures at play that systematically places the marginalised at locations of abuse and violence.

 

The loss of very love and intimacy, as we believe as structural, is nothing but a heinous offer of the power that one holds in social structures such as Caste, Race and Gender. The consistent act of offer has been archived in forms of our death(s) and fall(s) in higher educational spaces, as students are marginalised by the very social structures. But as we visit the graveyards of our death and fall, they speak to us of our survival(s) and fight(s) which is nothing but the life of hope just like the dreams of our lost ones. The language of a graveyard is not of the death, but the survival of the living and the lived. Because death(s) is the very desire of the social structures.  

With that language, we speak to you as we hope you invite yourselves to the stories of our survival and fights as the Savitribai Intersectional Study Circle and NALSAR Minorities Forum present to you, the first session of the two session panel discussion on " HIGHER EDUCATION IN INDIA."

Details of Session 1

"Problematizing Social Structures in Higher Education: Navigating Structural Changes. "

Date and Time 

May 2, 2012 at 7:30 PM

Venue : 

Virtual : Webex Meeting 

Meeting ID : 184 936 6170

Password : 123456

Click here to join the meeting

Speakers 

1.

Grace Banu is the first transgender person to get admitted into an engineering college in Tamil Nadu. She is also the founder of the TransRightsNow Collective which is a community centred around Dalit, Adivasi and Bahujan transgender people working towards greater trans visibility and opportunity in education, workplaces and politics. Her work has been particularly awe inspiring in the field of education rights for transpersons. Grace has been very vocal about the discrimination she has had to face due to her caste and gender identity in academic spaces.

2.

Bhagyasri Boywad is a Student of M.A, Womens Studies and is the Chairperson of the Student Council 2019-20 of TISS, Hyderabad. They write and talk about love, caste and their intersections with gender. 

3.

Akash Poyam belongs to the Koitur (Gond) community from Balrampur district of Chhattisgarh. He is currently working as a copy-editor at The Caravan magazine. He is also the founder and editor of Adivasi Resurgence, an online platform archiving writings by Adivasi writers on history, culture, art and literature. He has completed an M.Phil. in Sociology from University of Hyderabad.

MODERATOR

Kruttika is a fourth year Law student at NALSAR. They are Dalit Agender and a first genderation undergraduate student.

PURPOSE  OF THE PANEL

The current institutions of learning reek of hegemonic social structures, the evidence of which lies in visiblised as well as invisibilized incidents of casteist, racist and transphobic harassment or abuse. The locations of such incidents vary from unfair treatments in classrooms by teachers to most non-visual relations between teachers and students in evaluation. These locations of abuse and the enablers of it are made possible by several structural infirmities such as non-implementation of available systems of justice, for example reservation in teaching faculty as well as implementation of systems of injustice that are arguably exclusionary. 

The recent incidents of casteist abuse in IIT Kharagpur is neither new nor surprising. The recurring incidents of caste violence, abuse of positions, and discriminatory practices against marginalised people is a product of the very design of these so-called elite academic institutions - right from its admissions to appointments. The positions of these institutions in matters of social justice including reservation are well known. An institutional design that caters to the privileged/elites, continuing efforts to retain such character of the institutions, and the deeply ingrained notions of 'merit' classifiable as arrogance of merit are characteristic of these institutions. It is in this context that we should examine the operational power structures in these institutions. The relative ease with which those in positions of social power and academic capital abuse the most vulnerable sections of the learners is then not an anomaly of the system, but the system itself.

When the systems are designed with in-built structures of caste, race and gender, the participants with power and capital can access them actively that inflict various forms of tangible and intangible harms and violences on participants who are oppressed by these structures outside and inside. It is this power accommodated by the very structure that needs to be discussed. 

It is the objective of this panel to problematize these networks of injustice that produce violence and to look for possible changes through our critique on the status quo.

We hope to see you all there for learning together to retain love in educational spaces !

The details of the second session will be announced shortly

Regards

Sanjeev Gumpenapalli

ON behalf of Savitribai Intersectional Study Circle & Nalsar Minorities' Forum

Nalsar University of Law

Hyderabad