ID: Zine of Archival Metadata Cover (Front and Back), “The Office of Anti-Inequity and Anti-Exclusive Excellence” Scaffolds Project for Inhabiting Learning: Under Construction, Interlude 2022, Bengaluru: Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design, and Technology, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, March 1, 2022. Members included: Aishwarya Das, Akshay Prakash, Athena David, Chinmay Gheware, Gayatri Shanbhag, Hamna, Kush Patel, Neeraja D, Nithya Kirti M, Rupali Gupte, Santhosh Jayakumar, and Tanvi Karia. Image courtesy of Kush Patel (March 2022).

“What does it mean to cultivate tenderness in the face of academic patriarchy, to name and uplift the care labour of your colleagues, and to do so ongoingly lest the very pursuit of research scholarship and program building be reduced to the ever so loud and individualizing I. It’s been that kind of a week.”—I wrote this note to myself, sitting in the lab at the end of what felt like an endless start to the semester. Championing the meticulous labour that goes into leading, structuring, coordinating, and documenting any academic initiative or program, I would argue, is also about describing how that labour is multifold, almost always carried out by women and minorized genders, and often also both invisible and invisibilized in the academy. 

Such are the feminist orientations of this lab whose research, pedagogy, and carework agenda remain aligned with what Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein call “make labour visible,” a data feminism principle that implicates the spaces, objects, and lived histories of data and technology production—and one, which also extends cultural-technological work into a type of scholarly “caregiving” for me or how I may explain my refusals of everyday academic patriarchy to “generate,” in Sara Ahmed’s words, “a queer angle [and] a description of a body that is not lined up, or a body that is not at home in the world” (para 10, 2014). 

About

Felt Notes are monthly dispatches about the work of the Just Futures Co-lab, and the co-labouring worlds of research and teaching in art, design, and the digital humanities that it scaffolds, furthers, and amplifies. The letter writing translates the ever so negotiated nature of this space at Srishti Manipal Institute and the discourse and scholarship on equity and justice I produce with students and wider academic and non-academic community members through critical pedagogy; archival and database constructions; interactive digital storytelling; and inquiries into queer- and trans-feminist digital media technologies and knowledge infrastructures.

I hope reading this letter and its upcoming segments are a meaningful experience for you. If you aren’t subscribed yet, you may do so here. If you are already subscribed, I would love for you to share the link with friends and trusted networks as we make sense of our relationships to technology as well as our relationships to each other via technology. If you would like to write or co-write a letter in the future or share any announcements, please feel free to get in touch with me, and whilst you’re here, please also check out the Felt Notes Archive. 

Kush Patel