Movements
Felt Notes
ID: To Tash [center], my sincerest thanks for extending such a warm welcome to New Delhi, first by hosting me at the YP Foundation and subsequently by introducing me to Vaan [in the foreground]. This image senses the many laughs we shared at one of the most unassuming and serendipitous queer hangouts in CP—and for which I am grateful. Tash is an excellent feminist thinker and critical maker, currently also pursuing their PhD under my supervision at the Just Futures Co-lab. Vaan is an equally engaging teacher in a local school who co-leads (with Tash) a weekend queer book club in the city. Image courtesy of Vaan (April 2025).
It’s been some time since my last letter reached your mailboxes. Amidst the many movements of the past three months, I have been reading and writing in solitude and community, in the context of research and pedagogy, as part of my curriculum building work, student mentorship, and digital humanities (DH) research praxis, and as always, very queerly and trans(verse)ly within and between these worlds.
This year, as a SSSHARC Hunt-Simes Visiting Junior Chair of Sexuality Studies at the University of Sydney (see glimpses of this fellowship), I have also been collectivizing around queer- and trans-feminist archival practices with archivists, researchers, artists, educators, and community members working in Australia and India, as well as with and beyond the 2025 Hunt-Simes Institute of Sexuality Studies (HISS) co-participants globally. The current fellowship year of critical pedagogies, archival research, project-based collaborations, and academic organizing has been, and continues to be, a necessary space for healing and regeneration—and I cannot thank Susan Potter enough for how we’re making time for this scholarship ongoingly and Lee Wallace for letting me and Susan know very plainly and lovingly how she sees us both as showing up in the world: “over prepared.” [1] 💜
For this month’s Felt Notes, therefore, I thought of sharing, perhaps, two such overprepared moments of the Just Futures Co-lab: 1) my reflections on presenting a paper and being in community at the Ashoka University CWC annual conference on “A Song Called Teaching” and 2) the experience of producing a pop-up lab in Yelahanka New Town to mark the conclusion of the latest postgraduate transdisciplinary research (TDR) cycle at Srishti Manipal.
The Conference
I want to begin these notes [2] by thanking the Ashoka Center for Writing and Communication for the many visible and behind-the-scenes ways in which they put together a superb two-day convening on “A Song Called Teaching”—and for honoring the many different locations and affiliations of teaching and learning through this program. I want to also begin by naming and thanking each of the panel chairs—Neerav Dwivedi, Devarati Chakrabarti, Kanika Singh, Vrinda Chopra, Arunima Theraja, and Sonakshi Srivastava—for bringing a set of fantastic questions and preparations to the table and for steering each corresponding discussion in useful directions for my own work.
Ahead of my talk, I found myself thinking in particular with Padma M. Sarangapani’s keynote presentation and call for restructuring higher education pedagogy around Right to Life and to (Living) Life with Dignity as enshrined in the writings of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar and the Indian Constitution. That this pursuit should be collectivist and perennially rooted in undoing oppressive power relations endemic to academic patriarchy and institutional caste histories is how I outlined my paper, positing further that by extending this right into “the pedagogy and praxis of Queer and Trans+ being,” [3] we might just be able to loop—and trouble—the otherwise undisturbed dichotomies of “person formation” and “person transformation” with those of person being. What might such restructured and deeply embodied classrooms and pedagogies look like? And what roles do care politics from within Queer- and Trans-feminist, anti-caste, anti-colonial, and disability justice studies play in adding body and capacity to praxis?
The panel on “(A)Political (Anti-Caste) Teaching,” for example, with presentations by Ashna and Apeksha Yadav, namely and respectively on “A Pedagogy of Profanity” and “Unsafe Classrooms and Academic Agraharas,” felt most resonant in this context, especially as I asked myself and them: if indeed sustaining care for justice within classrooms needs an orientation away from Brahmanical notions of purity and safety, what then should be “our relationships” to what Sara Ahmed has called “institutional worlds” [4]? Equally, by reading Ahmed’s framing of the term “our” as an ever so vigilant and non-monolithic category attuned to situated and transformative politics, I was also able to draw out affective connections between these works and mine, as well as others from within my own panel on “Positionality and Reflexivity,” in talks by Irfanullah Farooqi and Yengkhom Jilangamba each on “The (Muslim) Teacher Who Must Play ‘Nice’” and “Neutrality in a Time of Ethnic (Manipur) Conflict.” That none of these cited works were couched implicitly or explicitly in notions of optimism is instructive here—and which, perhaps, explains why I found community in them; a community borne out of laying bare the entanglements of the personal, the political, and the institutional—and their distinct and difficult histories and genealogies.
Over two days, it was this web of listenings, annotations, and dialogic engagements that constituted a space of complexity for me and through which my own pedagogical questions and urgencies deepened and felt enriched. And yet, I would be remiss if I did not share my observations and concerns around the absence of undergraduate and graduate students at the conference. I was also left wondering about the extent to which student life and organizing at Ashoka lends a specific slant to campus pedagogy and the work of CWC in particular. Although several presentations, including mine, cited students and student works. I would have loved to have heard from and been in conversation with student attendees and even student presenters who make “a song called teaching” both possible and meaningful for us.
The Pop-Up Lab
I have been keen on having a pop-up lab in the city for some time now. This desire to engage broader publics also stems from student members (especially aṇu), who have been ever so encouraging to make the work and workings of the lab more known to peers at Srishti Manipal and beyond. So, when the opportunity to dream about a possible public engagement form and site of this semester’s TDR came up, my first instinct was to recommend Yelahanka New Town, given the dispersal of student housing units, artist studios, and faculty life throughout this neighborhood. As a lab community, we also enlisted other related options such as a local bookstore in the city (which was also the extended site of our last TDR), a cafe with an attached gallery space, and a metro station for this opportunity. Ultimately, however, it was the nature of the work we produced—a set of auto-theoretical hypertext narratives, an endless DH index scroll, and an intimate critical karaoke performance—that guided our selection: the terrace floor of Sandhya PG mess, a shared student dining facility in Yelahanka’s Self-Financed Society, placed centrally and within easy reach for most people, especially student groups. My heartfelt thanks to Ruhani for facilitating this campus-community connection and to the SPG team for trusting us with this engagement.
The TDR pop-up had three interconnected forms: listening to us perform critical karaoke as a collective; playing interactive hypertexts with participating student members; and juxtaposing these experiences with a personal and collective reading of the DH index scroll. The hypertext prototypes were variously titled as “பிறப்பிக்க (to birth)” [by anu]; “to author one’s body” [by Anwesha Paul]; “nameless” [by eyeshaan]; “Patterns” [by Ruhani Chatterjee]; and “MILK LOGIC” [by Shae]. Together, they animated each student’s inquiry lines as developed and deepened over five weeks, namely, aṇu on “A Rhizome of Queer and Trans+ Texts, Sounds, Peoples, Images, and Networks;” Anwesha on “Authoring Bodies, Authoring Feminisms;” eyeshaan on “Self-Projections, Trans Records, and Fexyzale Voices;” Ruhani on “Neuro Patterns: A Non Conforming Body in a Conformed World;” and Shae on “Holding the Grotesque Closely—and with Critical Intimacy.”
I began the event with a dedication to Joshua Clover, writer, poet, and activist, who gave us critical karaoke [5] and who sadly and quite unexpectedly passed away last month. Equally, I extended a massive shout-out to Karen Tongson for introducing me to critical karaoke as well as for orchestrating a fantastic daylong event at HISS where we all came to share our research with songs across genres and languages as a way to continue to build discourse and community. My TDR guide on critical karaoke followed Karen’s letter to those of us gathered at the institute and for those of us who continue to extend that pedagogy into trusted spaces beyond the institute. My gratitude for both Joshua and Karen: in memory 🖤, in community ❤️.
Notes
[1] As HISS faculty and SSSHARC member, and as a precious friend and colleague, Susan Potter and I often find ourselves thanking each other profusely for the gift and inspiration that is the discourse and practice we’re building. As SSSHARC director, Lee Wallace has been a brilliant connector, host, and mentor to me, encouraging me ever so thoughtfully to engage with the yet-to-be-fully-actualized aspects of my own writing for readers waiting to be. Grateful.
[2] I’ve shared these notes as reflections with the conference organizing team as requested and I’m reproducing them here with permission.
[3] My paper entitled “The Pedagogy and Praxis of Queer and Trans+ Being” asked: How might we describe our relationship to teaching when it grows out of a set of pedagogical locations that feel less hostile to the experiences of Queer and Trans+ being: the digital humanities lab, the community archive, the arts classroom? What do these locations index—and how might their overlaps and juxtapositions cumulatively expand the purpose of teaching to ensure Queer and Trans+ survival amidst the ever compounding “stranger experience” (Ahmed 2012) in the academy? Drawing on anti-caste, disability justice, and Queer- and Trans-feminist writings on critical care work and centering the practices and politics of discourse building and critical making at an art and design institution, I discussed the nature of scaffolds instituted to achieve (or even approach) the goals of liberatory education ongoingly.
[4] Citing and extending her previous writings on “stranger making” to gendered and racialized institutional spaces, Sara Ahmed talks about the relationship of body and space ontologically, about “how bodies come to feel at home through the work of inhabitance, how bodies can extend themselves into spaces creating contours of inhabitable space, as well as how spaces can be extensions of bodies.” See: Sara Ahmed, “Introduction: On Arrival,” On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Duke University Press, 2012), 3.
[5] Critical karaoke is a form of research writing with music that also amplified our lab work this semester. You can read more about the format of Critical Karaoke in Stephanie Hernandez’s web article and in Joshua Clover’s introduction (with Ange Mlinko, Greil Marcus, Ann Powers and Daphne A. Brooks) in this piece for the journal Popular Music.
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 media technologies and 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