Matter out of place: The language and lens of ugliness to study recollections of the negotiation of academic freedom in India

The affective terrain of the remembrances of socially marginalised, critical scholars are re-considered through the lens and language of ugliness, which emerges as discomfort and as friction along the eroding fissures of dominant sociocultural myths and norms (Henderson, 2018). Unlike western ugly-beauty binaries (Nuttal, 2006), this language opens to alternative conceptions of worldmaking that recognise the value of imperfect, mundane and even inglorious constructions of academic practices (acts) and figures (enactors) of individual and collective ugly freedoms (Anker, 2022). Not only is academic freedom ugly when built as an entitlement or through harms to Others; but alternate, communal notions are held and practiced that are mis-recognised when read through normative, individualist, liberal (Belluigi, 2023), masculinist frames. This is compounded when the scholars doing the ‘dirty work’ are themselves socially denigrated. In this re-consideration, the life histories of such authorities provide (in)sights from which to learn about individual and collective negotiations with power, resistance and solidarities within and beyond the institutional murus of the academy.

This paper is informed by data generated for a project with the participation of 46 gender-marginal academics who were employed across 30 institutions in India between 29163-2024, in addition to visual studies of 17 of those universities. That project was led by Nandita Banerjee Dhawan (Jadavpur University) and Dina Zoe Belluigi (Queen’s University Belfast) in collaboration with Asha Achuthan (Tata Institute of Social Sciences) and Ulrike M Vieten (Queen’s University Belfast), with the visual fieldwork led by Johny Marjit (Jadavpur University; Visiting Scholar to Queen’s University Belfast).