The view from within: A (counter)visual essay at the window of the Indian university

‘The view from’ is a phrase that frames many scholarly texts offering perspective from vantage points on to matters and spaces of import to communities of readers.

As a counter-visual methodology of (op)position(ality) and standpoint, a series of images are placed in dialogue with those of James Siegel’s Academic Work: The View from Cornell (1981) and Jacques Derrida’s The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils (1983).

The photographs — composed in 2024-5 primarily from within the workspaces of women academics in Indian institutions — are of their windows to the (campus) world. The quotidian window is given central place, as the limen at which socially marginalised critical scholars have sensed and enacted resistance to the dangers of distance and of place within ‘the university’.

The window device is useful as a counter-visual approach critical of the underlying scopic regimes and technologies of the modern university, when set alongside (in)sights from the participating academic citizens’ life histories, which provide rearview recollections of struggles with visibility and with visuality.

In this presentation, I share from the second part of a journal paper currently under review, about 'the views from within'.