“No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption.”
— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
On 14 August, Jason Arday was found dead after he resigned from his position as a professor on 6 August. The situation that forced him to take his own life was nothing but the result of institutionalised and ingrained racism in academia and Western society. The controversy surrounding his PhD thesis and autobiography eventually culminated in his suicide. Jason Arday was a renouned academic known for his work on race and racism in academia. As one of the youngest Black professors, he taught sociology of education at Cambridge University. The tragic death of Jason Arday reminds us of the institutionalised deaths of Dalits, Adivasis and other vulnerable social groups in higher educational institutions in India, where caste prejudice and discrimination force young and bright minds to give up their lives. We have witnessed tragic cases ranging from Rohith Vemula and Payal Tadvi to the recent death of Hrishikesh at IIT Delhi. These cases show how historically-subjugated identities remain unfree despite the larger claims of freedom. Racism and casteism remain deeply rooted even in modern times, and contemporary global authritarian regimes are only intensifying these conditions by creating space for conservative forces and suppressing oppressed social identities.
These deaths also raise questions about the epistemological imbalance of power, whereby knowledge produced by certain sections of society is not acknowledged, while the authority to produce and interpret knowledge remains in the hands of a powerful few who have historically held the upper hand in accessing, creating and disseminating knowledge. Historically, in India, the right to access and disseminate knowledge was largely controlled by Brahmanical forces, which restricted this access exclusively to themselves. Similarly, since colonisation, colonisers have not only looted labour and raw materials but have also enslaved the minds and bodies of the colonised. During the prolonged struggle against colonialism, when the colonised began asserting themselves, racial supremacists sprang their fangs in retaliation, attempting to curtail this assertion. This tragic death once again unearths the deep-rooted racism within academia and every other sphere of social life,Devesh, President,Hemant, Secretary,AISA
