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Anar Parikh: Thank you so much for having me and thinking of me to be a part of this research and this conversation.

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My name is Anar Parikh and I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Brown University.

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And also a graduate fellow at the Swearer Center for Public Service at Brown, where I also do work on community-engaged scholarship.

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So that's the...

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Suraj: Super.

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So maybe now you can just tell us a little bit about your dissertation and what you've been up to.

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Whatever the elevator pitch or whatever you want to say about it.

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An overview is great.

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Anar Parikh: Sure.

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So my dissertation, which I have tentatively titled, getting out the vote in South Asian Chicago immigrant political belonging in the United States is an ethnographic study of South Asian political participation and civic engagement in the United States and is based on 15 months of ethnographic research in Chicago and the surrounding area, but mostly the city of Chicago with South Asian American, Asian American, and immigrant community organizers, civic organizations, and youth and political leaders in the cities.

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What I'm interested in is basically, what does it mean to be South Asian American and politically engaged in the US?

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And as an anthropologist, I actually was specifically interested in electoral or formal political participation to an extent because my discipline is particularly interested in all of the ways that people informally assert their right to belong or claim rights outside of the context of citizenship.

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And for good reason, because citizenship is in itself based on exclusion or who is included as a citizen is based on who is not eligible or acknowledged as citizens.

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At the same time I still see this space of the electoral sphere or the ways that people want to assert their sense of belonging in, within the realm of what it is counted as a citizen as interesting.

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And about how they see those modes of participation as ways to assert belonging or claim a place for themselves in the context of migration, diaspora and ethnoracial or marginalization.

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So that's what my dissertation is on.

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That's sort of what I started with, but in the process, I've just really been trying to think further through that dichotomy between what it means to belong as a citizen, within a concept that inherently is exclusionary.

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And also the ways that people assert themselves in those spaces are still meaningful.

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Additionally, how to think about being South Asian American or being brown in the US as a racialized experience.

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And also one that is really complicated in terms of anti-blackness in terms of caste patriarchy and it's very much anthropological but also a very personal way to grapple with questions that I have been thinking about in terms of my own experience.

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Suraj: Yeah.

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And I'm hoping we can really get into the weeds with some of those things.

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Am I right to say that you were working as, at a nonprofit or something?

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Like this as part of a field work associated with this project.

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Anar Parikh: Yes.

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I think the parts of it are somewhat part for the course for ethnographic research.

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But when I arrived in Chicago, I started by volunteering at or interning at a statewide immigrant rights coalition for the first four months that I was there and also volunteering at South Asian direct service agency in neighborhoods called Westridge or Devon for those who are familiar with Chicago.

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And Chicago's South Asian landscape in particular.

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And then during the course of the time that I was interning at one organization and volunteering at one of its member organizations, a position for civic engagement coordinator opened up for the 2018 congressional and Illinois gubernatorial election.

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From February 2018 to November 2018, I was also the civic engagement coordinator at Indo American Center, which mostly involved coordinating the, Get Out The Vote campaign for the center.

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Which included voter registration, phone banking and canvassing to encourage people in the area to vote.

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And then some voter education stuff.

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So I was doing that.

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And then through being in that position, also sometimes I would service ISCs, like representative for broader coalition meetings with other immigrant rights, organizations or Asian American immigrant organizations in the area.

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Suraj: Cool.

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Well, thank you for that.

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That gives us a sense of what the empirical basis of some of your thinking has been.

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So before we go any farther, I think it would be really productive to hear you talk us through some of the language that you used to describe the diaspora.

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So that we can think about the vocabulary that you're using and why.

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So for example, I think people used to, and some communities still like the term DC, others like Indian American, others like Indian, and increasingly I've seen South Asian and South Asian diaspora used.

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So I'm curious about what kinds of terminologies you're using now and why.

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With the acknowledgement and caveat of course, that language is always shifting.

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Anar Parikh: Totally.

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Yeah.

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I think that for myself, I most often am drawn to use South Asian American to identify myself.

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And part of that is certainly because the history of South Asian...

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A kind of brief overview of where that term comes from, is that it is one that is like a product of South Asian American organizing to emulate or look to Asian American organizing from the 60s and 70s as a way to build coalitions across national boundaries.

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And that happened for South Asian Americans during the 1980s and 1990s.

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And to undo some of the ways that we've drawn internal differences between who is Indian and who is Pakistani or Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan or Nepali or...

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Those national differences to acknowledge our shared histories of colonial violence, as well as experiences of racialization in the United States.

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So I come at it from that perspective.

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And to like really be intentional about not wanting to reinforce what some might say is like Indian hegemony in the diaspora.

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At the same time I am Indian American and my family is Gujarati and Hindu.

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So in that sense, I think what I have been trying to learn and really think through, and is an ongoing and complicated thing for me is, within that diaspora, I do come from a set of particular positions and that by calling myself South Asian American, there is...

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For those of us who do come from particular positions of privilege within the South Asian diaspora, that we could very easily erase the experiences of those whose experiences are different than ours.

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That is like something that I'm trying to work through.

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And I haven't fully figured out what reflects my alignments but also acknowledges the ways in which I have that privilege.

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So for me, not just that language is shifting, but that identities are multiple and that we're constantly negotiating a variety of questions in thinking about our identity at various point in time.

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And this is actually something that is at the core of the dissertation project, is using these civic and political spaces to understand these category or to understand or break down these categories.

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And one of the ways that scholars have thought about that and Prema Kurien, who's a sociologist in particular has written about how South Asian American is an ethnic identity that emerges out of US multiculturalism.

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And that it is a strategy for coalition building that is legible in us multiculturalism.

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But that it is obviously complicated by a variety of things.

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And I think that that is true.

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I think that that is definitely a feature of it.

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So the other part of South Asian being that it's imposed by...

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It's a way that we are marked as other by the white mainstream society.

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I guess that I'm also thinking through the various ways that people invoke the term in certain contexts, not just that, this term is an identity that is forged out of multiculturalism, I think it's used strategically and not used strategically in different contexts.

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So that is something that I'm thinking through the dissertation as well.

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Suraj: Yeah.

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I really appreciate all of the complexity you brought to that.

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I hadn't realized that it was actually, so I'm not like brand new in our kind of discourse, but I think these kinds of solidarity-making aggregate identities are, like you said, strategically useful in some context.

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Obviously it sounds like the organization you were working with saw a kind of political solidarity among the people who might identify with this term, whereas it also has this flattening effect that takes place in the US, where racial othering takes place through a homogenizing process.

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Like for myself, I would identify as Sindhi, Hindu and my family left Sindh right before partition during partition.

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And my parents grew up in Hong Kong and Singapore and I grew up in the US.

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And so sometimes I feel that South Asian is the right term for me, just because I don't necessarily feel like the Indian state is the right kind of lens or a way I would describe myself, or I might describe myself as Sindhi or Sindhi American.

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But naturally, you can only describe yourself as Sindhi American if you're talking to a certain kind of person cause that's a completely illegible way to talk about yourself.

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And so I see the South Asian term as both inclusive or expansive, but also kind of acknowledging the semi-arbitrariness or the intentional illegibility of the national borders as they stand.

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Anar Parikh: And just to be clear, the organizations, the groups that I was working with or people that I was talking to, I think that it was also very much unresolved in the...

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It was very much unresolved in those spaces as well.

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Because some organizations use like Indo American or like South Asian American versus Asian American and I would also say that it doesn't even necessarily...

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At least at an institutional level, which I think is slightly different than the way that individual people adopt particular identities.

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It didn't always map on, in the way that you would expect given a particular term or that like...

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I think that there are different reasons why people would pick those particular names and it was not always like mapped onto a particular politics or non politics.

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And it's still also confusing and I definitely wouldn't.

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I'm not sure how I...

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Well, what I'm mostly thinking through is how it's invoked, not necessarily as at the institutional level, how it's being used, if that makes sense.

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Suraj: Yeah.

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I think that does make sense as kind of an institutional tool or an organizing tool rather than an individual identifier.

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Anar Parikh: Right.

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Suraj: Great.

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I think I had another thing I wanted to say about...

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Oh, part of why I'm excited to talk to you is because of course you've been Tweeting and I feel like your Tweets are quite insightful and they get picked up by BuzzFeed.

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I really liked your tweets about the Indian Matchmaking show, which I never got around to watching, which is fine.

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But I feel like one of the things that we may or may not touch on in this conversation is this, what I've been thinking about is this representative trap, particularly, of course, with the inauguration of vice president Harris.

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All time high.

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But I think one problem that we've had in the South Asian Learning Sciences Research Collective is that we've been branding ourselves as this South Asian collective.

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But of course, we in practice have...

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Well, maybe not of course, but in practice we've been predominantly Indian, predominantly Hindu.

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And now there's this tension, one of the tensions that you had sort of named where, we maybe feel like it's not the right term to use because it's not accurate and even though we think it's inclusive, if in practice, is it inappropriate to name ourselves that.

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I think that's probably enough juggling with that term.

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So for the rest of the interview let's use that-

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Anar Parikh: Totally.

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... Suraj: diaspora.

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But I appreciate the complexity you've brought to that because it is a challenge to find the right terms at the right time.

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So I guess the natural, next place to go would be, so what kind of motivated you to do this as your dissertation project or to in general, engage with the South Asian community in research?

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Anar Parikh: Yeah, so I have been doing ethnographic researcher, like in anthropological ethnographic research since I was an undergrad in college.

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So for about 10 years now, and originally when I started doing ethnographic research for my undergraduate thesis, which was required in my institution, I went to India and I did a undergraduate thesis on heritage preservation in urban India.

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And then applied to graduate school and did master's research on a similar project.

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And I did a couple of summer’s of research in Ahmedabad, where my family is from and where the city was a at the time striving for a UNESCO World Heritage city designation, which it has now received.

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And I decided to shift projects right as that was happening.

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But for a number of personal and political reasons, didn't want to continue doing that as my dissertation research.

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Partly because the nature of the field work would have been primarily with people that I did not align with even a little bit politically.

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It would've been a very negative experience.

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And I think for folks who do research in a situation that is primarily negative can be really hard.

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And on a very personal level, I was spending the academic year in Rhode Island and winters in Rhode Island and then summers in Ahmedabad and basically had no time to be outside.

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There was no time in that schedule to be outside because of winter seasonal disorder.

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And then summer in India you basically cannot go outside between 10:00 AM.

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So for those reasons.

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And also because there were questions, all of that is to say that I also had questions in the US around, what I was reading about South Asians in the US and the way that South Asian political participation and engagements were being sort of described or talked about in public discourse.

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Not very often but at times when they were.

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And then what I observed in my own social networks about the way that people would talk about things.

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And that's mostly to say that I thought that there was something that ethnography could offer in terms of complexifying or adding nuance to a discourse about like, well, this percentage of Indians in the US are Democrats, and this percentage are Republicans.

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I was interested in really thinking about how people situate themselves and are situated in the US political landscape.

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I'm from North Carolina and Charlotte specifically, which is on the border of North and South Carolina.

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So at the time in the mid 2010s both Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley were at the forefront of that discourse.

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Basically the question was, whether or not the Indian American community or the South Asian American community aligned with Jindal and Haley's views or not.

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That was the question.

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And I wanted to parse something out that was not as bifurcated as Republican or Democrat.

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And that has changed so much in the past.

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Even between 2015, when I started doing this project and now, who we're talking about on the South Asian American, like in terms of South Asian American politics, is like, we also can talk about someone like from Pramila Jayapal or Raja Krishnamoorthi or Ro Khanna, or all of these other people, who even as Democrats really have a range of ways that they situate themselves among South Asian Americans or Indian Americans and the US racial landscape at large.

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So there's been a huge shift from when I started doing this project to now.

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Suraj: Yeah.

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What you're saying is really resonating with me too, because one of the things that I think this project, well, maybe this project won't get there.

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I mean, our project, not your project is...

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Anar Parikh: It might not either.

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Mine won't either.

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Suraj: Transnational politics because how people situate themselves relative to South Asia or India really matters and means something politically.

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But I think in mainstream political discourse, we don't have the language to talk about this.

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As we see with this conflation of South Asian racism as Hinduphobia and everything always being both.

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And people will ask me something like, "Well, what's your mother's politics?"

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And they want the answer to be like, she's a Republican or she's a Democrat.

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That's not actually...

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The US frame doesn't give us the right way to talk about her various positions, which are sometimes quote, unquote conservative, sometimes quote, unquote, progressive and other times aren't really legible or meaningful for a white US audience.

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And I think you're so, right.

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That even in the last five years, I think just three, four years ago, you would've looked at the world stage or the national political stage, and you would've said, "Oh, are all Indians really conservative?"

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Because that was what was available.

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Do you have anything more you want to say about your motivation to take up this project?

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Anar Parikh: Yeah, I guess it's interesting that you bring up the transnational piece because I actually also...

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Another tension is that one in US mainstream discourses, it's true that there's only the US frame as a way to talk about it, but I guess that in the social sciences...

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Also, again, a particular movement that emerged for quite a good reason that the focus was primarily on transnationalism.

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So if you think especially in sociology and some parts of migration studies and even political science, the scholarship around transnationalism was a response against the emphasis on assimilation as a way to understand people's experiences and to say like, no people do really maintain connections that transcend borders.

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But my sort of reading or the way that I encountered that was to also notice that in shifting to transnationalism the attention to how these minoritized or marginalized or racialized groups, immigrant groups participate in US politics was also being overlooked.

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Especially in anthropology, which has its own disciplinary history of being primarily abroad.

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But even in sociology, I would say like, what I have read in this...

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The very small amount that I've read in this particular vein is that, it was a struggle to hold both that, okay, there are engagements in the US, and there are transnational engagements at the same time.

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My project is also...

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Though the transnational stuff does come up and was definitely a part of my experience, it was also intentionally focused on specifically, on particular engagements with the US formal political sphere.

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Because I felt like that wasn't being elaborated at least in the way that I wanted to see it elaborated.

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Not necessarily that it didn't exist but that I had these questions specifically about the US.

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Part of what I try to do as a scholar, it's just really be clear to say that there are all of these things that we can hold at the same time and even while we focus on something, we can also hold on to another piece of this as well.

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Suraj: Right.

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I'm really glad you raised this idea of transnationalism as in opposition to assimilationist discourses.

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I feel like in the diaspora, particularly in the US, it seems to me that, either we are so reductionist that we think our culture is a combination of food, arranged marriage and Hinduism, let's say.

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These things that are really easy to identify and sell and make legible.

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Or they're so complex that it seems impossible to really make sense of them, to connect the dots between British colonialism and migration and transnationalism and complex faith and politics and so on, that it seems like we often wind up nowhere at all.

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And I think that political lens is a really helpful one.

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I think for my own thinking to say that the political solidarities are the piece that allows me at least to make sense of my own diasporic identity in a way that I hadn't been until I really started thinking of my identity as a political one.

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And not simply a racialized one, so not only a minoritized one but also one that in some ways conveyed privilege.

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Anar Parikh: Right.

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Suraj: So that's maybe something that has been striking me lately, especially as I think more about caste and gender and sexuality in the South Asian diaspora and South Asia broadly.

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So I guess that makes me want to ask, as you've been doing this work, is there anything that has surprised you, intrigued you, changed your mind, complicated the way you thought about something?

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Anar Parikh: Yeah.

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Like all of it pretty much.

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And part of it is that, I came into this project really wanting to focus on the formal or like electoral sphere from an ethnographic perspective, as I have increasingly been radicalized to really challenge all of these concepts of citizenship and the borders of the nation state and race while doing this project.

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It's been heightened.

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Navigating why I still think it's important to pursue these questions but also my own politics on these questions have changed considerably over the period of time from when I started thinking about it to now when I write about it.

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So that's definitely something that I have been grappling with.

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Caste is something that I have thought about and definitely have been attuned to.

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So through American center, I also attended a South Asian Americans Leading Together, SAALT workshop in Silver Spring, Maryland because IC had a grant from SAALT.

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And a part of that training included a caste workshop.

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A workshop on caste and caste supremacy with Equality Labs.

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So I academically understood a lot of, I guess, like some of the precepts of the way that capitalism works.

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That workshop was my first introduction to really thinking about it critically, I would say.

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And for me, I'm still working on what is the best way for me to foreground this in my work basically.

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I haven't like fully even developed probably the vocabulary in the way, that I can talk about it.

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As much as I have practiced everything else I can talk about it with more relative ease.

00:32:15.330 --> 00:32:28.379
But that is something that Hindu Indian Americans and particular people of Hindu backgrounds because really have to recommend.

00:32:28.419 --> 00:32:43.739
And I say both Hindus and those of us who have rejected Hinduism as a religious identity for ourselves, but that's something that I haven't figured out also how to talk about.

00:32:45.059 --> 00:32:52.899
My family is Hindu and castein and has caste privilege, but I don't identify as Hindu personally.

00:32:52.899 --> 00:33:13.840
And I don't follow Hinduism, but at the same time, just because I have rejected Hinduism does not mean that those caste, that privilege doesn't continue to care like that dissolved by like virtue of an in individual rejection.

00:33:13.899 --> 00:33:14.139
Right.

00:33:14.139 --> 00:33:22.889
So that's something I, I mean, and figuring out how to acknowledge that a lot of the way that caste comes up is through erasure or silence.

00:33:22.899 --> 00:34:06.469
So in South Asian American political spaces, the focus is very much on racial or religious minoritization and marginalization or cultural minoritization without ever acknowledging that caste is real, that it exists, that it informs the positionalities that we have that both the academy and who are South Asian American or Indian American politicians locally and nationally are people who are mostly who are Brahmin or who are otherwise caste privileged.

00:34:06.889 --> 00:34:15.900
I don't know if surprised or intrigued does the right word, but really...

00:34:17.469 --> 00:34:20.419
That's been a reckoning that I'm still definitely working through.

00:34:21.549 --> 00:34:21.919
Suraj: Yeah.

00:34:21.920 --> 00:34:29.489
I think, thinking about caste as a diaspora Indian is a very particular project.

00:34:29.489 --> 00:34:46.429
And I think these Equality labs trainings have really made available some of the ways to think in solidarity with caste minoritized people both in the diaspora and in South Asia.

00:34:46.819 --> 00:35:00.759
And I wasn't totally expecting this, Isabelle Wilkerson book to show up and now suddenly there was this natural discourse about caste and race that I want to put a big asterisk next to that we don't necessarily need to unpack in this context.

00:35:00.759 --> 00:35:00.810
Anar Parikh: So do I.

00:35:00.810 --> 00:35:02.579
Suraj: There's a lot there.

00:35:02.870 --> 00:35:28.509
But I think for my own positionality, I don't know that I was raised with caste or that I think of myself as casteless, but having thought a lot about racial justice, you then kind of have to ask this question, is that because you are casteless or is that because you have this caste privilege that allows you to not understand yourself as caste in much the same way that we're white people don't understand themselves as having race.

00:35:29.189 --> 00:35:40.659
I think that's one of those spaces where maybe the ability to think critically about race really allows you to maybe think more complexly about other kinds of oppression.

00:35:41.979 --> 00:35:42.389
Anar Parikh: Totally.

00:35:42.409 --> 00:36:12.459
And I think as an anthropologist who has a complicated relationship with anthropology and in so far as I try, as you're saying, doing work in your backyard or my discipline has a very long and strong history of studying the other.

00:36:12.459 --> 00:36:16.439
And I feel pretty strongly about writing against that.

00:36:16.439 --> 00:36:43.380
So thinking about, what does it look like as a South Asian American to bring forward caste without that being that my position in that is to do a project with that's not been asked of me basically or that I have no claim to.

00:36:43.760 --> 00:36:59.930
And so what I envision that looks like is that were I to do a project on caste that would be to do that among caste privileged...

00:37:00.650 --> 00:37:01.050
Suraj: Savarna.

00:37:03.489 --> 00:37:03.619
Anar Parikh: Savarna.

00:37:03.620 --> 00:37:30.820
Folks in my own extended communing kinship networks, not to like exoticize or like turn the gaze onto caste oppressed individualism communities.

00:37:30.859 --> 00:37:54.260
But a lot of that, like what you were saying, a lot of that is looking at silence or looking at erasure or looking at the kind of innuendos that are used to talk about caste, which have to do with like vegetarianism or a number of other things that are there, but are not explicit.

00:37:54.270 --> 00:37:54.300
Suraj: Right.

00:37:57.339 --> 00:38:07.779
Again, I see parallels to racial justice where we think about, white saviorism or what have you, as who is the person who needs to be worked with about racial justice.

00:38:07.779 --> 00:38:44.529
And I think in education where I am, it becomes very easy to take on these deficit, I shouldn't say it becomes very easy, for some people it is very easy to take on these deficit discourses, where you understand education as this process of repairing a damaged person, but in these more emancipatory, critical politicized ways of thinking about learning that we're trying to advocate for in the learning sciences, we see the learning process as not one where the teacher is supposed to fix the learner but rather as this collaborative and community oriented endeavor.

00:38:45.210 --> 00:39:19.620
And then the other piece I wanted to say that what you said got me thinking about, is now I've been working with young people, Indian Hindu young people who are in racial minorities in their schools and communities, and are just kind of starting to develop the language and lenses to be in non assimilationist positions but rather to understand themselves as in solidarity with black liberation, indigenous liberation and decolonialism and so on.

00:39:20.410 --> 00:39:29.879
But there is this really deep tension where they feel like they are being racially minoritized through what they might understand as Hinduphobia.

00:39:29.879 --> 00:39:44.330
But then we also want to develop this lens that says, we need to have a more complex picture of our identities, but also the young people who I have worked with in particular, have been in schools and with educators that do not have the tools to do this work right.

00:39:45.350 --> 00:39:46.640
These complex identities.

00:39:46.949 --> 00:39:56.560
So I guess that brings me to my next question, which is now that you have been so immersed in this space and have thought about civic engagement, learning, political participation and so on.

00:39:56.569 --> 00:40:09.759
And here, I should say like, what you're talking about with civic engagement and political participation definitely is perfectly synonymous with learning for our purposes as in the learning sciences where we're thinking in these community engaged ways.

00:40:10.040 --> 00:40:11.190
Well, some of us are.

00:40:12.089 --> 00:40:26.210
I want to ask, for people who are interested in doing South Asian advocacy equity work with South Asian folks, education work with South Asian folks, what do you think they need to understand about the diaspora?

00:40:27.519 --> 00:40:45.320
Anar Parikh: I mean, I think, I guess that, something that we've already talked about is that, it's very much about holding multiple things at once.

00:40:45.500 --> 00:40:49.270
So in the process of...

00:40:54.120 --> 00:41:20.449
If we're thinking about the US, for example, because we live in a world that at centers whiteness, that like anything that is not whiteness is often flattened into a single thing, a monolithic thing, but that it's a very multifaceted thing.

00:41:21.220 --> 00:41:47.050
Even when we're talking about the South Asian diaspora, that's like not just migration from South Asia to the US but also legacies of indentured servitude and multiple paths of migration across Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific as well as to Europe and to the US.

00:41:47.069 --> 00:42:02.229
So keeping in mind that that is a part of that experience is that it's multiple and not particularly the same for any given person or group of people.

00:42:02.750 --> 00:42:21.680
And then also with something like Hinduphobia, is really thinking about not that people experience marginalization based on religion or whatever, but also that these are political projects as well.

00:42:23.779 --> 00:42:29.830
Hinduphobia has been manufactured by a particular group of people to advance a particular political cause.

00:42:30.210 --> 00:42:35.599
Which is to operationalize US racism and xenophobia in the service of refortifying Hindu majoritarianism in India.

00:42:45.319 --> 00:43:02.040
It's not just Hinduphobia, but what Hinduphobia is, has been propagated by very powerful organizations and operatives in India as a kind of political reality that people are schooled into.

00:43:02.710 --> 00:43:09.710
If not in school, then in temple spaces or in their families or temple spaces or wherever.

00:43:09.710 --> 00:43:25.210
So I think really trying to highlight the ways in which all of these ideas are political and politicized.

00:43:25.290 --> 00:43:47.660
And that's still very broad, I know, but really critically thinking through, what is a term, where does it come from, how is it being used in particular context, paying attention to all of those things can provide a lot of information.

00:43:47.660 --> 00:43:51.960
And a lot of it also relies on people not having a full context.

00:43:53.720 --> 00:44:08.570
You can convincingly make an argument that Hinduphobia exists because people either don't have a full set of information about what the Hindu American Foundation is or what the California textbook debates are about.

00:44:09.540 --> 00:44:15.859
Or because they're intentionally leaving those things out of what they say a particular thing is.

00:44:15.870 --> 00:44:23.569
So thinking through ideas and concepts of where things come from is important.

00:44:23.590 --> 00:44:37.439
And also just understanding how power works both as a South Asian diaspora, but like the world that we live in, in general.

00:44:39.490 --> 00:44:39.790
Suraj: Totally.

00:44:40.109 --> 00:44:42.190
I really appreciate what you just said.

00:44:42.190 --> 00:44:44.850
And I thought that that was really well said.

00:44:44.870 --> 00:45:04.789
This idea that Hinduphobia and these concepts have been manufactured to weaponize US racism to support this kind of Hindu nationalist and Hindu supremacist project, I think is a really straightforward way of putting it that sounds exactly right to me.

00:45:04.819 --> 00:45:15.169
And I think what I hear you say is, is these kinds of twins ideas about heterogeneity, and just this idea that everybody is the same as everybody else, which is something that is true.

00:45:15.169 --> 00:45:23.829
Anytime you're trying to do racial equity work in the United States, this kind of overwhelming need to flatten an end, we need to intentionally work against that.

00:45:24.060 --> 00:45:45.700
And then also this focus on power that people can strategically use, like you just said, strategically use this machinery of absent context and the natural penchant of the US society to be racist, to make it appear that there is a powerlessness that is not really an accurate way of thinking about people.

00:45:46.290 --> 00:45:59.229
I think for you and I, and for people who have the same Twitter feed as us, I don't know how you can really take seriously Hinduphobia as a concept if you can see what you're seeing on the feed.

00:45:59.490 --> 00:46:10.220
While at the same time, people do experience anti-brown racism and we need to be able to think complexly about this and not simply say that this is all one thing.

00:46:14.350 --> 00:46:14.640
Anar Parikh: Yeah.

00:46:14.640 --> 00:46:33.480
And I think it's one thing to also objectively say, if you're in particular spaces, it's hard not to be critical of something like Hinduphobia.

00:46:33.799 --> 00:46:35.459
But attending to that is also to...

00:46:35.950 --> 00:47:20.859
And this is hard for me, but also meeting people where they are, in the process of also trying to get them to a different sort of places that even though Hinduism is grounded in caste patriarchy, people still have ties to particular traditions or particular practices that are real and meaningful and severing yourself from something as you learn about its legacies of violence and stuff, can also be extremely alienating.

00:47:20.859 --> 00:47:50.880
So I also understand that it's hard to break up with a religious or spiritual practice, even if you know that it's mired in all kinds of injustice or violence because that means also severing yourself from a community of belonging.

00:47:52.780 --> 00:48:04.609
I think that that's something that I have to remind myself in terms of how hard I am on people who aren't in the same...

00:48:04.930 --> 00:48:11.250
I don't believe that some people are more capable of getting to a place than other people.

00:48:11.770 --> 00:48:13.049
I don't believe that at all.

00:48:13.049 --> 00:48:14.589
I think that that's a cup out.

00:48:14.830 --> 00:48:24.919
But I do think that it's important to remind myself that, it is also work and that that process is hard for people.

00:48:24.930 --> 00:48:37.950
So that's more from maybe those of us who are harsh on people is like also a reminder to have grace to an extent while also holding people accountable.

00:48:39.480 --> 00:48:46.090
Suraj: I feel like a recurring pattern in our conversations that any time we think one thing it's like, but also this other thing is true.

00:48:46.090 --> 00:48:59.990
And this idea that there is complexity and unfortunately or fortunately we can't just boil it down to these three facts that a person needs to know to do this kind of work, but rather of always looking for that other side.

00:49:00.509 --> 00:49:04.290
Maybe not other side but other perspective or other thing that's also true.

00:49:06.020 --> 00:49:06.080
Anar Parikh: Totally.

00:49:06.299 --> 00:49:10.219
Suraj: I feel like we covered this, but I want to invite you to comment on it.

00:49:10.220 --> 00:49:20.800
If you have anything more to say the question was, what perspectives on equity or social justice do you take to this work or do you see as most important effective when thinking about the South Asian diaspora?

00:49:21.700 --> 00:49:45.859
Anar Parikh: So, I mentioned this online the other day, that part of the reason I am hemming and hawing over my dissertation is because I'm trying to introduce myself to a new body of work that was not a part of my training.

00:49:47.679 --> 00:49:52.020
I've really been thinking with and alongside black feminist anthropologists and women of color feminist anthropologists to the extent that I can without redoing the whole thing.

00:49:52.029 --> 00:50:17.310
But I do think that drawing from black feminist thinkers and women of color feminist thinkers and queer thinkers has really slowly been a way to think about, both to think critically but also to not get mired in...

00:50:19.299 --> 00:50:22.289
Is like both to think critically and generatively at the same time.

00:50:22.290 --> 00:50:37.500
So both thinking about how do we really bring forth the parts of this that are racism that are caste violence that are caste patriarchy, but also to identify, where are the spaces of community amid all of that.

00:50:39.169 --> 00:50:55.819
I think for folks who are doing social justice or organizing work, having a strong sense of grounding in that community, it feels super important when everything can otherwise feel very bleak.

00:50:55.839 --> 00:51:30.970
That's also to say that rather than really thinking against the predominantly white scholars in any particular field or white innovative thinkers in any particular field, really being intentional about not just race, but when we say black feminist or women of color feminists, that's a political epistemological position that people are taking when they write.

00:51:30.989 --> 00:51:35.509
And I think that that is the part that feels important to me right now.

00:51:35.720 --> 00:51:46.479
And that's in terms of diaspora but also in terms of South Asian diaspora, but also everything that I'm reigning or thinking about right now.

00:51:47.839 --> 00:52:03.210
Suraj: I really appreciate that because I feel like I resonate with in my dissertation work, you always have this desire by some in the field to do this like, what's wrong, what's wrong, what's wrong, like pity-porn is what the youth I worked with called it.

00:52:03.210 --> 00:52:06.039
And I'm sure other people called it that.

00:52:06.049 --> 00:52:26.009
There's also this tendency to think about criticality as being a killjoy in like the Sarah Amid sense, but also just generally, whereas I think in reality, black feminist thinkers, critical thinkers, value joy in community and intimacy and these things.

00:52:26.049 --> 00:52:33.720
And it's a misrepresentation of their committee to say that what they look for is a reason that something is wrong.

00:52:34.379 --> 00:52:34.629
Anar Parikh: Right.

00:52:35.140 --> 00:52:37.269
Suraj: Not actually what these lenses do.

00:52:39.029 --> 00:52:40.740
So now I'm going a little bit off script.

00:52:40.750 --> 00:52:44.279
So if you say something you regret, we can certainly cut it from the recording.

00:52:44.279 --> 00:52:48.049
[inaudible] kind of hear your thoughts about representation.

00:52:50.240 --> 00:52:59.390
What of course you didn't say, naturally and what I also wouldn't say is that, the idea of representational politics is really central to your thinking about equity.

00:53:00.319 --> 00:53:08.750
And I think one of the things that you comment on often on Twitter is various people of pop culture that come out that are marketed to us as representation.

00:53:09.080 --> 00:53:26.040
And I wonder if you have anything to say, just in general about the way that representational politics, representational art and media in the diaspora, what you see as, maybe what's good about it or what it might afford, or if it's something that we...

00:53:26.339 --> 00:53:35.709
How might we engage with these pieces of art or media or politics that are framed for us as like great representation of this person or this identity?

00:53:36.770 --> 00:53:55.440
Anar Parikh: So, I guess from my own political perspective, representation can only do so much.

00:53:55.729 --> 00:54:03.470
There's like a hard limit to representation which is like, representation is not equal to politics, or it's not equal to solidarity.

00:54:03.490 --> 00:54:08.399
It can be a part of it but they're not interchangeable.

00:54:08.410 --> 00:54:20.290
So just because you see someone who looks like you on a particular platform does not mean that they are necessarily invested in your best interest or in a collective best interest.

00:54:30.210 --> 00:54:37.099
I think this is something that I am thinking through my dissertation, is that representation does hold meaning for people.

00:54:37.359 --> 00:54:52.430
And I think that while I'm critical of its possibilities, I think it's also worth really taking seriously that it does hold meaning and that it's effective and emotional.

00:54:52.439 --> 00:55:04.429
And there are feelings attached to being able to see someone who looks like you or to hear or see and experience that resembles yours.

00:55:04.440 --> 00:55:21.110
I'm kind of just interested in the one naming that it has value for people and then also identifying what the limitations are.

00:55:25.290 --> 00:55:50.799
But I think that it's an unfortunate consequence of white supremacy or of white heteropatriarchy or capitalist society, because representation also I think its capitalist concepts.

00:55:51.500 --> 00:56:00.759
I think that it generates profit for people because when you see something that is like you, then you want to buy into it.

00:56:02.100 --> 00:56:16.829
But because there's so few instances of being able to see ourselves in particular ways or spaces that we don't, that when we are able to see it, it feels like this is the epitome of it.

00:56:20.189 --> 00:56:30.404
I think it's frustrating and also I understand why people are drawn to it basically.

00:56:30.404 --> 00:56:30.777
Suraj: Yeah.

00:56:30.777 --> 00:56:34.138
I know that wasn't off the cuff question so...

00:56:34.138 --> 00:56:34.885
Anar Parikh: Oh, no.

00:56:34.885 --> 00:56:35.632
It's okay.

00:56:35.632 --> 00:56:46.819
Suraj: I hear again, that kind of, this is true and then this is also a true thing and I appreciate that these contradictions or tensions happen all the time.

00:56:46.990 --> 00:56:53.689
For me, it's like, oh, well, if I hate it, I'm like, well, why is everybody all great and excited about this representation?

00:56:53.710 --> 00:56:56.380
If I love it, I'm like, well, why can't I have nice things?

00:56:56.580 --> 00:56:57.040
Anar Parikh: Exactly.

00:56:57.870 --> 00:56:59.510
Suraj: [crosstalk] I get it.

00:56:59.510 --> 00:56:59.580
Anar Parikh: Totally.

00:57:02.509 --> 00:57:04.359
Suraj: I would love to just hear...

00:57:04.629 --> 00:57:08.290
I know that you've position yourself in anthropology, sort of.

00:57:08.750 --> 00:57:12.479
I would love to hear if there's just any specific works or role models.

00:57:12.480 --> 00:57:26.419
I mean, you've already mentioned black feminism, queer and women of color perspectives and onto-epistemologies but if there's anything else you want to name as a particular person, writing, school of thought that has really animated your thinking.

00:57:27.569 --> 00:57:32.649
Anar Parikh: Oh, sorry.

00:57:35.799 --> 00:57:40.520
I'm looking at my bookshelf but I don't know.

00:57:40.520 --> 00:57:58.440
I think that right now, other than being an anthropologist, I don't identify with a particular school of thought, either within the discipline or outside of it.

00:57:58.440 --> 00:58:12.250
Economically is like very specifically Christian, but I find that I think most generally pulling from a bunch of different spaces and thinkers at the same time.

00:58:12.250 --> 00:58:13.620
And I am actually like...

00:58:16.000 --> 00:58:16.710
What's the word?

00:58:17.660 --> 00:58:37.299
Really predisposed towards the [inaudible] I guess that I just really feel very disinterested in really holding on to a particular faith because your faith can always be problematic or is problematic.

00:58:37.299 --> 00:58:48.990
So I try to really appreciate what people can offer as thinkers, but I haven't particularly grounded my own work in a specific line of thinking.

00:58:52.520 --> 00:58:56.640
It hasn't been attached to any particular thinkers I think, other than that.

00:58:57.690 --> 00:59:00.189
Suraj: Well, that's possibly for the best, because I don't know.

00:59:01.100 --> 00:59:04.429
Logical schools of thoughts so if you name them, I'd be like, well, that sounds great.

00:59:06.690 --> 00:59:09.820
So I guess that brings me to my last question.

00:59:09.820 --> 00:59:22.899
Which is, if you have any thoughts about education, education research and I know that you wouldn't necessarily position yourself as an education researcher, but I also know you've thought a lot about graduate education, socialization into fields and all like that.

00:59:22.900 --> 00:59:29.440
So if there's anything you might want to say about the links between the South Asian diaspora and education.

00:59:30.020 --> 00:59:30.030
59:32

00:59:30.040 --> 00:59:30.470
Anar Parikh: Sure.

00:59:31.940 --> 00:59:38.419
I guess that this is a part of my work that I am doing right now that's not exactly specifically about the South Asian diaspora.

00:59:40.120 --> 01:00:04.210
I do think of myself as also doing eco community engaged research in a variety of not particularly well defined ways, but that's both through my research or both through the way that I did ethnographic research as working at an organization while also doing my research.

01:00:04.210 --> 01:00:12.479
But also for the past two years, I've been a graduate fellow at the Swearer Center for Public Service at Brown.

01:00:12.479 --> 01:00:29.740
And my current project actually involves reviewing and revising the undergraduate co-curriculum that goes with student's community engagement placements.

01:00:29.750 --> 01:00:34.369
So I am thinking, at least not necessarily this.

01:00:36.259 --> 01:00:59.079
This piece of my work is not specific to the South Asian diaspora, but I am thinking about how do you work towards anti-racism or work towards decolonial approaches in teaching or in learning in this co-curricular space and in a higher context more broadly.

01:01:01.819 --> 01:01:10.839
Just yesterday I Tweeted about how the heavy-handed use of TED Talks in educational spaces.

01:01:10.839 --> 01:01:13.850
Suraj: [inaudible] Retweeted, responded to you.

01:01:13.870 --> 01:01:14.230
Anar Parikh: Sorry.

01:01:14.680 --> 01:01:18.230
Suraj: Tressie McMillan Cottom Retweeted and responded.

01:01:18.730 --> 01:01:18.760
Anar Parikh: Yes.

01:01:20.110 --> 01:01:20.745
She responded.

01:01:21.020 --> 01:01:25.619
I could sing Tressie McMillan Cottom's phrases all day.

01:01:26.599 --> 01:01:34.470
And fairly sure that my Twitter success is due to things Tressie has uplifted for sure.

01:01:37.270 --> 01:01:46.540
I would say that more than beyond this as South Asian diaspora, I am not the best at operationalizing things, I guess.

01:01:47.150 --> 01:01:57.009
I'm an anthropologist because I think that there's this flexibility in ethnographic research to be adhoc, which suits my own modes of thinking and learning.

01:01:57.250 --> 01:02:01.950
That being said, I am invested in the spaces that I'm involved in.

01:02:01.950 --> 01:02:22.339
Really trying to engage people to think critically about the information that's presented to them and where that information comes from, who's writing it, what kinds of narratives are being produced or reproduced, why might those narratives be harmful.

01:02:23.029 --> 01:02:34.279
Are all things that I try to practice in my own work and also in the way that I talk to people in my own work and the way that I engage with others.

01:02:34.290 --> 01:02:38.970
I would say that that's how I'm thinking about education.

01:02:38.970 --> 01:02:50.090
And also when I work on materials to really think through those things in my syllabi or in the workshops that I'm revising, or curricula that I'm reviewing.

01:02:50.109 --> 01:02:54.600
So it's all very adhoc, as are a lot of things.

01:02:54.680 --> 01:02:59.549
But that's like where I am now.

01:03:00.620 --> 01:03:00.960
Suraj: Yeah.

01:03:03.009 --> 01:03:16.950
So I had been doing this work with LGBTQ plus Youth and so naturally when I went on the job market, I had to pitch a second project which is absurd to me cause I was like still working on the [inaudible] . But my second project, I was like, what if we just did the same thing with South Asian youth or whatever?

01:03:17.480 --> 01:03:22.959
And immediately that was a bad idea because it didn't necessarily make sense.

01:03:22.990 --> 01:03:26.720
But I have been thinking a lot about education with South Asian youth.

01:03:26.720 --> 01:03:30.310
And so this new project I'm working on is in my hometown.

01:03:30.629 --> 01:03:39.430
After this past summer, there had been all these petitions from, and my hometown is on Long Island and it is very white and very wealthy.

01:03:39.490 --> 01:03:47.940
And this petition had circulated about, how can we make our hometown schools more anti-racist, 2000 alumni signed it.

01:03:48.100 --> 01:03:52.920
That didn't mean anything because alumni K12 school districts are not a constituency group.

01:03:52.930 --> 01:04:03.539
But we wound up working with the few youth of color in the schools and to hear the way that they are positioned in these learning environments is really quite challenging.

01:04:03.890 --> 01:04:16.229
But then at the same time you think, oh, there are some parts of that culturally sustaining pedagogy that actually no amount of professional development can make the job of a white educator.

01:04:16.370 --> 01:04:30.549
And so there is a lot of complexity to it, especially if you about in this last few years in the learning sciences, thinking about, okay, well, what if we actually really did think about learning as political?

01:04:31.109 --> 01:04:35.289
All learning as having a political dimension or involving a kind of political becoming.

01:04:35.940 --> 01:04:45.259
Then you have to abandon this idea that neutrality is what you're going for as a teacher, which I think as we all know was sort of a farce to begin with.

01:04:45.499 --> 01:04:45.739
Anar Parikh: Yeah.

01:04:46.049 --> 01:04:46.999
Don't even start there.

01:04:47.699 --> 01:04:48.169
Its like...

01:04:50.370 --> 01:04:57.490
Suraj: And yet that is of course a tool that white teachers and others use to say, oh, well, we don't talk about race in this classroom.

01:04:57.490 --> 01:05:00.590
Never mind that I'm giving you this white supremacist history of the United States.

01:05:00.590 --> 01:05:01.850
That's not political.

01:05:01.890 --> 01:05:12.649
But us talking about any perspectives of people of color is necessarily talking about race and talking about race is illegal, racist.

01:05:12.980 --> 01:05:15.470
Now they're actually trying to ban critical race theory, but I digress.

01:05:15.470 --> 01:05:26.670
I think that's all that I had on the agenda for today, but I'll give you the opportunity to just say if there's...

01:05:26.700 --> 01:05:29.629
And then I have a little bit of closing matter, just paperwork...

01:05:29.629 --> 01:05:29.749
Anar Parikh: Okay.

01:05:30.379 --> 01:05:30.629
Sure.

01:05:31.539 --> 01:05:33.059
Suraj: But I'll just give you the opportunity to say.

01:05:33.060 --> 01:05:34.859
Is there anything else that you think that...

01:05:35.689 --> 01:05:43.730
So we're this collective of multinational transnational South Asian learning scientists, we do a lot of work on thinking about teaching and learning.

01:05:45.160 --> 01:05:53.979
And we're trying to really understand the implications of our identities for creating more equitable, more productive, more effective learning environments.

01:05:53.989 --> 01:06:00.379
So I'll just say that to say, is there anything else you might like to share about your research, your experience, your thinking?

01:06:02.799 --> 01:06:03.060
Anar Parikh: Yeah.

01:06:03.690 --> 01:06:09.690
I guess that I was just thinking about this as we were talking about learning in South Asian diaspora...

01:06:11.370 --> 01:06:30.290
like, This sounds so obvious, I guess, but really mapping out where are the place says that people learn or where people are socialized to learn and think in particular ways.

01:06:32.480 --> 01:06:40.390
I mean, nowhere do I think that there's an assumption, at least in this conversation that that's the school.

01:06:40.740 --> 01:06:56.249
But also really naming, I think for the South Asian diaspora and particular, maybe other affinity or identity based communities that it's not just schools but also families or temp...

01:06:56.250 --> 01:07:00.220
Where are the places that people are [inaudible]

01:07:01.319 --> 01:07:07.119
.
 There's social reproduction happening in families, in religious spaces.

01:07:07.899 --> 01:07:12.910
And then also in activist or organizing spaces as well.

01:07:15.330 --> 01:07:16.350
I think each of those...

01:07:17.549 --> 01:07:27.259
I happened to spend more time in my formative years in those activists and organizing spaces than I did in temple spaces or like religious spaces.

01:07:27.299 --> 01:07:33.480
And I think that it's not a surprise that I ended up the way that I did, at least to me.

01:07:34.400 --> 01:07:36.060
I think it's just something that I'm thinking about.

01:07:36.230 --> 01:07:40.069
And that's very off the cuff, I hadn't like fully developed that.

01:07:40.069 --> 01:07:44.580
But just something that came up based on what you were talking about.

01:07:45.069 --> 01:07:45.829
Suraj: Yeah, totally.

01:07:45.879 --> 01:07:50.250
I've now been on two projects where I've been working with youth who are trying to transform their school.

01:07:50.290 --> 01:08:01.229
And of course, the space of us working together to think about strategy and learn and think together, that space has not been in the school, but that has been the learning space.

01:08:02.319 --> 01:08:05.680
With this new project, with the youth in my hometown, it's very much been like...

01:08:06.490 --> 01:08:09.109
The school's never going to teach you critical race theory and if...

01:08:09.339 --> 01:08:09.729
Anar Parikh: Right.

01:08:10.960 --> 01:08:13.829
... Suraj: critical race theory, it won't do it for another 10 or 15 years.

01:08:14.479 --> 01:08:19.360
But we can learn critical race theory right now as part of us doing this advocacy work.

01:08:19.360 --> 01:08:23.699
And I don't know if Jean Lave is...

01:08:23.699 --> 01:08:26.104
Jean Lave is this, I guess, somewhat as a...

01:08:26.104 --> 01:08:27.090
Anar Parikh: Communities of practice?

01:08:27.469 --> 01:08:28.020
Suraj: Yeah.

01:08:28.369 --> 01:08:32.559
So that's really a big deal in our field and it's sold to us as anthropology.

01:08:32.569 --> 01:08:38.069
As like, this is an anthropological perspective on learning but I'm not sure if an anthropology she is.

01:08:38.649 --> 01:08:42.470
Or that that theory is something [inaudible] or whatever.

01:08:49.059 --> 01:08:56.420
Anar Parikh: I am familiar with Communities of practice because I took an anthropology of knowledge class.

01:08:56.459 --> 01:09:35.809
I wouldn't say that it's necessarily everywhere but there is actually this book called “Civic Engagements”, the citizenship practices of Indian and Vietnamese immigrants in Texas that uses this communities of practice idea to talk about how immigrants become civically engaged through religious organizations or through ethnic associations.

01:09:38.690 --> 01:09:40.910
The way that it's invoked in this particular instance.

01:09:40.930 --> 01:09:44.129
I think one is ignorant of race...

01:09:44.199 --> 01:09:46.160
Like one basically doesn't account for race.

01:09:46.590 --> 01:09:50.539
And two, also doesn't account for power.

01:09:50.719 --> 01:09:56.320
And those are often related in the way that, what belonging in the US involved.

01:09:56.330 --> 01:10:04.020
So I'm not saying that that's absent in the Lave and Wenger, in how they conceptualize it altogether.

01:10:04.049 --> 01:10:23.359
But I think there's parts of Communities of practice that are interesting and also probably if I were to read it closely now, I would also identify ways that probably hasn't fully accounted for oppression, basically.

01:10:24.519 --> 01:10:30.529
Suraj: In the last 30, somewhat years it's met with plenty of answers and critiques and so on.

01:10:30.530 --> 01:10:33.879
But I think the learning science is it's really kind of two communities.

01:10:33.879 --> 01:10:44.410
There's this very science, brain science educational psychology cognition, randomized control trial people, learning analytics and AI in education.

01:10:44.439 --> 01:10:58.049
And then also in the same field, there's these people who are like myself or like ethnographers, participatory research, qualitative research, equity education as a practice of freedom and all like that.

01:10:58.049 --> 01:11:00.689
And we are all for some reason learning scientists.

01:11:00.699 --> 01:11:16.340
But I bring up Lave because often in our graduate training, Lave is sold to us as ethnography in anthropology and it is offered as the alternative to this, that I'm highly critical of, this really cognitivist individualized.

01:11:18.250 --> 01:11:32.049
But I brought all of that up to just say, the Lave and tradition has really made this large group of learning scientists who really appreciate out-of-school learning and look to have [crosstalk] as the site where most learning...

01:11:32.059 --> 01:11:49.100
In fact, that whole line of thinking of course opens this argument that says schools is actually one of the places where learning is almost least likely to happen, or if it does happen, it happens in the least natural, least effective, least productive way and then you're just sort of left alone.

01:11:49.940 --> 01:11:52.860
Which is depressing but I think we're working on it.

01:11:54.770 --> 01:11:55.219
All right.

01:11:55.509 --> 01:11:56.889
Anything else you want to throw out there?

01:11:57.490 --> 01:11:58.680
Anar Parikh: No, thank you so much.

01:11:59.089 --> 01:11:59.379
Suraj: All right.

01:11:59.379 --> 01:12:03.805
Well, it was a pleasure to chat with you and I thank you so much for agreeing to do this.

01:12:03.900 --> 01:12:18.730
I think you really added a lot of complexity and nuance and texture to some of our language and thinking here that is really important both for people in the community and for people outside the community to try and wrap their heads around.