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This file was generated by Descript <www.descript.com>

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Suraj: all right.

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Well, just a little bit about me.

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I'm Suraj Uttamchandani, I'm a postdoc at Indiana University, and I've been working on this project with my colleagues, Deborah Dutta.

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Deborah Dutta who finished in Learning Sciences at Homi Bhabha, Vishesh Kumar at Wisconsin, Madison and Gayatri Jayathirtha at UPenn.

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The purpose of this project is we felt that in the learning sciences, there's just such a Western lens, and we have this grant to basically try and offer some other lenses.

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So our goal is to interview a wide variety of people just about their work and help create this space for learning scientists both Indian and non-Indian learning scientists to engage with ways that people are thinking about learning and education and equity in India and around the world, rather than simply in these North American contexts.

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That's the goal of the conversation.

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Just a little bit about me, especially for this interview, my dissertation work was with LGBTQ+ youth who were here in the State of Indiana who were trying to get their schools to be more LGBTQ+ inclusive and I was interested in how those youth asserted their own dignity, how they taught teachers about LGBTQ+ issues.

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I feel quite a lot of people actually have recommended chatting with you and I've had the opportunity to read some of your work and I'm really excited personally to also learn a little bit more about how you think about these kinds of issues.

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I'll read this formal text.

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"In this interview, we are simply interested in hearing about your perspectives, practices and experiences.

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In our larger project we will examine patterns and differences and how a variety of researchers have explored teaching and learning in diverse Indian contexts.

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Importantly, we want to deeply consider a wide variety of sociocultural groups and center educational equity in this work.

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In this spirit, we actively seek perspectives from minoritized groups and connections to important equity issues such as caste discrimination, LGBTQ+ rights, sexism, religious discrimination, indigenous epistemology and colonization.

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I also wanted to mention before we start Chayanika that I know you've written quite a lot on these topics, so if at any point you'd like to say, feel free to consult such and such writing I did on this topic, please feel free to do so and we can refer our audience to those pieces.

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All right.

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So before we dive in, perhaps you could just briefly introduce yourself with whatever information you'd like to share.

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Chayanika: Yeah.

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So I'm Chayanika Shah, I'm based in Bombay.

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Currently I'm a retired lecturer and an independent researcher interested in issues of education and communication.

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Yeah, I also have been very active in queer and feminism activism in Bombay and in India on many issues.

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So we can talk about them as we go along.

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Suraj: Great.

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Chayanika: That's about it.

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Suraj: Super, thank you.

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So before we get into those issues, I wanted to clarify the vocabulary we use.

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I tend to use the phrase LGBTQ+ or sometimes queer to refer to these communities.

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What terms do you like to use when you're talking about these spaces and these communities?

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Chayanika: Actually I also flip between the two in the sense that for me queer is more about the politics of questioning norms of gender and sexuality.

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Especially sexuality.

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I would use LGBTQIA+ when I'm speaking of organizing, which is more along lines of assimilation.

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When I'm talking of transformation then I use queer.

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So I would call myself a queer person and a person who has queer politics.

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But all organizing does not necessarily have a queer politics.

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Sometimes one might refer to it as LGBTIQ+, which is recognizing the multiple ways in which people are there, including them.

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But in politics also, it stops short at just inclusion.

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And facilitating inclusion, but not really moving towards transforming the ways in which things are being done.

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So I made that distinction and personally I identify queer now, of course my journey begins with identifying bisexual, lesbian and coming to queer.

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Also, as we understand the meaning of what being queer means, that I take this on as a descriptor for myself, because yes I do not necessarily desire only cis women or women per se.

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Then the descriptor for the self also has become queer over a period of time, as you define more and more, who is this woman that I am feeling attracted to, that my definition of myself has also shifted.

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Suraj: Thank you for that.

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I think that's a really helpful way to talk about some of the differences between those terms, but also that we can use both of them, depending on what we're trying to talk about.

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Maybe we can talk a little bit about your long term journey.

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If I understand your biography correctly, your graduate studies were in physics and over time you became quite focused on feminist and LGBTQ+ experiences in science and also in the activist realm.

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I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about what motivated you to either shift that focus or if it doesn't make sense to talk about it as a shift, but rather some other way, tell us a little bit about that story?

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Chayanika: Sure.

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As my life has been very long, it becomes difficult to actually talk about them, but let me condense it in a manner.

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Yes, I started with doing my graduation, post graduation and my doctorate in physics.

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As I was doing my PhD, I think this is from 1979 to '85 is when I was actively involved in finishing my research.

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That is the time that a city like Bombay saw the growth of the feminist collectives of this phase.

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So reviving of the feminist movements in the 1980s happened at around the same time as I came to Bombay to do my masters and my PhD program.

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These days I recognized it more and more that it was also a time immediately after the emergency, I had just entered adulthood and I came to the city.

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The city was a city that also made me who I am.

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I want to mark that in some manner, because in my time here, the city has moved from being a worker city to a service and finance city, and that also has meant a lot of change in the external environment.

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But when I came in was a time when the emergency has just ended, there were lots of movements that were happening on the ground around me, and that influenced me in my time in the university to get acquainted with many struggles.

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I came from a very middle class, very safe cocooned so-called non-political family.

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I'm a second generation learner, so it's not like we had a lot of support from there in terms of ... Education was something that parents encouraged.

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But in other understanding, we were very, very mainstream.

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So the university expanded that arena for me completely and changed my outlook to the world.

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So by gaining understanding of physics and my gaining understanding of the world happened simultaneously.

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The PhD program probably extended by a year or so, because I was doing both these things and neglecting one for the other obviously.

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So by the time I finished my PhD, I also recognized a dissonance of some sorts with the world of theory physics, and the world that I was inhabiting outside.

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At that time I did not recognize it as much about me being a woman in science or a queer person in science, but it was more about my own outlook of the world did not match.

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So there were these two separate worlds that I was inhabiting.

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One that was a world which was detached from the real world that was going around, and one did not see the connections between these.

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It also seemed like doing physics meant giving up this real world, which was also seeming very fascinating to me and which also I felt compelled to engage with.

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I think I made a difficult choice at that time to say that I will not do research in physics, I'll continue to teach physics and take some time off to do other things, because there is a perception that if you have to do research, then you have to be singular-minded, and I think I've written some of this in my journey, in the EPW.

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There's a set of six essays that were put together by Gita Chadha and Asha Achuthan which talk of people in physics, biology and mathematics, two people from each of these domains talking about their journeys.

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In that I indicate that this monogamous relationship was not something that I could handle and probably it's reflective, but in retrospect, I can say that.

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But it was truly that it also questions the concept of the genius, the concept of who can do good physics.

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So all of these things played a role.

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I thought I was not good enough.

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So it was better if I continued with my love for physics and my involvement in physics by teaching it.

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I wanted to stay in teaching right from childhood.

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I like teaching.

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I chose to do that.

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That meant a shift actually in my career it meant a shift.

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I then moved and then because I did not want to do research, I did not even go in the university.

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I went into a college.

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And because I had chosen Bombay then the college also, wherever I got a job, I took a job.

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In fact in retrospect, again that seems like a good decision.

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Because, I came in touch with a lot of students who were first generation learners, and that over the 20 years that I was teaching, I kept questioning the meaning of teaching physics to this set of people, who are not going to continue in physics, who probably were going to take on other lives, and what does it mean then to teach physics to this set of students?

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And how do I give them something that they carry with them?

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Although all our syllabi seem to indicate that we want to make physicists, right?

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We are training people to become physicists, and that was not something that most people do.

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It also led me to question what kind of physics needs to be taught and how it needs to be taught.

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I think that when you look back then you see these trajectories obviously when they were happening, there's nothing conscious that was going on.

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Alongside in the '80s, in the mid '80s in Bombay and other places, there was a very strong people’s science movement that was also happening at the same time.

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Science was being engaged with by people's movements in the '80s and the '90s.

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But that was more from the point of view of looking at science making it more accessible to many people.

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In the same context, I got involved with a Science Teaching Program, which was run in Madhya Pradesh in Hoshangabad District and other places around there, which is known as the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Program, which again, tried to teach science differently to students who came from rural, tribal and small-town backgrounds.

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So that was also a new way of thinking about science, thinking about science and science teaching.

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But that was at the school level, and I was peripherally involved, but that started a process of thinking about education.

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Because, when you went in with one subject, you actually encountered the whole public education system, and you understood what is the possibility within that education system, to intervene.

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I taught in a college which was also a state-funded college, and this program was also run in state-funded schools.

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That meant that you were talking to students who came from very marginalized backgrounds and constantly the question was how to teach and what to teach.

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I think both of these influenced my understanding of education.

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Alongside of course, was my activism which was in the area of women's movements that moved slowly to queer organizing that moved ... Over the years, all of this became part of me.

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So it's only after about 20, 25 years that I see these different parts of me coming together when I look at education.

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So it is not like I've just been a teacher and I speak of education from there, or I've just been somebody who's an activist and is looking at education issue from there.

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It is all of these parts coming together to address the issue of education, which is my last research work.

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And we can talk about it more later, but that's my most concrete work on education that finally has happened in the last three, four years.

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Before that it's just been more experiential.

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It's not been in terms of working input.

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Does that answer your question?

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Suraj: Yes.

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I really appreciate that answer.

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Hearing your story and I love hearing people's stories of this, what motivated them, we see the role of Bombay.

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We see these feminist movements, we see the influence of the people science and the college teaching.

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And we get so much of that really rich history influencing us.

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And of course, you're right.

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Like now in retrospect, we can see all of these threads and at the time you're just living.

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It reminds me of my own stories.

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So my undergraduate studies was in math and I started graduate school with an interest in math education.

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While I was in graduate school, I shifted my interest to be in these more activist spaces, because I was asking these questions about why are we teaching mathematics and to whom and what would it mean to diversify mathematics?

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Some of these questions were.

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If anything now I feel ... it's not about me, it's about you, but now I feel like, "Oh, now I feel ready to come back to math now that I feel like I have a better sense of what else was happening."

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You know?

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Chayanika: Yeah.

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Suraj: I really appreciated that story and feel free to reminisce any further as we continue talking.

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But now let's talk about that last, you mentioned these last few years, some of that education work.

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So if you could tell us about that last few years, that work that you're calling this culminating work.

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If you could just tell us a little bit about it, maybe what have you been up to, and if there's a particular theory, method, goal, context, whatever it is how you would characterize that research?

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Chayanika: So I did two or three strands that have happened in the last 12, 13 years, and I actually stopped teaching in 2008.

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I took what is called voluntary retirement.

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So in India, we had that possibility at some point.

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I don't think it exists anymore, that you retired after 20 years and you could get a pension after that.

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I made sure that I had an income continuing after that, and I retired.

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In the last 12 years, I've done two or three kinds of things.

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One is that looking at science itself with a feminist lens, which is something that has been a thread which has been going on in my head since I was doing my PhD.

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I was in IIT Bombay and we had a lovely library and the library also had in some corner, some books written by feminists on critiques of science.

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This way back in the '80s and we found those books and read them.

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Also, because you're newly becoming a feminist and you want to take that to everything about you.

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So you looked at feminist studies of science and you looked at Sarah Harding and you looked at Evelyne Fox Keller.

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Those were the two that I clearly remember from that time on.

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So this is something that's been an ongoing ... something that you keep reading and thinking about.

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You don't have that many people around you who are doing similar things.

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So you don't have a community with whom you can talk about it.

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I'm talking about the '80s and '90s.

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So obviously there were a couple of us, three, four of us who connected with each other, and in the process I met this sociologist Gita Chadha who did a PhD in sociology of science.

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And we then worked together and there was a new women's studies program that was coming up in Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

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And they said we want to put a course on feminist studies of science, or feminist science studies as we called it.

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So we designed the course and we taught it for one year and it's been a course that runs.

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Suraj: This is in the late '80s?

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Chayanika: No.

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This now, after-

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Suraj: [crosstalk] quite recently.

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Chayanika: 2008, yeah.

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2008 is when the program began.

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They did a course on feminist science studies.

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I think the first [women’s studies] program in India which had a science studies course and in the first run of it, we had both of us simultaneously co-teaching it.

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So there's a sociologist and a scientist teaching the course together and that made it very interesting.

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It made us also think more, learn more, understand more where the sociology is coming from, where other social science people actually coming to natural science and where do the natural sciences go along with this social science.

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So I think that from then on we've modified that for different sets of people and many of them are natural scientists, smaller groups.

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So try to talk to different sets of people about why it is important to do feminist critiques of science and how does one integrate it into understanding science itself.

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So this has been one strand, and I see this as a strand in science education, to actually bring the feminist lens to women's studies, social scientists, and natural scientists, all of them because each is actually unaware of this critique as much as the other.

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Even within the humanities in India for a long time the only critique of science that has been very dominant, which also links back to the people’s science movement, is a Marxist critique and a postcolonial critique.

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But a feminist critique has not been really homegrown here in spite of the fact that we've had people like Vandana Shiva talk about it and others, but the nuances with which we can talk about a feminist critique of science, has not been paid as much attention, so it was interesting to bring it first into women's studies program and then take it in different ways to different places and today I think in the last 10 years, there are many programs that have come up and there are many courses that have come up at least.

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So in science teaching programs, you have a critique, and in women's studies programs, you have the feminist science studies course.

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So there is some integration that is attempted and is happening.

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That's one strand.

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The second was actually-

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Suraj: That is fascinating.

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Chayanika: The second was again in TISS they started an elementary education master's program and that they looked at education as a discipline, not really teaching.

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So up until then in India, what we had was B.Ed.

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and M.Ed.

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We have bachelors in education, master's in education, basically teachers being trained to teach.

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In the 2000s there was a shift to start B.Ed.

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in elementary education.

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There was a first program I think in Delhi which was a bachelor's in elementary education, which actually made education as a discipline and trained people to come into it.

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The only other program that I know and I may not be really understanding the whole scene is the Homi Bhabha Center For Science Education in Bombay, which was okay in science education, but their interest was more in how to teach science better.

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I think that issues of science and society were there, but they were not in the way that we were critiquing it.

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And they're still not being integrated.

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Slowly I think changes are happening there as well.

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The TISS program started as a master's in elementary education, and they offered an optional course on science education.

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Which we then… in that we brought in many of these ideas of how to teach and why to teach and what to teach in science.

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So that I think I taught for almost seven years, it was a course again I co-taught with many people, there were bits and parts to it.

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But one component that I was involved with continuously for the seven years, was actually talking about why should you teach science and what is the need to teach?

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And when you teach what is that you should teach.

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So that is one engagement in education which has happened in the second thing.

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The last was a very different space that it came from.

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It came from a research that we did and I was part of this collective LABIA.

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Which is a queer feminist LBT collective.

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As part of that collective, we did the study in 2009 to 2013, which was actually understanding gender.

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So it came from a very different place.

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We were trying to talk to those assigned female at birth across the country, some 50 qualitative interviews, talking to them to understand how did they comprehend their gender and how did they live it?

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From there start understanding what is the meaning of gender as we understand it to date.

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From there, we brought out that book which is ... I'm now forgetting the name of my own book, the ... No Outlaws in the Gender Galaxy, right?

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That's a book that's published by Zubaan.

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That largely speaks about gender and the various ways in which it impacts parts of our life.

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But one thing that stood out really in that conversation for us, when we looked at childhood experiences, was that one side was the family, and the second side was the school.

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That there were two important sites in the life of a person, and both of them could actually be the reason for which I could grow up confident in my skin and in my identity, or I could be completely demolished by it, right?

00:25:09.320 --> 00:25:26.800
And for most people, the second is what happened, whether it is home or school, that it really, it completely broke me [one] down so much that many a times people had to quit school and it was not possible to continue in school.

00:25:27.470 --> 00:25:33.884
There were these rare stories that we heard over there in which that home was a difficult place to be and school became a refuge.

00:25:33.884 --> 00:25:41.209
I don't remember a single story where the home was a refuge and the school was a horrible space.

00:25:45.480 --> 00:25:53.330
For many people, both were horrible spaces and they navigated it somehow if they completed school completely.

00:25:54.230 --> 00:25:59.350
We had not imagined that it would be such an important part of the narrative.

00:25:59.380 --> 00:26:10.740
One was school and the other was sports and sports in India is mostly associated with childhood, adults don't have sports as such, unless they become sports people.

00:26:11.370 --> 00:26:34.320
So, this very interesting bit that people who are queer or trans, for them sports was one arena, especially if they were assigned female at birth, and this is completely distinct experiences for those assigned male and those assigned female that you found a space which allowed you to wear what you wanted.

00:26:34.540 --> 00:26:36.537
It allowed you to cut off your hair.

00:26:36.609 --> 00:26:45.589
It allowed you to be out, it allowed you to meet many people, travel, be on your own and meet many other queer people.

00:26:46.099 --> 00:26:54.810
So I think it was a very important space, which you suddenly lost when you became this 17, 18 year old and moved out.

00:26:55.160 --> 00:26:57.070
And then there was no such space left for you.

00:27:02.030 --> 00:27:13.899
All these three spaces exist together, the sports arena, that there were many of our respondents who were actually state level and national level players.

00:27:14.679 --> 00:27:16.259
So they were very good players.

00:27:16.550 --> 00:27:25.550
Some of them continued to be sports teachers, or they became physiotherapists in the sports there, or somehow, some of them, they started a gym.

00:27:25.560 --> 00:27:31.260
So in some sense, they kept that connection, but many of them lost it after they left from there.

00:27:31.270 --> 00:27:37.463
So these three things actually brought home this whole idea of schooling, schooling into gender that the home and the school are both teaching you and making you normative people in this world.

00:27:37.463 --> 00:28:07.836
At the same time, the small things you heard about what helped, also indicated that the very small things that schools can do, which can allow for children to be more comfortable in identifying their gender and sexuality actually.

00:28:07.836 --> 00:28:12.339
So this was one very big learning for us from that study.

00:28:14.090 --> 00:28:36.190
Then the next study that I took up, which was the final one, which is on looking at discrimination based on marginalized gender and sexuality, and this came about actually after the 2013 judgment that went on 377, which is criminalizing homosexuality.

00:28:36.790 --> 00:28:42.850
Like in 2009, we got decriminalized, 2013 we got recriminalized.

00:28:42.850 --> 00:28:47.619
At least some sexual activity got recriminalized.

00:28:48.219 --> 00:29:06.260
And while that case was going on and everything else was happening, we felt that there is need to talk about other things as well, because in the queer circles we've been continuously saying that just getting decriminalized is not taking us anywhere, and we were to start articulating what is it that we want.

00:29:06.700 --> 00:29:20.449
And one of the things that we've been talking about since the late '90s is actually talking about anti discrimination laws, as a step to think about how do we protect our rights as queer and trans people.

00:29:20.449 --> 00:29:34.910
Around 2015 when some of us got together and we thought about what does discrimination mean actually for identities that are invisible?

00:29:35.410 --> 00:29:37.900
For identities that are self chosen?

00:29:38.939 --> 00:29:41.900
How would discrimination be identified?

00:29:41.900 --> 00:29:49.030
Because so far we've spoken of caste, we've spoken of gender, we've spoken of disability, which are [often] visible identities or assigned identities from childhood.

00:29:54.760 --> 00:30:03.489
So if I'm a woman, it is something ... As a cis woman, it's something I've been assigned and it's not questioned by me or by society.

00:30:04.480 --> 00:30:13.579
Then I'm not trying to prove who I am to you, you are reading me as a woman and you are misbehaving, you're discriminating, you are violating.

00:30:14.599 --> 00:30:20.319
There is a description of all of that, but there is no need to describe who I am.

00:30:20.909 --> 00:30:36.260
That is when I'm coming to somebody queer and trans, then there is a second layer added to it, because I am invisible at some level, I am not actually out to you, but you are reading that I'm queer and you are discriminating.

00:30:37.279 --> 00:30:39.894
I am in a very gray zone of discrimination.

00:30:40.049 --> 00:30:54.414
I'm not actually able to ... And in a place where, till 2018, till we actually until the NALSA judgment came, they're not recognized identities.

00:30:55.140 --> 00:30:55.642
So how do you navigate them?

00:30:55.649 --> 00:31:00.590
How do you navigate the existing discrimination?

00:31:00.590 --> 00:31:03.140
And we felt that what we needed to do was actually map.

00:31:03.740 --> 00:31:05.440
Map what discrimination means.

00:31:06.650 --> 00:31:13.920
Talk about the everyday, talk about what it means really to be a queer person navigating the world at large.

00:31:14.510 --> 00:31:21.860
So that was a multi city study in which different teams took up different areas.

00:31:22.000 --> 00:31:32.570
So there were some two teams working on health, one working on housing, one working on public spaces, one working on political organizing.

00:31:32.969 --> 00:31:36.780
And what we were working on was on education.

00:31:37.660 --> 00:31:46.382
Within the education, we then chose to take higher education because, since 2014, I think India has seen a lot of mobilizing in universities.

00:31:46.382 --> 00:31:52.740
Both these things are happening simultaneously.

00:31:53.470 --> 00:32:09.509
That public education is getting completely eroded consciously by the state, which means that a lot of communities that have just entered university education, are already being denied in.

00:32:10.139 --> 00:32:16.200
That they're already given very substandard education or good education is being denied to them.

00:32:16.330 --> 00:32:17.190
That's one part.

00:32:17.930 --> 00:32:25.589
The second is that any political mobilizing on campuses is becoming very, very difficult, is being attacked.

00:32:26.610 --> 00:32:38.420
Which means that if I look back at my life, I think that if that period of time had not happened in the campus, when I could get politicized I would be a very different human being.

00:32:39.110 --> 00:32:46.769
So for me, it is a very important part of a campus that, that's the only time in our [adult] life when probably you're away from the real world.

00:32:47.539 --> 00:32:56.880
In a smaller space where the real world is very present, but it at least allows you a chance to live your life slightly differently.

00:32:57.840 --> 00:32:59.839
As a queer person I think it's critical.

00:33:00.100 --> 00:33:05.200
It's critical how that space is made, especially higher education.

00:33:07.470 --> 00:33:13.059
We concentrated on higher education and looking at discrimination there in this study.

00:33:13.599 --> 00:33:17.287
Again, there are multiple parts of it, only one has been published very recently.

00:33:17.287 --> 00:33:22.620
I can tell you what were the different parts.

00:33:23.950 --> 00:33:26.170
You want to ask anything right now or should I just go on?

00:33:26.490 --> 00:33:28.300
Suraj: No, this is super.

00:33:28.400 --> 00:33:29.090
Please continue.

00:33:29.660 --> 00:33:30.010
Chayanika: Okay.

00:33:32.029 --> 00:33:34.269
So we had some four or five different parts.

00:33:34.590 --> 00:33:37.360
In one, we wanted to continue with the school story.

00:33:37.959 --> 00:33:45.240
So since the earliest study that I was part of, which was with LABIA, we had looked at those assigned female.

00:33:45.990 --> 00:34:00.010
We decided that now we'll talk to a few people who are assigned male and look at diversity of genders, but try and understand their journey in education and not look at anything else the journey in education.

00:34:00.540 --> 00:34:02.630
So they have to have reached higher education.

00:34:02.899 --> 00:34:04.700
That was one of the criteria that we put.

00:34:05.780 --> 00:34:12.389
To look at how school is working and how higher education is working and if there is any difference in these two narratives.

00:34:13.259 --> 00:34:16.480
Then lots of differences we can talk about it a little more later.

00:34:16.549 --> 00:34:21.149
The second was actually talking to queer groups.

00:34:21.629 --> 00:34:46.989
Because in the last 10 years, I think that every big campus has had a queer group or a queer organization come up on campus for students and to talk to them and talk to other marginalizations of caste students from marginalized caste, organizing themselves, women organizing themselves, which has become a rare site on campuses now.

00:34:47.359 --> 00:34:50.677
You never see women's groups on campus.

00:34:50.677 --> 00:34:54.290
You see queer groups, you see anti caste groups but you don't see women's groups.

00:34:57.279 --> 00:35:05.939
If there are any, so talk to them to understand what discrimination means, what do they feel on this campus, et cetera, so that was a second.

00:35:07.039 --> 00:35:11.189
The third was actually talk to teachers, who are queer themselves.

00:35:11.190 --> 00:35:21.980
To understand what does it mean to be from a margin and yet be this person in part in the classroom, in the staffroom, in the campus with the syllabus.

00:35:22.169 --> 00:35:24.079
So what is it that you manage to do?

00:35:24.149 --> 00:35:28.310
What is it that you don't manage to do?

00:35:28.310 --> 00:35:31.829
We had a wonderful discussion and we hope to bring out a book, but I don't think my collaborators are helping me in putting it down.

00:35:34.160 --> 00:35:42.020
So if it happens, it is good, but if it does not, then at least one will write something about that discussion because it is a very rich discussion.

00:35:43.910 --> 00:35:45.300
Then look at policies.

00:35:45.310 --> 00:35:55.470
So one of the policies that is in place regarding discrimination is the sexual harassment policy.

00:35:55.720 --> 00:36:02.379
Most campuses, I think the spaces where the sexual harassment policy has really worked are campuses.

00:36:03.359 --> 00:36:06.870
Because there is an in-house….

00:36:08.200 --> 00:36:12.140
students and teachers who are wanting it to happen, wanting it to make it work.

00:36:12.710 --> 00:36:16.369
So some of that experience to see how we can address discrimination.

00:36:16.759 --> 00:36:20.399
If this is one model, then is this a model from where we can draw?

00:36:20.660 --> 00:36:24.709
If we're looking at another system, if we're looking at all discrimination.

00:36:25.629 --> 00:36:46.580
So that was one and finally one was done just on a whim because I lived in this campus of IIT which was ... Again in retrospect, I think it was strangely structured, today I see it as the student's area was basically the men's student's area.

00:36:47.259 --> 00:36:56.500
And the women students had one hostel, which was far away from that student area, and on the other side of the campus.

00:36:57.600 --> 00:37:01.379
I looked at all the five IITs to begin with and all of them had this structure.

00:37:02.000 --> 00:37:12.238
So then that gave me an idea to look at planning and design of campuses to see how in the design itself some of us are excluded.

00:37:12.238 --> 00:37:18.819
So we looked at five campuses, one IIT Bombay which was technology.

00:37:18.859 --> 00:37:20.860
One was management, IIM Ahmedabad.

00:37:20.890 --> 00:37:24.350
So we took all the cream of institutions.

00:37:25.399 --> 00:37:30.579
Tata Institute of Social Sciences, National Institute of Design and National Law School, Bangalore.

00:37:31.120 --> 00:37:34.950
So we looked at these five campuses and that book has just come out last month.

00:37:35.669 --> 00:37:39.309
It's published by Yoda and it is Space, Segregation, Discrimination.

00:37:40.600 --> 00:37:48.355
So it's looking at how, in our imagination of a university, we are creating the center.

00:37:48.540 --> 00:37:54.419
We are creating who the space is for and in the process, excluding many others.

00:37:54.419 --> 00:37:57.119
And there's subtle ways of doing it.

00:37:57.970 --> 00:38:18.500
The hostels are very obvious and they've been talked about a lot, but where you locate them, what architecture you make for them, and in that milieu now, if you have queer and trans people going in such a segregated gender-segregated space, what does it mean for these students?

00:38:18.870 --> 00:38:33.250
What does it mean for a trans woman who does not have an official identity as a woman yet, who takes admission to an institution like this and who goes to the boys' hostels because that's where she's allotted space?

00:38:33.850 --> 00:38:38.869
And the boys' hostels are one space that breed toxic masculinity.

00:38:39.390 --> 00:38:40.819
What does it do to this person?

00:38:41.399 --> 00:38:43.779
Is a question that one needs to answer.

00:38:45.310 --> 00:38:59.369
Along with that, how does caste work in… disability is something that we always ... that's where we talk about access and that's where we talk about inclusion, so that's been an ongoing debate, but we have not looked at these other angles.

00:38:59.369 --> 00:39:02.769
So how do we look at queer, trans gender issues?

00:39:02.779 --> 00:39:03.829
How do we look at caste?

00:39:03.879 --> 00:39:04.669
How do we look at….

00:39:05.810 --> 00:39:07.240
in plan and design itself?

00:39:07.589 --> 00:39:15.209
I think that that's a very preliminary based level study, but it has a lot of possibilities of thinking.

00:39:15.629 --> 00:39:24.220
Although on the one hand, you're talking of this and you're dreaming of this, that there is a possibility of doing things differently.

00:39:24.799 --> 00:39:34.420
Because while we were doing this, TISS created this one wing which was gender neutral in a hostel, there was conversation on gender neutral toilets.

00:39:35.140 --> 00:39:38.470
Much of this is happening as our study was going along.

00:39:39.029 --> 00:39:54.780
But on the other hand, there's active repression, there's active finishing off of campus cultures, finishing off of any political activity on campuses in the same time period.

00:39:54.790 --> 00:40:01.879
It is an interesting time to actually look at higher education and understand, and we can come to that.

00:40:01.910 --> 00:40:16.954
Next, understand how queer organizing is being located within the higher education spaces and gaining ground there, while all progressive organizing is actually taking a back seat more and more.

00:40:17.069 --> 00:40:25.170
Suraj: Yeah, that is very interesting, all of that, and just zooming back a little bit, one clarifying question.

00:40:25.170 --> 00:40:44.840
So this latest project where you were interviewing people around various campuses, I know that the built environment project was at these five campuses, but were all of these interviews with various professors, students, et cetera at one particular campus or around the whole country?

00:40:47.100 --> 00:40:48.390
Chayanika: So it's selective.

00:40:48.589 --> 00:40:52.700
The first set of qualitative interviews with those assigned male.

00:40:53.350 --> 00:40:57.560
We did it in Bombay primarily, and Kolkata was the second site.

00:40:59.310 --> 00:41:04.549
We took more trans people from Kolkata and men identifying people from Bombay.

00:41:07.200 --> 00:41:11.549
But a lot of people that we spoke to in Bombay in particular were all migrants.

00:41:12.120 --> 00:41:15.249
So actually they came with experiences from all over the country.

00:41:15.770 --> 00:41:18.670
From different parts of the country at least.

00:41:18.920 --> 00:41:23.669
The teachers also came mainly from big cities, mainly from Bombay and Delhi.

00:41:24.299 --> 00:41:25.410
Hyderabad maybe.

00:41:27.120 --> 00:41:30.447
But it is very city-based.

00:41:30.447 --> 00:41:39.990
The only non-city experience comes with the people who are talking to us, because they've grown up in smaller towns and smaller villages.

00:41:40.689 --> 00:41:45.030
Which I think is also a problem with higher education, that it is more urban.

00:41:45.279 --> 00:41:57.500
It is located in urban locations, but also because of where we were and what kind of time crunch we had, we were particularly concentrating on big cities.

00:41:58.230 --> 00:41:58.490
Suraj: Sure.

00:41:58.930 --> 00:42:02.719
Chayanika: We also don't have tier two experiences to talk of.

00:42:03.190 --> 00:42:05.009
We have not been able to look at private institutions.

00:42:05.430 --> 00:42:08.359
That's not something that we've looked at, which is a whole new arena and a whole new thing that has come up.

00:42:08.359 --> 00:42:23.749
We've not looked at a lot of coaching classes, which I think is another hotbed where I think most education today is happening more there than in the colleges.

00:42:25.169 --> 00:42:33.740
There is a whole thing of coaching classes in India which is a subculture of education, which nobody is looking at because it's not regulated.

00:42:33.740 --> 00:42:43.970
It's nothing, it exists and there is a crass amount of money that is being spent on it and it’s a business model it's a lot of money.

00:42:44.859 --> 00:42:47.420
Which is beyond all our narratives of education.

00:42:49.009 --> 00:42:49.453
All of that we are aware of.

00:42:49.453 --> 00:42:53.900
But yeah, this is more about big cities and big campuses.

00:42:55.489 --> 00:43:01.100
One of the reasons that we chose more elite campuses also, we look at places where things are happening.

00:43:02.750 --> 00:43:14.239
If I go to a smaller town and city, I'm sure that it is much more difficult for the queer trans student there to talk about their own self.

00:43:14.419 --> 00:43:18.400
And we heard it in the narratives that people brought to us.

00:43:18.609 --> 00:43:27.870
That they've done some education in some place and they've come to this big city or this big campus, and they are bringing in that narrative here, or even the teachers.

00:43:28.589 --> 00:43:37.930
Many of us grew up in smaller towns and did our primary education in their school, and the undergrad education there and then moved on somewhere else.

00:43:38.940 --> 00:43:39.970
So it's like that.

00:43:41.759 --> 00:43:59.540
Suraj: It is delightful to hear these three strands after having talked so much about your own development as a physics graduate student and these other influences, because you can see each of those influences from that time period now impacting some project of yours.

00:43:59.750 --> 00:44:02.890
So there's a nice story to be told there.

00:44:03.230 --> 00:44:13.830
So I think you can speak this next question to any of those projects, the science education, sociology of science or this queer activism one that we were talking a bit more about.

00:44:14.230 --> 00:44:32.430
I'm wondering if there's anything that you could think of that either surprised or intrigued you that you weren't expecting to learn in this last few projects or, if you prefer, you might say something that really was challenging or unexpected or difficult about trying to do this work?

00:44:34.109 --> 00:44:37.770
Chayanika: I think I alluded to both these a bit in the earlier bit.

00:44:39.450 --> 00:45:11.499
For example, when we are talking to what I mentioned earlier, that when you're talking to queer people, how important was school as an institution in my becoming the queer and trans person is something that was ... The degree of importance was surprising, that what the school meant to me as an individual, because I personally did not think of my sexuality and gender when I was in school.

00:45:12.089 --> 00:45:13.169
I thought of it later.

00:45:14.210 --> 00:45:20.770
I didn't have that personal experience, and many of us had comfortable childhoods to not have that experience.

00:45:21.310 --> 00:45:38.739
So our respondents gave us a variety of experiences that came from there and also the intersections of class and caste and where you come from with this was another ... it just stares you in the face.

00:45:38.789 --> 00:45:40.329
You cannot ignore it.

00:45:41.350 --> 00:45:52.889
You may have it in the back of your mind, but if you listen carefully then it all comes to you when you are talking to people.

00:45:52.889 --> 00:45:58.059
So it's not a surprise, but it is something that you don't actively think about it.

00:45:58.069 --> 00:46:08.229
But when you talk to people then it becomes an active thought, that you cannot talk of a queer person as just a queer person, you are talking of many locations that that person is coming from.

00:46:09.549 --> 00:46:31.240
So you see this and I think that's what qualitative narratives do, that they bring to you a whole person and so you think of the issue in very complex manners, which again it feeds into my understanding of natural science, that this is not appreciated by natural scientists.

00:46:31.310 --> 00:46:41.460
This contribution from the social scientist too, the enterprise of knowledge is not really appreciated within natural science, which wants numbers to prove everything.

00:46:41.460 --> 00:46:51.259
Also the complex manner in which you need to talk about it is something that one has to appreciate and learn as we go along.

00:46:51.620 --> 00:47:13.490
But coming back to the question, I think what has been a challenge really over the last project in particular is this ... again, there is a dissonance on what we are thinking and what we are imagining university campuses to be, and what they're becoming.

00:47:16.669 --> 00:47:26.860
It's totally because of decisions that this country has made some years ago in terms of liberalizing of various kinds, in terms of globalizing of the economy.

00:47:27.479 --> 00:47:30.060
Privatizing of every aspect of our lives.

00:47:30.060 --> 00:47:37.750
And we're seeing more and more of it happening every day almost.

00:47:37.830 --> 00:47:46.370
At some level, the giving up of the constitution at different levels, the authoritarianism, the majoritarianism, the regime that exists today.

00:47:46.379 --> 00:48:02.279
It actually is something that does not encourage the understanding of a university and higher education, in which we are imagining these projects also.

00:48:03.160 --> 00:48:11.315
So there's a very, very great dissonance and it doesn't sit well because campuses are transforming in front of your eyes.

00:48:12.330 --> 00:48:17.320
Campuses that you have worked with, that you've looked at with hope are becoming very different today.

00:48:21.750 --> 00:48:35.309
If I look at Pinjra Tod which is the formation that has come up in Delhi in particular and many other universities, which is again, women students talking about not being locked inside their hostels.

00:48:36.560 --> 00:48:44.190
Which is a battle that I fought with my fellow students in 1979 in IIT Bombay.

00:48:44.220 --> 00:49:00.970
It is something that was our first so-called feminist action, that we wanted to change the name of a hostel from ladies' hostel to Hostel 10 because every other host was called all hostel one to nine and so we called ourselves Hostel 10.

00:49:01.299 --> 00:49:02.560
We didn't want to be marked separately.

00:49:02.560 --> 00:49:05.202
We didn't want these rules.

00:49:05.202 --> 00:49:10.109
We had to come back at 10:00 and be locked inside the hostel, we broke those rules.

00:49:10.460 --> 00:49:16.019
We were not allowed visitors in, men could not enter the hostels and we changed those rules.

00:49:16.249 --> 00:49:26.660
So we did all that at that time, and I can't imagine any hostel today, any campus today, allowing its students to do that for its own hostel.

00:49:27.350 --> 00:49:29.753
Pinjra Tod is a very good example.

00:49:29.839 --> 00:49:31.609
As they began with talking about this.

00:49:31.660 --> 00:49:35.710
Of course, when you begin from there, you will land in many other questions.

00:49:36.299 --> 00:49:37.720
I can see it in my own life.

00:49:37.750 --> 00:49:42.119
I began with that question, and I see where that questioning has led.

00:49:42.500 --> 00:49:44.470
So Pinjra Tod is an example of that.

00:49:44.819 --> 00:49:49.900
But today, look at the repression, look at the ways in which this is not being allowed.

00:49:50.629 --> 00:50:14.430
How do then you have a imagination of the queer and trans, when everything is stepping backwards to becoming normative in ways that it was not, how do we talk of non-normativity in these times is a very, very difficult point, and yet this is the time when more and more people are talking about what non-normative ism can be.

00:50:15.160 --> 00:50:15.350
Suraj: Right.

00:50:15.839 --> 00:50:28.109
Chayanika: So it is a challenge how to match these two worlds with each other and not keep them in that microcosm of urban upper class, upper caste space.

00:50:28.700 --> 00:50:30.900
But how do you take it across?

00:50:30.980 --> 00:50:36.669
How do you take it across various identities and talk about in the more nuanced manner?

00:50:37.220 --> 00:50:38.919
So I find that very challenging.

00:50:39.200 --> 00:50:43.172
I found it very distressing actually to work on this project because, you keep saying things and you feel that none of this is going to happen, because the world seems to not be going towards that.

00:50:43.172 --> 00:50:48.346
But you still want to leave a record that these are the kinds of things that people are talking about.

00:50:48.346 --> 00:51:00.919
These are kinds of things that were happening at the same time while everything else was happening.

00:51:02.259 --> 00:51:02.720
Suraj: Yeah.

00:51:04.200 --> 00:51:08.520
I think there are so many of these paradoxes, right?

00:51:08.960 --> 00:51:25.839
In ways that the university is both becoming more open to non-normativity and more closed off that it's a place where people go and they meet new types of people who they would not have met before, but also they confirm their own biases and get set up for such and such career.

00:51:25.850 --> 00:51:29.450
It is a strange space in that way.

00:51:30.509 --> 00:51:57.689
Thinking with that, several times now you've mentioned this idea that school is a site where LGBTQ+ children feel particularly influenced, and that you've also mentioned that there are a few ways that schools maybe even small things, big things, a few ways that schools can become more inclusive or healthier environments for LGBTQ+ kids.

00:51:58.190 --> 00:52:16.770
If I'm hearing about your projects with this sociology of science, working with natural scientists, and then this activist project, I might say, what do you try and tell your natural sciences students, your natural sciences colleagues about the role of schools and LGBTQ+ youth development.

00:52:16.770 --> 00:52:24.290
So to put that question another way, what do you think everybody, educators needs to know about LGBTQ+ students in India?

00:52:27.640 --> 00:52:41.770
Chayanika: I would say that actually for anybody ... the project that the schools do is of making these “good boys” and “good girls”.

00:52:41.950 --> 00:52:48.939
That project itself is flawed.

00:52:48.949 --> 00:52:51.280
What is this good is very different for boys and girls.

00:52:51.910 --> 00:52:53.579
So you question what is good.

00:52:54.539 --> 00:52:57.759
And then you think of what is it that you want the person to become.

00:52:58.870 --> 00:53:07.749
What is it that you want this person to acquire while being in school?

00:53:07.749 --> 00:53:09.439
Do you want them to acquire the narratives of ... and there's a whole feminism, right?

00:53:09.859 --> 00:53:18.410
That you want to make a good girl out of everybody is a narrative that we've questioned, feminists have questioned for very long.

00:53:18.569 --> 00:53:26.730
That do you want her to be this submissive, whatever that kind of a person or you want her to be adventurous moving out?

00:53:27.230 --> 00:53:28.660
We're just going a step further.

00:53:29.339 --> 00:53:31.740
That who's this “girl” and who's this “boy”?

00:53:32.020 --> 00:53:40.274
And that why are you imposing that you are a girl and you are a boy, when actually it would not matter.

00:53:40.649 --> 00:53:50.720
It does not matter who they are or what they are by imposing so many gender norms.

00:53:51.299 --> 00:54:01.749
You actually are underlining and making it more and more difficult for anybody to not be identified as boy or girl.

00:54:02.520 --> 00:54:17.060
I look at some of the feminist struggles of not having long hair, of not wearing skirts, of wearing trousers, of going on the sports field and doing what I want to do.

00:54:20.430 --> 00:54:31.310
Look back at the feminist movements and our struggles, and in trying to gain space for women actually, we also went and underline that ... This is the larger view of the feminist movement.

00:54:32.029 --> 00:54:37.520
Also went and underlined that we've been caught in this duality.

00:54:37.960 --> 00:54:45.140
On the one hand you don't want to be labeled woman, and on the other hand you are asking for something special as women.

00:54:45.170 --> 00:54:53.320
So there is this dichotomy, which we've been battling with all along, and there's a reality.

00:54:53.950 --> 00:54:59.884
There's a reality that if there's a co-ed school, girls will not be sent to school.

00:54:59.884 --> 00:55:06.669
You ask for women's schools, you ask for girls' schools, you ask for separate schools, you ask for girls' common room boys' common room.

00:55:06.919 --> 00:55:17.580
You ask for safety for girls, and in this safety language, we've actually underlined gender much more, and I'm not saying that it's not needed.

00:55:17.940 --> 00:55:25.029
I'm still not very confident to say that girls and boys is the category that has to be given up.

00:55:25.069 --> 00:55:30.900
I'm not saying that, but in some spaces, maybe we have to give it up.

00:55:31.759 --> 00:55:33.729
Maybe we have to give up some of these things.

00:55:33.809 --> 00:55:39.270
If you have say gender neutral uniform, right?

00:55:39.600 --> 00:55:42.683
In some schools they try that, it usually is a pant and a shirt.

00:55:42.683 --> 00:55:47.359
A gender neutral uniform is usually a pant and a shirt.

00:55:47.839 --> 00:55:51.589
The question that we are asking now is, why?

00:55:51.680 --> 00:55:55.149
Why should a gender neutral uniform be a pant and a shirt?

00:55:55.710 --> 00:56:02.370
Why should the liberty to cut hair be for girls, but growing of hair should not be a possibility for boys.

00:56:03.120 --> 00:56:03.569
This is the thing.

00:56:03.850 --> 00:56:07.649
So why is this underlining of gender happening?

00:56:08.189 --> 00:56:15.359
Why can't we have some three sets of things, anybody can wear what they want, what they feel comfortable in and come with that.

00:56:15.830 --> 00:56:24.213
Why can't we not have to continuously underline that this is boys and this is girls?

00:56:24.213 --> 00:56:26.969
Can't schools be made safe spaces at least?

00:56:27.669 --> 00:56:37.099
Smaller spaces like homes where also we encourage that you don't bring up children as boys and girls try and make them rounded people.

00:56:37.569 --> 00:56:39.969
Similarly, can schools also address that?

00:56:40.609 --> 00:56:58.094
They are simple things, very simple things for children, allow them to do whatever they want to do, allow them to study what they want to study, and allow them to have hair of whatever length that they want.

00:56:58.094 --> 00:56:58.842
I think very critical, very critical, allow them to wear what they want.

00:56:58.899 --> 00:57:07.000
So if you do even these small things, it is such a big learning for everyone.

00:57:07.690 --> 00:57:11.939
It is such a big learning for teachers, such a big learning for students.

00:57:11.939 --> 00:57:17.129
It is such a big learning and these are small things, which can make a difference.

00:57:18.720 --> 00:57:24.589
Which is what in higher education you turn to say that, "Okay, we are not saying that remove women's hostels."

00:57:24.950 --> 00:57:29.220
Because if you remove women's hostels a lot of women will not be able to come to universities.

00:57:29.560 --> 00:57:31.250
If everything becomes gender neutral.

00:57:31.600 --> 00:57:34.480
But can we have a mix of gender neutral and gender specific?

00:57:35.700 --> 00:57:36.920
Can we do this?

00:57:36.920 --> 00:57:44.529
Can we have facilities that are gender neutral and facilities that are gender specific as a stop gap in between?

00:57:45.200 --> 00:57:49.350
Can we allow people to choose where they want to go?

00:57:49.580 --> 00:58:02.679
Can we stop being police men, police women, and stop people from deciding who can go where and who cannot go where?

00:58:03.249 --> 00:58:08.469
In schools also, the second thing that we realized was that teachers are very critical.

00:58:08.529 --> 00:58:14.770
At that time, one teacher in that whole school could change your work.

00:58:14.989 --> 00:58:25.773
As much as that one teacher could be sexually abusing and make you hate the subject for life, similarly there could be one teacher who could reach out to you in a way that made you feel affirmed, that made you feel good, that made feel that you can continue in this world.

00:58:25.773 --> 00:58:26.111
I think that teachers are very critical.

00:58:26.160 --> 00:58:47.029
Thirdly, in our study, especially with girls, what we see is, a lot of romance that happens between girls.

00:58:50.479 --> 00:58:56.329
At adolescence suddenly, there is much more monitoring of girls and their behaviors with each other.

00:58:58.009 --> 00:59:07.720
For boys in fact, there is a extent of bullying, which at least in our interview we did not hear that much in the so-called girls narratives.

00:59:07.720 --> 00:59:11.319
The bullying was not as present.

00:59:11.640 --> 00:59:20.949
So if I was a transgressive person and I was assigned female, my peers looked up to me more.

00:59:21.790 --> 00:59:30.089
They did not bully me, but if I was a transgendered person assigned male, then I had to find ways to cope with it.

00:59:30.539 --> 00:59:35.839
This is a stark difference between growing up as a boy and growing up as a girl

00:59:36.299 --> 00:59:39.950
Or being read as a boy and being read as a girl in India at least.

00:59:39.950 --> 00:59:44.019
I don't know if this extends world over, but in India for sure.

00:59:44.120 --> 00:59:46.130
This is very, very marked.

00:59:49.420 --> 01:00:09.419
The ways in which that bullying then progresses to become bullying of girls is also very evident, that the practice begins with boys, practice begins with peer, and this is something that I think all boys will speak of.

01:00:09.419 --> 01:00:22.129
It's not necessarily queer and trans I think all boys will speak of, any mannerism, anything which was seen as different, how it was punished by peers.

01:00:22.959 --> 01:00:25.629
I think this is something that at least girls are spared.

01:00:25.629 --> 01:00:40.580
[In case of girls] The punishment from peers is not as much till you reach the stage when you actually start writing love letters to each other, and then you're caught, because the narrative there is also not of sex, it's more of love.

01:00:40.950 --> 01:00:44.810
It's more of drawing the red hearts and giving the pink balloons.

01:00:45.140 --> 01:01:04.339
That narrative when you reach there, you might have peer violence also, or you at least have people going behind your back and telling your family or telling the teacher to become this favorite ... You'll have all of that, but you don't have the violence that boys face.

01:01:04.980 --> 01:01:16.969
Either at home or in ... home maybe there is some violence that girls also face but, from peers, the violence that boys face is not heard off for girls.

01:01:17.230 --> 01:01:17.560
Suraj: Yeah.

01:01:18.490 --> 01:01:20.740
Chayanika: I don't know why people are not paying attention to it.

01:01:21.480 --> 01:01:24.839
What is this masculinity that is being generated from school?

01:01:25.460 --> 01:01:25.830
Suraj: Yeah.

01:01:25.830 --> 01:01:27.920
Chayanika: What is this ... Pardon?

01:01:28.390 --> 01:01:41.700
Suraj: I feel that idea, this idea that now is increasingly people have this language of toxic masculinity is this generalization of the phenomenon you're talking about with adolescence.

01:01:43.149 --> 01:01:44.277
Chayanika: But it starts very early.

01:01:44.519 --> 01:01:45.729
It starts very, very early.

01:01:46.250 --> 01:01:46.550
Suraj: Right.

01:01:46.899 --> 01:01:51.609
Chayanika: Then how are we surprised that these boys are treating these girls in the manner that they do when they grow up?

01:01:52.080 --> 01:01:52.350
Suraj: Right.

01:01:53.649 --> 01:01:56.950
Chayanika: I think that we've not paid enough attention.

01:01:56.950 --> 01:02:09.093
We've not paid enough attention to schooling and its impact on gendering and its impact on creating this heterosexuality.

01:02:09.093 --> 01:02:15.209
Especially in this context of India where you keep the sexes separate so that there is no desire, right?

01:02:15.210 --> 01:02:25.269
And that is something that for many years we've been saying that if you have women together, then you don't imagine sex, when there is a boy and a girl together, then you don't imagine anything other than sex.

01:02:25.549 --> 01:02:35.950
So it is this notion of sex and security also, which is so rampant that you won't even allow friendships, you won't allow people to just be with each other and walk around.

01:02:36.989 --> 01:02:37.980
Of course things change.

01:02:39.380 --> 01:02:44.990
First things are moving and things are different slightly now, but at heart, I don't think it shifts so much.

01:02:45.439 --> 01:02:49.020
I don't think this notion ... So this is heterosexuality.

01:02:49.490 --> 01:03:06.190
When I am trained from childhood to be only with girls and not allowed to interact with boys because this is what is going to happen if I interact with boys, I think this is a lot of that happening in schools, which needs to be addressed.

01:03:06.480 --> 01:03:18.583
So we may get in and we may talk of children who are coming out as queer and trans, and we may have more and more of them, but we have to question what is the normative heterosexuality also that we are constructing?

01:03:18.583 --> 01:03:18.728
Maybe this cis man or a cis woman or cis boy or cis girl.

01:03:18.728 --> 01:03:31.560
I may not have any gender dysphoria as a child.

01:03:32.230 --> 01:03:35.701
But, what is this gendering that is happening?

01:03:35.979 --> 01:03:36.309
Suraj: Right.

01:03:36.499 --> 01:03:46.560
Chayanika: Is something that has to be done at the school level, very consciously so that all of us become different kinds of people.

01:03:46.560 --> 01:03:51.019
In that atmosphere, that is what I call a queer transformation.

01:03:51.019 --> 01:03:57.920
Just accepting that, "Okay, there can be some of us who are queer and some of us who are trans and some of us who are straight."

01:03:58.149 --> 01:04:12.209
Is one different goal, but more than that, how does accepting queer and trans people change my understanding of normative gender and sexuality is very crucial.

01:04:12.470 --> 01:04:28.470
If it does not shift any of that, if it does not shift that I can be a boy of any kind and still be a boy, or be a cis man and have varied gender expressions, or gender roles or gender whatever, that becomes normative.

01:04:29.340 --> 01:04:38.029
There is no transformation and there's just inclusion and there's just redoing the same with a different gender and sexuality person.

01:04:40.830 --> 01:04:51.560
And that possibility exists if we start thinking at the school level, if you start thinking in education, we have to start thinking from the school level to higher education.

01:04:53.450 --> 01:04:54.020
Suraj: Yeah.

01:04:54.680 --> 01:04:56.529
I really appreciate what you've just said.

01:04:56.529 --> 01:05:06.230
It nicely captures some of these, the tensions and the possibilities for a more gender-expansive and free education.

01:05:07.729 --> 01:05:12.140
Out of respect for your time I'll just move us through our last few questions here.

01:05:12.299 --> 01:05:17.029
So you've already mentioned, this is a big change, not really new question.

01:05:17.230 --> 01:05:33.600
You've already mentioned a few of the thinkers you read when you were first learning feminist studies of science, but I'm curious about other kinds of role models or theoretical theories, schools of thought that have influenced you.

01:05:34.080 --> 01:05:43.620
Part of why we're asking this question is to get a feel for how are scholars around the world thinking about these issues beyond the very standard people who are held up as the.

01:05:46.899 --> 01:05:47.879
Yeah, end of question.

01:05:47.949 --> 01:05:58.070
Chayanika: So I think it's a difficult question for me because I would say that a lot of my learning has come from people.

01:05:58.070 --> 01:06:00.339
From people that I have interacted with.

01:06:04.329 --> 01:06:40.680
Less from ... and even in queer circles it's from the work that organizations have done and work that we have done together that that influences me much more than actually ... For example the very trans people that we met over the last 20, 25 years, they have built our understanding of gender much more than ... I'm sure that reading also has helped but, primarily it has been people who have forced one to think differently.

01:06:41.339 --> 01:06:52.189
Because I jump from one discipline to the other, my reading is not that deep in any one area, that it is coincidental what you read.

01:06:53.779 --> 01:07:31.179
So it's not a planned reading in some sense, but I think a lot of trans thinkers, the people that I mentioned in the trans feminist anthologies, people in the present times, a lot of younger Dalit writers on Round Table India, on things like this which we don't look at in academia, who I may not completely agree with, but I think that they teach me a lot.

01:07:32.049 --> 01:07:42.270
They teach me a lot ... and I think anti-caste work, Ambedkarite and Periyarite thinking is critical to an exercise in education.

01:07:42.710 --> 01:07:46.554
That we cannot move fully Ambedkar, Periyar is something that we have to take with us when you're talking of inclusion in education.

01:07:46.554 --> 01:07:46.888
Al least in the Indian context.

01:07:46.888 --> 01:07:46.944
Suraj: Yeah.

01:07:47.000 --> 01:07:47.666
Chayanika: We might have learned a lot.

01:07:47.666 --> 01:08:16.618
Might have learned a lot from those writings, especially Ambedkar and from the younger scholars who are writing on these various platforms which are social platforms or virtual platforms that are available now, who are educating us on how does one understand education really?

01:08:16.618 --> 01:08:29.354
Because while we talk more about queer and trans people, I think that the axe is really falling on people from marginalized castes.

01:08:29.354 --> 01:08:42.350
This is the time when they're becoming, it's possibly the second generation that's entered higher education, or maybe the first generation that has managed to enter higher education.

01:08:42.350 --> 01:08:47.499
They're just about to find their feet here and just about to alter discourses.

01:08:48.729 --> 01:09:03.529
And there is this sudden attack on them, starting from the Rohith Vemula incident, the struggle before that in HCU and all the various campuses that has happened after.

01:09:04.419 --> 01:09:12.700
I think that caste has been one major learning and all anti-caste writing I think has been a major learning in anti-caste struggles.

01:09:13.800 --> 01:09:18.569
So the Ambedkar APPSCs in various campuses, what they put out.

01:09:19.290 --> 01:09:34.220
I am saying that all of this writing, which is coming through the activism of these groups in these campuses is very educative about what is the status of the education system, especially in higher education.

01:09:34.220 --> 01:09:47.560
So I want to mark that as one of the big educators, the second one is around disability, which I find still, I haven't read enough but I would like to read more.

01:09:47.670 --> 01:10:20.970
I'd like to understand more, especially in science education because, I don't think we're paying attention to any issues of disability in terms of ... how do you learn science if you don't use all your senses is something that one will have to talk much more about, because it is so much practical and it is theory, it is actually doing things, it is seeing things, it is smelling things, it is touching things.

01:10:21.340 --> 01:10:24.800
So how do you replace this?

01:10:24.800 --> 01:10:32.893
How do you understand knowledges that get generated when different senses play different roles is an area that one is watching.

01:10:33.059 --> 01:10:47.280
But yeah, [apart from this] the languages of disability activism, who are questioning the notion of ability, are also very critical to the enterprise of education, which is always on merit.

01:10:47.770 --> 01:10:55.330
Most caste and disability, give us a new way to understand success, to understand merit, to understand ability.

01:10:55.340 --> 01:11:05.860
I think that these are critical, these schools of thought, which are bringing in new ways of understanding merit, ability, success.

01:11:05.860 --> 01:11:10.969
Success of course comes from the queer language as well.

01:11:11.300 --> 01:11:14.860
All of these, what does failure mean and what does success mean?

01:11:15.790 --> 01:11:17.050
Comes from the queer language.

01:11:17.050 --> 01:11:19.200
The queer theory of failure.

01:11:19.440 --> 01:11:25.410
All of this is something that ... I think that these are very critical to education.

01:11:26.080 --> 01:11:27.276
Suraj: Yeah, I really appreciate-

01:11:27.276 --> 01:11:35.080
Chayanika: [crosstalk] and I think caste and race, which could be in addition in India as well.

01:11:35.090 --> 01:11:51.970
Race is another thing that we need to talk about, which we don't do as much, and it has, we've been looking at these incidents of institutional murders of students in campuses, medical colleges.

01:11:51.980 --> 01:12:01.502
The last one that happened in Bombay was of Payal Tadvi who was an adivasi doctor who was forced to kill herself.

01:12:01.502 --> 01:12:04.591
You have to think of what is it that we are creating here in terms of success and merit.

01:12:04.591 --> 01:12:04.740
Suraj: Right.

01:12:04.740 --> 01:12:24.537
Chayanika: I do think I want to mark these three areas from where people have come and especially all young scholars that are coming up now that are talking about it in different ways.

01:12:24.567 --> 01:12:33.757
Maybe they're not established, maybe they're not known, but they're writing in a lot of these spaces, which have influenced me a lot over the last few years.

01:12:34.737 --> 01:12:37.427
Suraj: That is a lovely and informative answer.

01:12:38.437 --> 01:12:41.747
Again I'll just work us through our last few questions here to close up time.

01:12:42.017 --> 01:12:54.157
So my next question was about feminist theories and queer theories and you and your email back said, this will probably come up and I think that we have had the opportunity to talk about both of those things-

01:12:54.157 --> 01:13:03.327
Chayanika: only one thing I said that actually I find ... my feminism from the '80s and my feminism today is a sea change.

01:13:05.767 --> 01:13:16.257
I will not articulate things how I did in the '80s, and I think that that's the understanding of an ism, that is where it has to keep changing.

01:13:16.257 --> 01:13:31.167
It has to keep evolving, it has to keep moving, and I want to give this one little example that we're trying to do this conversation with women in physics to talk about intersectionality to a group of women in physics.

01:13:31.487 --> 01:13:45.602
As I was talking to somebody, when we were trying to plan how to do it, for me it is a concept from physics actually, or science that, you only know this much of the world, you know very little of the world.

01:13:45.602 --> 01:13:50.467
As much as you can perceive is what you can understand.

01:13:51.267 --> 01:13:55.997
A good scientist is actually aware that this is temporary knowledge.

01:13:55.997 --> 01:14:03.077
This is knowledge that is coming from this limited understanding that I have of the world.

01:14:03.077 --> 01:14:05.677
There is a huge world out there which I do not understand.

01:14:06.307 --> 01:14:13.397
As that world becomes perceptible to me, my theories will change, my understanding of reality will change.

01:14:13.557 --> 01:14:17.497
This is something that I think that we don't extend to social science.

01:14:17.877 --> 01:14:34.237
We don't extend to society, that we are seeing world from a very, very limited blinkered way, and if we stay rigid within it, whether it is any progressive moment, whether anything, it stays rigid within that, then it has lost the game.

01:14:34.927 --> 01:14:55.657
But if you do not change, if you do not understand, if you do not acknowledge that there are many realities that you are not aware of, that you are actually invisiblizing, marginalizing, not recognizing, if you are not aware of that and you push for a way of thinking, then that's a problem.

01:14:56.387 --> 01:15:08.087
My own understanding of feminism has really enriched through these engagements and I think that that is what any ism has to do.

01:15:09.277 --> 01:15:15.247
Suraj: I love that connection to that science idea, that's a really powerful analogy.

01:15:17.087 --> 01:15:31.127
This last question you may choose to pass on, but we wanted to give everybody we were talking to an opportunity to talk about how COVID-19 has shaped their work or their thinking around some of their research issues.

01:15:31.457 --> 01:15:36.057
But it's not an essential question, so you can choose to pass if you'd rather not discuss.

01:15:36.387 --> 01:15:37.537
I leave that up to you.

01:15:37.547 --> 01:15:37.577
Chayanika: Okay.

01:15:39.837 --> 01:16:19.287
I think one point that I'd like to say personally on the COVID question, there’s lots that one can speak of in terms of education and the absence of education in people's lives because of COVID and the ways in which people's lives have been complicated because of this et cetera, but I want to take to another place that I think that in this country at least, and maybe it’s true in other countries, but in India, because the government has made our lives so difficult, in the ways in which it has made policies, that a lot of our energies have gone into survival.

01:16:19.287 --> 01:16:29.577
In the first lockdown, it was around giving people food, making sure that they were safe as they were walking kilometers and kilometers across the country.

01:16:30.547 --> 01:16:38.797
We just witnessed it and for the first time we all jumped into what is called relief work, because the government was not responding.

01:16:39.017 --> 01:16:40.307
Everybody kept doing that.

01:16:41.247 --> 01:16:49.447
The second wave where again we had a crisis where everybody was helping everybody get hospital admission, get oxygen, get this, get that.

01:16:51.917 --> 01:16:59.337
In a sense we've been forced to take the government's position, government's work and do it as civil society.

01:16:59.617 --> 01:17:25.262
In the process I think that one of the things that as science people, all of us could have done, as educators, all of us could have done, is actually talk about, this was the best time period to speak about science, what it can do, what it cannot do, how it works, how it does not work, how it gets influenced by so many things, how it makes you skeptical about it.

01:17:25.517 --> 01:17:26.982
What is it that you take from it?

01:17:27.097 --> 01:17:28.527
What is it that you don't take from it?

01:17:29.047 --> 01:17:38.357
And this is the right time to have a debate on modern medicine and science through it.

01:17:39.657 --> 01:17:40.527
We've not had the opportunity to do it.

01:17:40.527 --> 01:17:43.107
We've not really engaged with it as much as we ought to have done.

01:17:43.527 --> 01:17:54.387
So what we have done, many people have tried and many people, and there's good work also in translating medical facts for lay people, and that's important, and that needs to be done.

01:17:54.877 --> 01:18:09.957
But beyond that, as a person who looks at science studies, as a person who looks at nature of science, I think that the last one and a half years tell me about the enterprise of science, much more than what I could have ever put together.

01:18:09.957 --> 01:18:13.847
All of us are witnessing it, and all of us are living it.

01:18:14.337 --> 01:18:20.207
But we are not taking that debate forward, we are stuck in pro science and anti science positions.

01:18:20.467 --> 01:18:27.617
We are stuck in these locations, the debate that needs to happen, we are not able to do it.

01:18:28.677 --> 01:18:47.267
That's one large lacuna and the second large lacuna I feel that again, education, you had these huge campuses all over the place, huge infrastructure for schools and colleges and universities, none of which got utilized at a time when people were really struggling.

01:18:48.097 --> 01:18:53.717
When children are struggling in their homes to find connections, why couldn't our classrooms be opened?

01:18:54.107 --> 01:18:58.137
Keep children at a distance, let them come, let them study.

01:18:58.187 --> 01:19:04.217
We have not done any of that, and I think that's a waste of infrastructure, both these points.

01:19:06.947 --> 01:19:07.307
Suraj: Yeah.

01:19:08.837 --> 01:19:10.387
Both of those are really good points.

01:19:12.277 --> 01:19:14.937
All right, well, we're coming up on our time here.

01:19:14.937 --> 01:19:20.877
So I'll just close us out a little bit by saying, this was such a pleasure.

01:19:20.917 --> 01:19:22.697
I'm so glad we could make this work.

01:19:23.987 --> 01:19:29.577
The purpose of this project is to expand our geographical grounding in the learning sciences.

01:19:29.577 --> 01:19:44.747
But also really, we really wanted to talk to you and talk to activists and progressives and people who care or about these equity issues because to me, the learning sciences is not simply educational psychology.

01:19:44.757 --> 01:19:51.037
Rather it's like a much more holistic political, cultural and social way of thinking about schooling.

01:19:51.797 --> 01:20:04.477
I'm really excited to have had this interview and be able to make sure that these issues around queer, trans and feminist questions and equity are represented in our thinking, especially outside of the west.

01:20:04.877 --> 01:20:16.407
I think we could do a whole nother interview about the tensions and how queer activism is positioned in the west as a Western invention, 377 and all that colonialism and so on.

01:20:16.417 --> 01:20:21.337
But all that to say, I really appreciate you're making the time after all of this back and forth.

01:20:21.787 --> 01:20:24.887
Again, we do have a grant for this.

01:20:24.887 --> 01:20:31.327
So we would like to as a token of our acknowledgement, pay you about 100 USD for participating.

01:20:31.327 --> 01:20:50.537
So what happens now is, I will send you a little form that will ask you for your address or if you want to be paid in some other way so that we can send a check to you, and it will also ask for a little bit of a biography and any citations or works that you've written that we can put up on the website with you.

01:20:50.967 --> 01:21:03.917
Our intention is in the next few months to cut down the interview to about 15 minutes that will go up on the website and our hope is to be able to quickly check in with you and say like, "Here's what we're putting up.

01:21:03.917 --> 01:21:06.657
So just make sure that it's good with you."

01:21:06.987 --> 01:21:15.857
But also if there's anything as you're reflecting in the next few days, if you think, "Oh, I said that in the interview but I don't want it up on the website."

01:21:15.867 --> 01:21:18.057
Just let me know and of course we won't put it up.

01:21:20.197 --> 01:21:21.527
I think that's everything.

01:21:21.727 --> 01:21:33.997
I just want to invite you if there's anything else you'd like to say that you feel you didn't get too expressed or comments on learning sciences, education, queer justice, anything at all, I'd like to offer you the opportunity to do so.

01:21:35.177 --> 01:21:36.547
Chayanika: I don't think so.

01:21:36.737 --> 01:21:37.802
Right now I can't think of anything.

01:21:37.802 --> 01:21:39.644
But can I get a copy of this interview or the transcript if you're going to do a transcript of it?

01:21:39.644 --> 01:21:39.947
Suraj: Yeah, of course.

01:21:46.597 --> 01:22:02.927
I can send you the video copy on Monday, is when I'll be ... But we will have somebody from our team edit ... The Zoom will create an auto transcript and it's really bad, so we'll have somebody on our team edit that transcript over the next few months.

01:22:03.117 --> 01:22:09.087
I can send you the video as soon as whenever, and I can send you the transcript in a few months time.

01:22:09.537 --> 01:22:09.837
Chayanika: Sure.

01:22:11.227 --> 01:22:11.607
Suraj: Yeah.

01:22:11.917 --> 01:22:12.477
Happily.

01:22:12.857 --> 01:22:22.207
Thank you so much Chayanika it was just such a pleasure to connect with you and hear your story and I look forward to our continued interaction.

01:22:22.217 --> 01:22:29.017
Chayanika: Thanks a lot to you too, for actually putting up with I don't know, this has been a really bad six months.

01:22:29.477 --> 01:22:29.597
Suraj: Yeah.

01:22:29.737 --> 01:22:31.987
Chayanika: So I'm glad that we managed to do it today.

01:22:31.987 --> 01:22:38.647
The electricity was fluctuating here today and I was like, "Oh my God, I don't know if I can ... I cannot cancel this now."

01:22:41.067 --> 01:22:42.518
Suraj: Well, I will say just-

01:22:42.518 --> 01:22:43.365
Chayanika: [crosstalk] we managed it.

01:22:43.577 --> 01:22:52.797
Suraj: In case you don't know that actually quite a lot of people who we were asking, "Who do we need to talk to about queer justice in education in India, who would be such a good person to talk to?"

01:22:53.287 --> 01:22:58.737
Multiple times, Google searches, people we asked all this it kept coming back to your name.

01:22:58.737 --> 01:23:00.102
So you're quite appreciated.

01:23:00.447 --> 01:23:03.547
Chayanika: [crosstalk] being generous was okay.

01:23:05.037 --> 01:23:11.787
I had fun talking and I feel this is a sign of old age that you like to talk about your life and your work.

01:23:12.017 --> 01:23:14.127
Suraj: Well, I like to hear about it, that was the whole point.

01:23:14.127 --> 01:23:15.297
So this was wonderful.

01:23:15.337 --> 01:23:16.867
Have a good evening, and I hope we get to talk soon-

01:23:16.867 --> 01:23:17.567
Chayanika: Bye-bye Dr.

01:23:17.777 --> 01:23:18.767
Suraj, bye.