“Still Valley” is part of an ongoing series of essays and short stories written following my diagnosis with Fahr’s syndrome, a rare neurodegenerative disease, with each piece titled after episodes from The Twilight Zone and Red Shoe Diaries. Drawing on disability studies, queer temporality, and affect theory, this essay examines academic precarity as both an institutional and embodied condition. Through reflections on chronic illness, deferred futures, and administrative legibility, the piece explores how contemporary academic life reorganizes one’s relationship to time, stability, and hope. Ultimately, “Still Valley” considers the emotional and physiological consequences of living within institutions that rhetorically celebrate complexity while materially sustaining contingency and exhaustion.

This article explores the savane of Guadeloupean writer and political figure Ernest Moutoussamy as a poetic and decolonial reimagining of the jardin créole. Traditionally understood as a post-plantation site of subsistence and resistance, the jardin créole is here extended into a multidimensional space that cultivates not only plants but also memory, spirituality, and poetic vision. In Ma savane natale, Moutoussamy reclaims his childhood savane—located on land once part of a sugar habitation—as both a personal sanctuary and a transgenerational archive. Its transformation into what he calls the Académie universelle de ma savane creates a literary and ecological space of homage, where thinkers such as Gandhi, Tagore, Césaire, and Condé are each symbolically paired with a tree, bearing witness to an ethics of relation across histories and cultures. While the article attends to Indian contributions to the jardin créole—often marginalised in ethnobotanical and historical studies—it considers more broadly Moutoussamy’s savane as an expanded, creolised vision of the garden in which Asian and Amerindian elements are uniquely intertwined. Drawing on literary analysis and interviews with the author, the article argues that Moutoussamy’s garden models a jardin créole that is both philosophical and ecological, rooted in Caribbean history and open to planetary futures. His practice fuses cultivation and composition, transforming the garden into a site of memory work, creolised ecology, and civic care. As such, it invites us to reconceive the jardin créole as a living practice of regeneration, relation, and repair.

Indian indenture in the Caribbean transformed the local topography as labourers brought dried fruits, seeds, and cuttings during the transoceanic voyage. Over one hundred years after this mass migration, these plants have become central to religious ceremonies and cultural festivities, drum-making and art, landscaping, agriculture, home gardening, cooking, and decoration. They now appear familiar and native to the wider Caribbean population. Some of the flora provide flowers, fruits, and leaves that have become synonymous with the region and reflect transported labourers’ deeply embedded footprint and gendered histories. Drawing on these influences, this article describes a collectively created archival project, Indian Inheritances Across and Beyond Caribbean Geographies, produced in memory of the Caribbean historian Professor Emeritus Brinsley Samaroo, whose essay, cited further in this article, and passing in 2023 inspired this project. As shown in this article, the project contributes to contemporary Caribbean visual archives through curation of photographs and text which memorialise the botanical legacy of Indian indenture and the meanings it has for those living in and descended from the region. Building upon these community-sourced submissions, the article intervenes in writing on the Creole garden through its analysis of contemporary gardenscapes in terms of post-indenture phytoarchives and floral mnemonics. In this framing, plants are living archives co-creating multispecies and multiethnic experiences of indenture and its afterlife, and they act as devices which memorialise and metaphorise indenture inheritances, evoking a multisensory connection to the past in the present.

This essay examines the “dirty margins” where HIV/AIDS, cancer, and academic life intersect. Drawing on Paula Treichler’s concept of AIDS as an “epidemic of signification,” it traces forty years of living with HIV, including a near-fatal episode of Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS) in 1994 and over a decade of anal dysplasia—conditions rendered culturally legible through AIDS-era moral panic as much as through oncology. I write as autopathography, treating autobiography not as confession but as method, following Arthur W. Frank’s understanding of pathography as knowledge produced from embodied experience. Although KS did not recur, its long shadow shaped the temporal and affective terrain of survival. Moving from the whispered moralization of illness to the clinic’s production of the clinical self—the version of the body produced in medical records, and from academic domestication and erotic counterpractices to quantification, pharmacological society, and the social mirror, the essay traces how a misbehaving body is repeatedly threatened, written down, fragmented, managed, and measured—yet continues to theorize back. In these processes, minoritized bodies become hypervisible as research objects yet remain marginal as knowledge producers. Against triumphant scripts of biomedical progress, the essay assembles a counterarchive of resentment, erotic improvisation, and delayed care. The “dirty margins” of cancer, it argues, reside not only in diseased cells but also in the epistemic and institutional systems that metabolize marginalized bodies as spectacle, evidence, and compliance while refusing their authority as theory.

Two recent Malayalam films, 19(1)(a) (2022) and Private (2025), ask a question that has become urgent in post-2014 India: not “can a writer speak?” but “who will keep the text alive once the writer has been silenced?” Both films turn on the same narrative pivot: a politically charged manuscript outlives the assassination of its author and survives through the hands of an ordinary, reluctant custodian. This piece argues that in staging this scenario, the films offer not just a political thriller but a theory of literary survival under conditions of democratised censorship.

Drawing on feminist disability studies, critical caste scholarship, and the disability justice framework, this article examines how caste, class, and gender intersect to shape care futures for ageing adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) in contemporary India. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted predominantly in Bangalore, India between 2024 and 2025, including life history interviews with parents of adults with IDD, this article analyses the cultural logics and material conditions organizing decision-making around long-term residential care. It argues that under neoliberal conditions in India, where the commodification of care has accompanied the consistent reduction of state social provision, newly emerging private residential facilities reproduce rather than challenge existing caste and class hierarchies. Through a close analysis of two life history interviews with mothers of adults with IDD, this article demonstrates how dietary norms, religious practice, and idioms of “shared culture” function as caste codes structuring belonging within these facilities. It further shows that the gender of the adult with IDD—particularly the heightened vulnerability of disabled daughters to sexual violence—shapes the form that class privilege takes in securing care.

What visitors see in a museum display case is not just an object. It is the result of a long chain of invisible filters (what survived, what was collected, what a curator decided to show) that shape our picture of the past. This paper uses the image of a mosaic, missing many of its tiles, to explore how museums construct knowledge rather than simply presenting it, and asks what museums can do once they recognise this. Taking ancient Egypt as a case study (a field whose modern shape still carries the marks of nineteenth-century colonial collecting), this paper looks closely at one recent attempt to put these ideas into practice: the hall Searching for Life at the Museo Egizio in Turin, dedicated to the display of human remains, implemented after years of scientific study, public consultation, and internal ethical debate. The hall does not aim to resolve all the existing tensions: it offers instead a working example of how a museum can hold those tensions in view, rather than disguising them as settled. This paper argues that the way forward is to make these filters visible, turning the missing tiles of the mosaic into part of the story a museum tells.

Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), established to preserve and promote interdisciplinary research on traditional knowledge, have been increasingly discussed in relation to diversity, nationalism, and the integration of traditional knowledge with modern science. A recent article in this journal argues that IKS exhibits a Vedic Hindu-centric bias, marginalizing various knowledge traditions and fostering pseudoscience. This article discusses IKS from historical, demographic, institutional, and research perspectives, focusing on its origins, civilizational diversity, early studies of traditional knowledge, and funded projects. We observed that traditional knowledge research in India predated IKS, with support from multiple agencies. However, IKS, under a single institutional structure, provides a more structured ecosystem aimed at greater visibility, coordinated funding, innovation, and scientific validation. Such scholarship demonstrates the inherent plurality of the Indian civilization, which established a continuum of orthodox and heterodox philosophical schools, Buddhist and Jain systems, Islamic scholarship, indigenous communities, and regional practices. In our analysis of 102 IKS-funded projects, nearly 50 percent of the projects were aimed at scientific validation across health-related sciences (19.61%), agriculture and sustainability (14.71%), and materials science, metallurgy, and heritage engineering (13.73%). These priorities are aligned with contemporary national and global research agendas, including One Health, preventive healthcare, climate resilience, and digital technologies.

The decline of public trust in mainstream journalism has become a defining concern for contemporary democratic politics. Although this trend is frequently attributed to digital misinformation, algorithmic amplification, and the accelerating pace of online communication, these developments alone cannot explain the depth of the present crisis. The problem is also institutional. Legacy news organisations are increasingly perceived as operating within networks of political and corporate influence, making traditional claims of editorial independence less persuasive than before. Under these conditions, assertions of objectivity are often interpreted not merely as professional norms but as institutional practices whose authority has itself become contested. The resulting gap between journalistic self-understanding and public expectations has intensified wider debates over credibility, legitimacy, and the democratic role of the press. This paper reconsiders this crisis through the philosophical resources of classical Cynicism, bringing Diogenes of Sinope into dialogue with Michel Foucault’s account of parrhesia, or fearless truth-telling. Distinguishing Socratic, political, and Cynic forms of parrhesia, it argues that democratic truth-telling derives authority not from institutional position alone but from ethical commitment, personal vulnerability, and the willingness to accept public risk. The discussion also revisits the political economy of legacy media, reassesses prevailing assumptions about whistle-blower motivations, and employs the “Snowden paradox” to clarify the continuing relationship between individual truth-tellers and institutional mediation. It further examines the problem of “bad parrhesia,” where algorithmically rewarded outrage appropriates the appearance of fearless speech while weakening democratic deliberation.

This article intervenes in Indian disability justice through a case study of Assamese poet Alakesh Kalita, who lived with schizophrenia. Shifting focus from public activism to private, relational solidarity, it examines spaces shaped by care, intimacy, and affective labour. Drawing on José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of ephemera as evidence, the study analyses Kalita’s writings as a crip archive of endurance. These ephemera resist neoliberal demands for productivity and coherence, recording modes of living with psychiatric disability without seeking narrative resolution. Foregrounding uneven mental healthcare infrastructures, the article highlights the centrality of informal care networks in India, where support often relies on family and community rather than institutional systems. Kalita’s life and work were sustained through such kinships and literary solidarities. Crucially, Kalita’s poetry exceeds diagnostic registers. Rooted in Assamese cultural memory, his poems utilize metaphor and spiritual imagery to render psychic pain without reducing it to pathology. Ultimately, the article proposes a disability justice grounded in care and attentiveness rather than recovery or moral resolution. By treating his poetic traces as vital evidence, the study argues for a relational model of justice that honours Kalita within the enduring social scaffold of the domestic and literary realm.

Museums and heritage sites in the United States have a complicated relationship with Indigenous Americans and African Americans. Only recently have such places begun to connect with and honor descendants of non-White people who lived and labored on the land in question. This interaction has paved the way for a fuller, more truthful telling of the American story. Unique insights can come from descendant visitors who have not taken part in curation or interpretation. Museums and historic sites can learn a great deal from descendant visitors who are willing to share how their museum experience merges with their personal knowledge and feelings about their ancestry. The author argues that descendant visitors’ responses to heritage sites should be recorded not only to provide important feedback to the individual museum, but also to formulate generalizable ideas--theoretical models--that all heritage sites can use to analyze their own situations.

This article theorizes “artifactification,” the process through which museums transform mundane objects into noteworthy artifacts that materialize historical narratives. Drawing on John Searle’s theory of Status Functions, it argues that historical artifacts emerge from collective agreement structured by institutional rules, making museums semiotic mechanisms linking objects to history. Case studies of the Parthenon Marbles, the French Crown Jewels, and missing Chinese Canadian military artifacts illustrate how museums confer or deny the “artifact” status and the consequences of disrupted artifactification.

This essay explores the ethical stakes of hospitality through an unexpected pairing: the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida and the riverbank encounters in the classic children’s novel The Wind in the Willows. Levinas’s account of the face of the Other and Derrida’s reflections on unconditional hospitality illuminate the risks, demands, and vulnerabilities inherent in welcoming the stranger. Read alongside these thinkers, Ratty and Mole’s unfolding friendship becomes a parable of ethical openness that resists calculation, merit, and control. Their encounters reveal how hospitality is continually tested by fear and disruption, yet remains an imperative that unsettles the reasons for exclusion wrought by the social and political forces that shape our world. In an age marked by displacement and contested borders, this literary-philosophical dialogue invites us to imagine forms of welcome grounded not in worthiness, but in responsibility.

This article examines how mobile apps and digital platforms embed values about speed, efficiency, and productivity into their design, shaping how teenage users understand what makes time “well spent.” It argues that speed is only part of the story: the same platforms also rely on automation and data-driven algorithms that decide what fills users’ attention, turning that attention into a product. Drawing on design theory and classical rhetoric, the article introduces the concept of deliberative restraint as an alternative to the “move fast” ideology of Silicon Valley and offers concrete practices for putting it to use. Rather than advocating for digital abstinence, the article equips readers with critical questions to recognize when design choices prioritize velocity over reflection, helping them make more intentional decisions about their relationship with technology.

For India to meet the sustainable development goals for disability inclusion, realizing disability justice through universal accessibility for persons with disabilities (PwDs) is essential. Universal access guarantees equitable access for PwDs and ensures their just inclusion in mainstream society. India’s National Sample Survey reveals that a significant number of Indian citizens harbour a disability, with a higher prevalence being reported among older adults, among males, and among people living in rural areas, showing that accessibility is as much a matter of justice as of provision. Poverty and disability are intricately connected, and there is evidence of these leading to vulnerability and exclusion from society and the labour force. The lack of reliable public data on accessibility to PwDs in India impairs inclusion, with some of the challenges being in defining disability and recognition of stigma and exclusions. Poor implementation of well-meaning policies and inappropriate budgetary spending further exacerbate this. Achieving universal accessibility demands more than legal affirmation; it requires strong political will, sustained financing, and administrative accountability. In the backdrop of the recent Supreme Court ruling on universal accessibility, this exploration discusses the importance of grassroots activism and public policy development that is inclusive and efficient with monitoring and evaluation systems in the policy design phase, such that efficiency and learning are imbibed throughout the development, implementation, and evaluation phases. For this to sustain, achieving accessibility must shift from a legal–technical exercise to a justice-oriented target grounded in the nation-building agenda, with sustained financing and continued grassroots activism.

Museums have long claimed to be spaces for everyone, yet the built environment, interpretive practices, and institutional logics of most museums systematically exclude visitors with disabilities. This article argues that disability is not merely an accessibility problem solved by ramps and audio guides, but also a generative epistemological standpoint capable of transforming museums’ purpose. Bringing crip theory into sustained conversation with critical museology and the scholarship at their intersection, this article asks what changes in a museum’s practice when disability is treated as a source of knowledge rather than a population to accommodate. Drawing on three institutionally distinct cases—the Smithsonian Institution’s adoption of universal design, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza’s certified accessibility model in Madrid, and the Museum of Modern Art’s community-based Access Programs in New York—the article shows that centering disabled visitors does not simply widen inclusion: it exposes the normative assumptions embedded in museum architecture, temporality, and spectatorship, and reshapes curatorial and institutional practice. This article closes by specifying what crip-informed museum practice requires, situating the argument within the public humanities’ claim that the life of the mind is a shared, not a restricted, inheritance.

This article explores the Middle Ages as a creative “topic,” examining how personal encounters with medieval places, objects, texts, and histories can generate creative as well as scholarly engagement. Drawing childhood experiences, public history, and translation together with creative non-fiction, it argues that medieval scholarship is enriched by acknowledging the speculative and creative dimensions of reconstructing a fragmentary past. The article considers creative non-fiction as a mode of historically grounded enquiry that combines research with narrative, description, uncertainty, and perspective. It proposes creativity not as an alternative to scholarship, but as a productive extension of it.

Sport is often treated as entertainment, competition, or spectacle, but it is also a public arena in which people argue about value. Focusing on recent debates about Arsenal’s set-piece football and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s foul drawing, this article asks why some ways of winning feel admirable while others feel merely effective. It follows the movement from play to commentary, from tactical explanation to public judgement, and from sporting shorthand to broader questions of fairness, aesthetics, legitimacy, and excellence. Sport matters for the public humanities because it gives ordinary public form to disagreements about what counts as winning well.

This paper examines Ecuador’s Rights of Nature following the Los Cedros Constitutional Court ruling in 2021. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, it explores how legal recognition of ecosystems as rights-bearing subjects intersects with Andean cosmology, conservation governance, extractive pressures, and local livelihoods in cloud forest communities, and how storytelling translates these changes into lived practice. It traces the historical and political context of the case while showing how Ecuador’s landmark environmental and legal achievements are increasingly threatened by authoritarian political reforms. The paper argues that preserving these gains is both a national and global imperative, requiring local and international solidarity to defend the rights of Nature, democratic institutions, and the communities that protect them. It calls for ecological justice grounded in interdependence among human and more-than-human life, emphasizing that the future of Rights of Nature depends not only on constitutional recognition but also on sustained collective action. By situating Los Cedros within broader struggles over democracy, conservation, and extractivism, the paper demonstrates how legal victories remain fragile without continued public engagement, institutional accountability, and transnational support, offering lessons for environmental justice movements confronting similar threats around the world today.