Division J Vice Presidential Session: Embodying, Negotiating, and Rejecting Par/Desi Narratives: Cultivating Desi-South Asian Scholars’ Decolonizing Onto-Epistemologies in Higher Education

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Unearthing the socio-political-immigrant Desi-South Asian educational trajectories is critical to creating space in the academy that often bifurcates identity discourses into black and white at the individual, institutional, and systemic levels. Straddling this binary, Desi axio-onto-epistemologies in the global North have often been rendered invisible, hypervisible, ambiguous, exoticized, and Othered. In this symposium, four Desi-South Asian scholars leverage their social identities, and use blended autoethnographic and empirical approaches to discuss their efforts to cultivate and legitimize Desi ontoepistemologies. We share how we embody, negotiate, and reject Par/Desi narratives representing a continuous movement between indigeneity and colonialism. In doing so, we illuminate our relationships to scholarship, practice, and kinship and identify how these frameworks further de/colonizing and anti-racist discourses.

Sub Unit

• Division J - Postsecondary Education / Division J - Section 6: Society, Culture, and Change

Chair

• Vijay Kanagala, The University of Vermont

Papers

• Exposing the Fault Lines of Oppression: Par/Desi Narratives of South Asian Experiences in Higher Education - Kakali Bhattacharya, Kansas State University

• Im/possible South Asian Belongings in U.S. Academia: Influence of Race, Neoliberalism, and Empire - Binaya Subedi, The Ohio State University

• Border-Crossing as the "Outsider-Within": Indigenizing Intersectionality Through Mishrit in Queer Desi–South Asian Research - Dirk J. Rodricks, University of Toronto

• "Being and Doing Brown": Theorizing a Par/Desi Onto-Epistemological Framework - Vijay Kanagala, The University of Vermont

Discussant

• Nina Asher, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities