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From Margin to Method: Rethinking Counterpublics in Critical Theory

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What if the spaces we think of as “public” are built on carefully staged exclusions? What if the very idea of a  counterpublic  is haunted by the norms it tries to resist? In this blog, we revisit the influential debates around the  public sphere  and its critical reimaginings, asking how concepts like the  counterpublic —shaped by thinkers like Nancy Fraser and Rita Felski—are entangled with the very structures they aim to disrupt. Moving beyond binaries of public/private and inclusion/exclusion, this post explores how power operates not just through presence, but through the politics of absence, silence, and structural framing. If the public sphere is where voices are heard, then the counterpublic sphere is where silences speak. In critical theory, few concepts have generated as much debate - and as much disillusionment - as Jürgen Habermas’s idea of the public sphere. Introduced in his seminal work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), H...
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From Caste to ‘Taste’ - The Unfinished Story of Kerala’s Clothing Protests

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Kerala loves its Renaissance. Navodhanam rolls off the tongue in cultural festivals, political speeches, and school textbooks like a badge of collective pride. It is the word that animates our sense of being modern, secular and progressive. A convenient shorthand for a heroic leap from caste darkness into the light of equality. But what if this Renaissance is not the neat, linear saga we’ve been told? What if its symbols - upper cloths, nose-rings and fine cotton saris - tell a more tangled story, one woven not just with reform but with resistance, repression, and erasure? This blog invites you to read Kerala Renaissance not as a procession of noble reformers but as a contested terrain of bodies, fabrics, and forbidden desires. Through the lens of Foucault’s political technology of the body and Bourdieu’s aesthetics of taste, we peel back the glossy narrative to expose its seams - those stitched together by ezhava women and forgotten rebels like Arattupuzha Velayudha Panickar, with t...
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Beyond the Brochure: Whose Lives Get Counted in Kerala’s Healthcare Miracle?

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Kerala’s healthcare story is one of paradox and pageantry. From robotic surgeries in public hospitals to Ayurvedic wellness rituals packaged for global elites, the state projects an image of seamless progress - a biosocial utopia where tradition and technology dance in harmony. But every image excludes. Every statistic forgets. This blog peels back the glossy layers of “God’s Own Country” to ask: who gets to be healed, and who gets left out of the healing narrative? Drawing on the critical frameworks of biopolitics, necropolitics, caste critique, and environmental justice, the blog interrogates the structures that make some lives visible and others expendable. It traces the quiet violence of omission, the slow poison of environmental neglect, and the caste-coded pathways through which care circulates - or does not. A scalpel in hand does not always mean justice in practice. And when care becomes a mere spectacle, it risks becoming just another mode of exclusion. The Spectacle of Health...
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The Demography of Dispossession: Who Really Bears Kerala’s Climate Burden?

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Floods do not just swallow land - they trace forgotten histories. Landslides do not just destroy homes - they unearth centuries of injustice. In Kerala, every monsoon carries more than rain; it carries memories - of caste, of displacement, of a land divided long before disaster struck. Between 2010 and 2025, Kerala has faced a relentless cascade of climate catastrophes: from the devastating 2018 floods to the landslides in Wayanad and Kavalappara and cyclones like Tauktae. But these are not simply ‘natural’ disasters. They follow a map - drawn not by nature, but by history. This blog traces that scary map. It asks - Why do disasters always seem to find the same people, in the same places? Why is it always the hills, the wetlands and the coasts that collapse and why are these terrains mostly inhabited by adivasis, dalits and fisherfolk? This is not coincidence. It is political geography, colonial legacy and caste apartheid embedded deep in Kerala’s social psyche. This is not just a clim...
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