Creative ways of engaging Critical theories

Critical theories are largely seen as intellectual labyrinths, as challenging to navigate as the intricacies of rocket science. A core paper invariantly offered in courses on Literary Studies, most of the students and even teachers have a hard time grappling with the discussions under its purview. The very reason for the inclusion of Critical theories -  the strengthening of Humanities perspectives - fails miserably when approached as an intellectual burden that cannot be wished away.

Most of my teaching assignments since the past 7 years have included texts from Critical theories for postgraduate students. These seven years of teaching theories have been a learning experience to identify the reasons for the skewed perceptions on theories held by many students and teachers. I have also been informed by the regular discussions I continue to have with my guide and mentor, Prof. G. S. Jayasree  who introduced Literary theories at the Institute of English in 1995 and moulded the critical perspectives of many generations of students till 2014. 

As of now, these are some of my observations:

1. Most of the classroom discussions on Critical theories are situated within the binary of Creative vs Critical thinking. 

     We need to reimagine Critical theories as a creative process that uncovers the deeper nuances of texts and issues — layers that might remain hidden to those unfamiliar with these ways of thinking. Seen through this lens, theories would be more fun.

2. Discussions of Critical theories are largely reduced to the prescribed essays in the syllabus.

    The essays prescribed for study are only pointers towards larger understanding. They are products of specific socio-cultural milieus. Beyond the essay, historicising the theoretical formation is indispensable. 

3. Critical theories are alienated from the realities of everyday life.    

    Critical theories are about the everyday life. They are different frames for storying individual as well as collective experiences. Decoding contemporary situations or texts using the theory under discussion would ensure an active engagement of the students with the the concepts.

4. The practice of reading research articles is not widespread.

Students have to be initiated into the habit of reading research articles to understand the use of theories in praxis and to hone their critical perceptions. 

Critical theories are discourses that sharpen one's critical thinking skills and enable stronger reflections on pasts, presents and futures. In this age of AI and increasing authoritarianism, these reflections are highly imperative to ensure that the society is not reduced to a group of servile automatons. 

Lifestyle diseases in Kerala: School & Workplace Canteens / Cafeterias

Recent health statistics reveal a troubling decline in the overall well-being of Kerala's population.It is indeed an unfortunate paradox that one of the most developed states in India is suffering from a pandemic of lifestyle diseases. The increasing mechanisation of everyday life has definitely reduced physical activities that would otherwise have been the norm. A booming service sector and burgeoning consumer culture have further aggravated the health crisis. 

One of the most high-risk habits catching up in the state is the consumption of junk food items. Global fast-food chains together with the umpteen number of eateries selling oil-fried / high calorie veg and non-veg items are some of the much sought after gastronomic hotspots across the state. The easy access to online food delivery apps like Swiggy and Zomato have further worsened the health indices. 

Diet is a habit; hence designing 'Catch them young' campaigns in schools that conduct regular interactive sessions with students on healthy eating habits should be made mandatory. Kerala education department, in its rules on "Establishment & Maintenance of Schools", has prohibited the sale of liquor in close proximity to schools. This is an appreciable move that could be reimagined to include campaigns towards healthy eating habits. A similar format could be conceptualised to prevent the sale of junk food in shops near schools. While the right to start any business legally permitted in the country has to be protected, the future health of the society should also be seen as a priority. Active interventions of the state to curb sale of packet junk food in shops near schools is highly recommended. There has to be an auditing of the eatables on sale in shops close to schools. School canteens should be transformed into healthy eating hubs. Sale of bottled aerated drinks, packet snacks and fast food has to be legally curbed near educational institutions. Disrupting the routes of easy access to these food items and nurturing healthy eating habits during the formative years of one's life would go a long way in making a paradigm shift in the health profile of the state.

Workplaces also play a significant role in 'normalising' indulgence in unhealthy diet. The canteens in workplaces offer the option of 'without' tea/coffee. However, what are the options of snacks and beverages available in these outlets? The snacks for sale in canteens of public and private sector undertakings usually include vada, banana fritters (pazham pori) and sukhiyan. These are oil-fried and hence can worsen lifestyle diseases like diabetes, blood pressure and high cholesterol. The shortage or absence of healthy snacks is a major downside in these spaces. 

Taking constructive steps to introduce healthier food items in the workplaces would go a long way in improving the health of the society. Moreover, the practice of distributing healthy snacks during official meetings should also be stipulated. This becomes a greater imperative for the public sector undertakings as they are funded through the public exchequer and hence cannot afford to directly or indirectly promote practices that lead to unhealthy human capital. 

 

                               

Digital Afterlives

The idea of life/death as defined in the analog world is getting complicated in this digital age. As netizens, our everyday life is immersed in diverse forms of digital acts that by and large leave a digital footprint until and unless the traces of our digital lives are erased forever through deliberate human intervention or collapse of technology. In this era of hyper-digitalization, we’re not just living our biological lives; we're also crafting algorithmic versions of ourselves, day by day, in the digital realm. "When we encounter the dead through their left-behind data - what researchers call 'digital remains' - we are not merely facing a symbolic mask but a lifetime of data, an informational corpse." We must sharpen our awareness of how we manage our digital selves to guard against the risks of data manipulation, digital theft, and breaches of privacy in the online world. 

Together with being critically cautious about what we post, comment, like or share, we need to negotiate with a new set of concepts and new forms of understanding to deal with the digital imbroglio. At the outset, this new form of digital sensitisation should begin with the planning of our digital estate. This must be a priority in our lives today, as many of us now map our analog existence onto the digital world. The digital conglomerates are always in the process of calibrating our digital trails to monetise on our behaviour. Privacy, digital ethics and digital identities are at stake as we continue to immerse ourselves injudiciously into the virtual world. The paper titled 'Digital Immortality' published by Gordon and Jim Gary in 2007 speculate on the dual ways of immortality the 21st century is extending to us. 

We have to develop a new culture of planning our digital inheritance to exclude as much as possible a status of 'digital intestate.' Despite the absence of 'digital will' in our legal discourses, we need to chart a plan of action regarding the posthumous usage of our digital remains including passwords, visual and literary content and even digital signature. Death in the contemporary world entails our journey from our bones to bytes. A new form of vocabulary that facilitates responsible management of digital selves is the need of the hour. 

Our digital data ought be regarded as the 'technological heirloom' we bequeath to our near and dear ones. They are stories of our networked lives and can create havoc to the memories we leave behind if handled unethically. It can also be a threat to the right to privacy of the human beings we leave behind. Digital afterlife comprise the ways in which we manage the intersections of life and death with digital embodiment. We are also accountable for the necro-digital-waste that we leave behind in the forms of defunct websites and digital gadgets. 

The notions of 'digital burial' as the cremation / erasure of the digital residues left behind by an individual, 'digital inheritance' to focus on the digital memories and artefacts we handover to our kith and kin, 'right to digital privacy' posthumously and 'right to forgetfulness' are the new age concerns that require intense debates and deliberations.  

Fascinating developments are emerging at the crossroads of death and digital data. A new corporate trend, the digital afterlife industry, is capitalizing on the management of our digital legacies after death. Carla Sofka has coined the term thanatechnology to describe this phenomenon, referring to "any kind of technology that can be used to deal with death, dying, grief, loss, and illness." This industry is monetizing the management of techno-affective archives left behind by the deceased, transforming how we navigate the intersection of mortality and technology.

It's up to us to craft a 'digital afterlife plan,' just as we do with legal and financial arrangements, to ensure that our loved ones can navigate life smoothly when we're no longer here.

(De)normalizing dowry through statutory warning in visual media

Statutory Warning: Giving or Taking or Abetting the giving or taking of dowry is a punishable offence. 

Enacting laws and framing policies are never enough to challenge perceptions that are deeply entrenched in the social psyche. These formal interventions have to be equally complemented by critical engagements with the socio-cultural discourses that could reinforce and normalise the discriminatory and exclusionary practices. The dowry system is one such social evil that continues to thrive unabated in spite of the Dowry Prohibition Act (1961) and the initiatives from the part of different governments in ensuring the successful implementation of the act in letter and spirit. The issue becomes a serious threat to society when we realise that a state like Kerala, with high human development index (HDI), continue to report instances of suicide / murder of women belonging to all sections of the society owing to the failure of their families in meeting the expectations of dowry of the lover / groom / husband and his family.  

While laws are yet to be texts of everyday discussion in our society, popular culture in the form of artistic expressions exert powerful influence on the social consciousness. The uncritical acceptance of ideas and ideologies internalised through popular culture help us situate ourselves seamlessly into the 'normalised behavioural patterns'. In this digital age defined by visualities, creative expressions in visual forms leads to the construction of a symbolic world shared by a community. Hence it is highly imperative to attempt a critical examination of the role played by visual media in propagating an antisocial practice like dowry in Kerala together with crafting innovative ways of supporting artistic freedom and commercial interests while at the same time ensuring that the practice is not being validated. 

Visual media that includes print and online images, videos, movies, advertisements and so on are in abundance in the contemporary world. In most of these visualscapes, there are images of brides as part of storytelling in movies or along with the showcasing of ornaments and wedding dresses in advertisements. By and large, these visual texts construct imagery of a bride flaunting expensive pieces of  gold / diamond jewellery. 

It is an open secret that, in Kerala, gold ornaments worn by a bride at the time of wedding happen to be the most visible form of dowry. This explains the anxieties of parents with unmarried daughters when the rate of gold skyrockets. Irrespective of the creative or commercial purposes to which the images of brides are put into use, it is for sure that  these images have contributed to the conditioning of the social imaginaries of bride. With the proliferation of digital media that enhance the pace and reach of visual stories, people belonging to all age groups are more or less subjected to this understanding. 

Promoting aesthetics and commerce should never be at the cost of social ethics and values. Institutions like the Central Board of Film Certification have already established the requirement for a 'statutory warning' to inform viewers about the legal implications of specific types of visual content while still providing room for creative expression. We have the most common examples in the case of scenes of violence against women and  of alcohol consumption in movies. The former type of scenes in the present day Malayalam movies carries the following statutory warning: "Violence against women is a punishable offence" and the latter carries the warning: "Alcohol consumption is injurious to health." The repeated display of these types of warnings during the screening of similar scenes act as an effective way of social sensitisation. 

A closer examination of these statutory warnings reveals that the definition of 'violence against women' is narrowly confined to verbal and physical abuse. However, patriarchal narratives extend far beyond these overt forms of discrimination and violence. A similar line of thought is the claim that there is peace in society when there is no war or riot. The discursive formation of Peace Studies has contested this skewed understanding of peace/violence by broadening the understanding of violence to include even situations of poverty or displacement. 

Reconceptualising the idea of violence against women is one of the possible ways in which gender sensitivity could be ensured through popular culture. This entails: (1) considering the practice of dowry as a form of violence and injustice against women (2) showing disclaimers on visual scenes that directly or indirectly normalise dowry system. Moments of marriage in real and reel life is mostly visualised as a spectacle of opulence with the image of the bride clad in expensive ornaments. Since jewellery given during marriage is often a socially accepted form of dowry, these types of bridal images subtly yet powerfully reinforce the concept of dowry through gold ornaments. This should also be considered alongside movie scenes that depict dowry negotiations. 

Dowry is a form of violence against women. It is a practice harmful to the confidence and self-esteem of women. Any narrative that makes direct or indirect references to dowry should be accompanied by statutory warnings, similar to those previously mentioned. Regular warning through popular culture that includes movies, teleserials and advertisements could be a creative way of making the sensitisation against dowry an everyday process. Rather than relying solely on anti-dowry campaigns and oath-taking ceremonies, leveraging popular culture would ensure a broader and more impactful spread of the message.

Let's make this a part of our visual culture:

Statutory Warning: Giving or Taking or Abetting the giving or taking of dowry is a punishable offence. 

Debating the relevance of Humanities in the Digital Age

“It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.” - Steve Jobs

The necessity of the Humanities in the digital age has become a topic of intense debate among policymakers and academicians worldwide. Regrettably, many of these discussions have found more reasons to sideline Humanities and favour STEM subjects. This trend has led to a decline in the disciplines' popularity in higher education institutions, leading to significant cut in the financial support for Humanities programmes. 

The social perception that mostly celebrates rather than laments the decline of Humanities is a reflection of a distorted idea of knowledge. Seen through the neoliberal lens, it is the market economy that analyse the (ir)relevance of any episteme in the contemporary world. Neoliberalism adopts a "technical rationalist approach" towards education leading to its commodification and the formation of knowledge capitalism. The learner is redefined as a 'knowledge worker' who uses one's expertise in contributing towards the economy. 

As knowledge gets reimagined as a new form of capital that can be monetised and invested, subjects that can facilitate the creation of economic value are promoted. The educational institutions are expected to boost this 'knowledge economy' by creating linkages with industry and by building collaborations. This leads to the privileging of courses that groom the students to be 'market-ready'. The student becomes a consumer of knowledge whose proficiency is evaluated through standardised tests (mostly in the form of objective questions) that are driven by the requirements of the market. 

Any society that considers economic growth and employability as the ultimate end of education is digging its own grave. As meritocracy becomes the norm and socio-cultural capital enjoyed by an individual is invisibilised, the distance between the elites and non-elites increases. When educational spaces conceive knowledge merely as a 'product' that can create wealth, the fundamental values of a democratic society - for instance, sense of justice and equity - gradually takes a backseat in favour of technocracy. 

While societies across the globe are hard bent on constructing techno-citizens, human beings are in the throes of a dangerous mutation into automatons. The gradual erasure of Humanities paves the way for mechanistic approaches to life and relationships, reducing all and sundry into algorithms. What most of the educationists and policy makers have overlooked in this entire paradigm is the seminal role played by Humanities in grooming a generation sensitive and sensible enough to critique and challenge the norms and to strive towards making the world a better place for the entire eco-system. 

Rather than training youth to be minions of the neoliberal economy, the onus is upon us to reconceive knowledge to transcend the current reductive approach. Knowledge, beyond its materiality, should offer an enriching experience to the learners that enhance their social and political perceptions. Instead of being preoccupied with quantity, they should be equally concerned about the qualitative changes that knowledge brings into their lives, relationships and opinions. Too much of science and technology at the cost of Humanities would further worsen the conflicts and violences in society. It is upon the educational institutions and curriculum designers to nurture Humanities to sharpen the interpretative and analytical skills of the learners. Besides, there should also be enough funding and career opportunities that can bring the best scholars into this field for research, teaching and policy making.

Strengthening Humanities is one of the best options to  curb divisiveness and authoritarianism in society. A society with greater number of people who are wary of exclusionary norms and repressive regimes together with being self-reflexive enough to regularly contest their own ideological positions is our only hope in these turbulent times. 

Is an external member mandatory in Internal Complaints Committees constituted under POSH Act, 2013?

 The question that I have posed here is one that has been bothering me for quite some time. Though I belong to a humanities discipline, I have always been fascinated by laws and their impacts. The deep interest in bringing laws into the everyday life of students in my department inspired me to offer elective papers on women specific laws in India. My classroom discussions with students on the possibilities and limitations of different laws for making qualitative changes in the lives of women have caused me to think critically about the text of a few laws. It was during one of those interactions that my focus turned to the constitution of the Internal Complaints Committee under the Sexual Harassment at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013. The Internal Complaints Committees have been made mandatory at workplaces to ensure a just and impartial handling of the complaints of harassments raised by women employees against any one of their male co-workers. In spite of the strength that the law supposedly gives to women to raise their voice against gendered forms of harassments, the functioning of these committees can really be affected for a variety of reasons. 

First and foremost, in spite of the law specifying in Chapter IV that workshops have to be organised at regular intervals to sensitise the employees about the provisions of the Act, there doesn’t seem to be any legal auditing of the conduct of such programmes at a fixed frequency, thereby affecting the legal literacy of the employees. Only a legally literate public can effectively use a law for empowerment as well as prevent all possible forms of misuse of the law. The question of training about the Act and the functioning of the ICC gains added significance when we  think of the members of the ICC. It is not necessary that the Chairpersons or members of the ICC have a background in law. With legal literacy yet to catch up in our ecosystem, there would be situations where the members of ICC are ignorant of their duties and mode of operation. This will seriously hamper the delivery of justice in such cases. 

Second, the Internal Complaints Committees are recommendatory in its legal status. The ICC can recommend suitable action against the guilty to the employer but the committee’s power ends there. The onus is on the employer to take action. This is yet another moment when the law could get reduced to a process without any concrete result. The employers can choose to accept or reject the ICC report based on a number of factors including their prejudices. According to the law, any person, which would include the complainant and respondent, aggrieved by the recommendations or the implementation of the recommendations could approach the court or the tribunal as the case may be. When many women who have been victims of harassment find it too difficult to file a complaint against the accused owing to social stigma, approaching any court of law may be beyond them. 

The last but the most serious obstacle in ensuring the effectiveness of the Act could be the description of the constitution of the ICC. In Chapter II, Section 2 (c) of the Act, it is stated that it is mandatory to have “one member from amongst non-governmental organisations or associations committed to the cause of women or a person familiar with the issues relating to sexual harassment.” The question that arises here is whether it is possible to read this clause as a permission to include any of the women employees of the same office as the member under Section 2 (c), provided the said employee is experienced in handling issues related to sexual harassment? I would say that this would be a serious flaw in the constitution of the committee, since the presence of the external member is highly critical to ensure some form of objectivity in the inquiry held on a complaint in which the employees of the same organisation are involved. Further in the Act, under Chapter II, Section (4), it is stated that “The Member appointed from amongst the non-governmental organisations or associations shall be paid such fees or allowances for holding the proceedings of the Internal Committee, by the employer, as may be prescribed.” If we read Section 2 (c) and Section (4) together, it is quite clear that one member has to be from outside the workplace and is eligible for a fee or allowance. Even an external member can have quite a tough time in any office if a section of the employees have turned hostile against the ICC. 

But if Section (4) is not considered and if an attempt is made to confine the constitution of the ICC to Section 2 (a) to (c), there seems to be enough room for confusion and there could be instances of all the members of ICC being from within the same office. 

The mere presence of a law wouldn’t ‘naturally’ ensure justice. A paradigm shift in the everyday life of women can happen only when the laws are effectively implemented. ICC happens to be one such body which can make remarkable changes to the lives of women at the workplace. For that to happen, there should be compulsory annual auditing of the constitution and working of ICC in all workplaces together with mandatory training sessions for the ICC members and the conduct of regular workshops for all employees.

It’s the everyday that matters…

 Life happens in the everyday. The way we spend our everyday defines our tastes, desires and even our anxieties. Our everyday life is punctuated with a variety of routine performances that reinforce these emotions. Everyday life is also the abode of the most ordinary to the most shocking experiences, with infinite shades in between. Everyday is most intimate to us. The ‘residues and leftovers’ of everyday life which are often disregarded offer endless possibilities for social analysis. The myriad activities that we perform are our interactions with the cultural and political logic of the times. The everydayness of this space and its materialities present before us the critical vocabulary to philosophise on the world in which we live in. 

The world around us creates different forms of disruptions to our everydayness. When we are informed of diverse kinds of global and local issues, it is their proximity to our everyday life that mostly define our affective responses to them. Whether it be global warming or a recent policy decision of any government, our responses are conditioned by the immediacy of the event to our life. A turn towards sustainable living entails a critical engagement with these mundane and quotidian reflexes which define our lived experiences. It is the transformation of everyday that enhances the texture of human lives. Hence a critical reflexivity to read the seemingly insignificant and fragmentary quotidian experiences becomes imperative, since “the familiar is not necessarily the known” (Hegel). Redeeming the hidden potential of everyday life to unravel the politics and poetics of our existence will help us initiate critical conversations on fundamental aspects of human lives.