ACADEMIA

THE POWER OF KNOWLEDGE

This module teaches that knowledge production is not neutral, and shows how funding, peer review, editorial politics, rankings, language, archives, and visa regimes can gate keep Dalit/Bahujan, Adivasi, Rohingya, and other minority voices. It situates caste justice within comparative traditions that changed universities (Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, Critical Race Theory), then maps the South Asian higher-education landscape—pipelines, hiring/tenure/publishing dynamics, curriculum politics, and the growing impact of surveillance and defamation risks on academic speech. It also treats applied scholarship as legitimate: framing research questions from community problems, choosing methods that respect lived experience and consent/data justice, writing for journals and public audiences, and using repositories/open access/community-owned data commons so scholarship is preserved, citable, and protected—with intergenerational leadership woven through archives, mentorship ethics, and institutional change strategies.