Publication of the article "The taming of the public sphere"
Udaya Kumar, IEA 2020-21 fellow and translated by Isabelle Bruno, IEA 2020-21 fellow, in "La revue d'anthropologie des connaissances."
The arrests of academics and intellectuals in India in 2020 was part of an intensifying campaign to tame and demobilize critical spaces of public exchange. This was preceded by a slow disciplining of print and electronic media and an evacuation of sites of protest. At a time when the critical force of truth has been weakened in the political public sphere through a populist undermining of facts, the university’s institutional investment in knowledge, research and critical thinking, accentuated by the resurgence of resistant energies on campuses, has become a source of anxiety for the power elite.
