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Paper short abstract:

Anti-caste scholar activism is a relatively new academic arena adding pivotal insights to epistemic justice and academic research. I have been working with anti-caste scholars in solidarity since long and now hold a PhD place to push awareness and to create more space for anti-caste scholars.

Paper long abstract:

This research aims to solve a pressing omission in academic knowledge on lived experience of caste and its intersecting inequalities, through what is known by the self-named term “Anti-Caste Scholar-Activism”: counter-hegemonic knowledge production from the perspectives of Dalit Bahujan and Adivasi on the Indian subcontinent and the diaspora. The articulation of anti-caste scholar-activism as academic social scientific knowledge is a recent development by anti-caste scholars in South Asia and in countries with large diaspora communities in the UK and US. The mapping of it in terms of theoretical and societal relevance for academia within academia in the global North and the Netherlands in particular, has hardly been done yet. Further articulation and mapping of contents and relevance of anti-caste scholar-activism discourses in Dutch academia urgently needs attention for the following reasons:

- It adds to multiple academic postmodern and postcolonial discourses within social sciences and development studies, by adding counter-hegemonic knowledge production from the lived experience of subaltern Dalit Bahujan communities and scholars.

- It adds to decolonizing academia and research partnerships (in terms of institutes, individual scholars and knowledge production). This will be reflected in the research setup and methods used. Similarly, it contributes to ending the Brahmin hegemony (both in terms of representation of scholars and in the generation of knowledge) of academia. As such, it also adds to the emancipation of the anti-caste movement and members.

- It investigates alternative, reflexive forms of critical learning, “other ways of knowing” in development cooperation and social scientific research