ORIGINS

The journal, AGITATE! emerged from the close sharing of dreams, ideas, and labors among a number of students, colleagues, artists, and activists between 2011 and 2017. Most notable were the energies gained from Transborder Conversations on Race, Caste, Indigeneity, a series of five workshops that Richa Nagar and Himadeep Muppidi (Vassar College) conceptualized and co-facilitated between Spring 2013 and Spring 2015 with the support of UMN’s Institute for Global Studies and the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change. These workshops, alongside the inspirations of SKMS and Parakh, catalyzed two years of teamwork between Richa Nagar and students who enrolled in several of her courses–‘Caste, Race, and Indigeneity’ (Spring 2015 & Spring 2016), ‘Stories, Bodies, Movements’ (Spring 2017 & Fall 2017), and ‘Ways of Knowing’ (Fall 2017). These forums approached the praxis of knowledge making as participating in inadequate translations and fragile representations across borders: At times, these efforts to cross borders enable novel imaginations and new forms of inquiry; at others, the movements of knowledges and knowledge-makers inflict silences and (fore)closures. The ongoing journeys of how to constitute relationships that allow us to struggle ethically with these challenges led to the co-founding of the journal, AGITATE! Unsettling Knowledges. 

THE JOURNAL >