Swati Arora in conversation with Malavika Priyadarshini Rao

An online event, with an in-person screening option. A link will be provided after tickets are booked.

As state surveillance and ideological control of Higher Education institutions intensifies, they are becoming contested spaces where identity, knowledge, and dissent are increasingly policed. From curriculum design to personal expression, universities risk becoming sites of regulation rather than liberation—especially as budget cuts erode support for critical pedagogies. Amidst this repression, marginalised bodies—those oppressed by caste (Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi), race, religion, gender, and those living under occupation, such as in Palestine—resist. Their everyday performances draw from folk traditions, spiritual memory, and embodied dissent—not as spectacles, but as urgent choreographies of survival and solidarity. Protest becomes not only political but profoundly theatrical: a choreography of resistance, a dramaturgy of refusal.

This conversation will draw on Rao’s forthcoming book Performance and Performativity of Dalit Students Politics in India to explore how the aesthetics of protest—collaborative authorship, horizontal learning, embodied knowledge—can inspire radical, care-centred pedagogies. It asks: What becomes of the university when its spaces are no longer safe? How can we reimagine education not as compliance, but as collective emancipation?

Malavika Priyadarshini Rao is Assistant Professor in the Department of Performing Arts, Christ University, Bangalore, India and author of Performance and Performativity of Dalit Students Politics in India: The Justice for Rohith Movement (2025).

Swati Arora is Senior Lecturer in Performance and Global South Studies, Queen Mary University of London.