Devika Misra

I have a quiet sense of joy in sharing that I have signed a contract with @SpringerNature for publishing my thesis & my first book, should be out next year. Filled withude for my teachers, friends & mentors. Going to be a tiny bit proud of myself ❤️

lol academic life right now is so absurd. there are no jobs, tenured liberals don't know what year it is, and you're supposed to provide comments about arguments hallucinated by a robot that flies military drones and moonlights as a ghostwriter

Day 3 of Bolivia's general strike demanding the resignation of neoliberal President Rodrigo Paz. All major highways blocked by protesters. An indigenous long march is heading to the capital, as it passes through each town and village more people join.

I'm sharing my latest article "Ambedkar and Annihilation: A Theory of Transformative Praxis", published in @SouthAsia_R.

@jadumanilion @SouthAsia_R Congratulations Jadu !!

Trump wants to win on the cheap but that's difficult in Iran, I argue via @ThePrintIndia theprint.in/opinion/iran-u…

Okay my heart broke a little bit before I realised that this was in response to a hoax account.

@NedBertz How are students the only redeeming feature of this profession but teaching is the most maligned, controlled & farcical as your put it, part of the job in the modern university.

@NedBertz It feels like a day doesn't pass when I haven't been part of a conversation where committed teachers are reconsidering what the job has come to mean today. Students be the only redeeming feature of this profession

Teaching in the age of AI feels farcical. One student scrolls TikTok all lecture but my TA/spy says their defense is that a phone app records me and makes notes. I'm horrified but curious how it transcribed my jokes about tradwives and Gen Z in a class on the Communist Manifesto!

“Writing is also bestowing a blessing on a life that was not blessed.” (Lispector, Too Much of Life)

Whenever I hear “AI is inevitable” I am reminded of J. Weizenbaum’s comment: “The myth of technological & political & social inevitability is a powerful tranquilizer of the conscience. Its service is to remove responsibility from the shoulders of everyone who truly believes it.”

"Good writing doesn't make you look smart; it makes readers feel seen. You can't win people over with intellect. You do it by describing something they've felt their whole life but never had the words for. "

Am absolutely delighted to confirm that I have started my tenure as a Visiting Professor at the @UspIri Institute of International Relations at USP - Universidade de São Paulo! Beyond chuffed, beyond excited, chegamos, finally!

Art will save you. Being unreasonably passionate about something niche will save you. Letting past sources of joy show you the way back to yourself will save you. Earnestness over composure will save you. The natural world will save you. Caring for something bigger than yourself will save you. Daring to be seen will save you. Kindness, not as a whim but a principle, will save you. Appreciation as a practice will save you. Daring to try something new will save you. Grounding will save you. Love will save you. One good night's sleep will save you.

A few points about Carney's outstanding speech at Davos. What he said about the middle path is what the Indians have been practising for decades. When India did it, driven by its national interests, we were attacked as fence sitters who were shy of taking positions. Now Carney realises that the third way is not actually fence sitting, it is standing on one's ground. Two, what Carney said about the rules-based order is something we have been saying in the East for quite some time. The rules of the rules-based order were framed by the West and they followed the order as long as they thought it favoured them. The rules were not fair. Partnership and cooperation were used as euphemisms for subordination. Carney's Canada or Frederiksen's Denmark happily supported America's illegal wars in the South until now. Just look ag Carney's own response on Jan 3 when Venezuela was bombed and its president abducted. It took a direct threat from Washington to take over the whole of Canada for the Canadian Prime Minister to realise that the rules-based order was a lie. Third, what Prime Minister Carney did at Davos was the proclamation of the death of the post-war order. It died a long time ago. But the West never accepted it because they thought they could keep the alliance together by, like what Macron said, doing "great things" on countries like Iran or Syria. But the cracks are so wide now that even the Canadians, dependent on the US up to their eyeballs, can't ignore them any more.

‘A request: please don’t correct me. Punctuation is the breath of the sentence, and that’s how my sentence breathes. And if you find me odd, respect that too. Even I have been forced to respect myself.’ — Clarice Lispector

“Travel was once a means of being elsewhere, or of being nowhere. Today it is the only way we have of feeling that we are somewhere. At home, surrounded by screens, I am no longer anywhere, but rather everywhere in the world at once... To arrive in a new city is suddenly to find oneself here and nowhere else. The body rediscovers how to look. Delivered from images, it rediscovers the imagination.” — Jean Baudrillard

"The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means." - Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

Finished proof reading --will update you when it is out. Toward a Genealogy of Indian Sociology: Knowledge as Nationalism, Nationalism as Knowledge #sociology #anthropology #nationalism #Foucault #India #power #knowledge #Hinduism #Islam #Muslims

No analysis of #Iran is complete if you reduce what's unfolding in the country into a simplistic binary of an oppressive regime vs a freedom-loving people. That's a liberal trap. I have serious disagreements with the character of the Iranian state (which I have with a lot of regimes), but that doesn't stop me from trying to understand the broader picture. Iran has lived under crippling sanctions for decades--and those who imposed the sanctions wanted to make everyday life miserable in the hope that the public would rise against the regime which would open a window for the liberal interventionists. Why is Iran under sanctions? Mainly because of its nuclear programme. Iran exists in a very hostile region. Just look at the map -- Iran is the only Persian Gulf country that doesn't host an American military base. It sits in a region where Israel is the only nuclear power. The mistake Iran did -- as I have always argued -- was that it did not make the bomb. They thought they could leverage a nuclear threshold status for both security and economic relief. That was a blunder in a world of jungle. Tehran signed the nuclear deal in 2015. Trump demolished it in 2018 and reimposed sanctions. Europe just follows the line given from Washington. Despite the hostility in the region, Iran enjoyed relative deterrence due its so-called axis of resistance. The US first killed Soleimani, one of the architects of the axis. And then Israel, post-Oct 7, with American help, chipped away at the axis. Because for both Israel and the US, Iran is the only revisionist power in West Asia. You take Syria out, Iran would be weakened. And you take Iran out, the whole region could be redrawn. Look at what happened. Hamas was pushed into the ruins of Gaza. Hezbollah has been degraded. Houthis are fighting their own battles. And the Syrian regime, Iran's only state ally in the region, collapsed. Russia is stuck in Ukraine. China remains too self-occupied. Iran suddenly lay vulnerable to external threats. And then the Israelis bombed Iran in June. Trump happily joined in. Europe followed suit in the subsequent months by reimposing snapback sanctions--because Iran violated a deal that Trump killed in 2018! In the middle of all this, Iran had elected a reformist as its president in an election in which more than 30 million people voted. But the government’s hands were tied when it came to economic issues because of the sanctions. And there is genuine public resentment which was what triggered the shopkeepers' protests on January 1. But on Jan 2, after meeting Netanyahu in Florida, Trump said he was “locked and loaded”. Mossad started amplifying anti-regime messages in Farsi via social media. It even posted on X that “we are with you in the field” (I wrote here on X on the day the US attacked Venezuela and abducted President Maduro that Iran was next). The protests started turning violent. Reza Pahlavi, son of the deposed monarch who is living in the US, suddenly emerged as the “Crown Prince”. Someone who hasn’t set foot in Iran for over four decades, emerged in western TV and press as the rightful voice of Iran’s opposition and he called for urgent American bombing of Iran! Garbage propaganda channels such as Iran International unleashed a firestorm of misinformation. Reports about the situation on the ground came from “rights groups” based in Oslo and Washington. The liberal mills, which were conspicuously silent during Israel’s genocide of Palestinians for two years, started firing on all cylinders. Iran, they said, wants freedom through American and Israeli bombings. And now Trump is asking the “protesters” to take over institutions. #IranProtests

First syllabus done for fall 2026: History of East Africa