This site is a selected record of my community-centered critiques and pedagogies in the context of art, architecture, and the digital public humanities. The published works are structured around a set of interconnected engagements with questions of participatory politics; social production of space; anti-colonial digital and archival praxis; and queer- and trans-feminist politics. Together, these selections act with and on forms of knowledge and expertise across voice and difference.
— Kush Patel, Ph.D.
The following images introduce a set of publishing and research-creation venues of my scholarly practice, comprising book chapters, journal articles, project engagements, and pedagogy exhibitions.
(L to R) Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities (Alan Liu, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, and James Smithies, eds.) volume from the University of Minnesota Press (2026), which comprises my co-authored chapter (with Ashley Caranto Morford and Arun Jacob) entitled “Resisting BYOI (Bring Your Own Infrastructure) in Digital Humanities Learning Spaces;” “The Just Futures Co-lab: Care Praxis for Queer, Trans, and Anti-Caste Research-Creation” Pop-Up and Talk Poster at The University of Sydney with an image of another on Queer Passages at Vikalp’s Art Exhibition in Vadodara (2026); “The Just Archives Collaboratory: Care, ethics, and histories of queer and trans archives” Online Office Hour Poster for the International Archives Week (2026).
(L to R) Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) 76:2 (Fall 2022) issue on “Pedagogies for a Broken World” (Jay Cephas, Igor Marjanović & Ana Miljački, eds.) carrying the article I wrote in collaboration with Johnson Jament and Merin Mathew entitled, “Framing Survival: Questions of Safe Space in Design Pedagogies;” a screenshot of the digital humanities (DH) working group on anti-colonial storytelling and community building through Twine (2022); and Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Science through Critical Race Theory (Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight, eds.) volume from MIT Press (2021), which comprises my co-authored chapter (with Anne Cong-Huyen) entitled, “Precarious Labor and Radical Care in Libraries.”
As I build, reflect on, and engage with discourses on critical DH pedagogy and praxis, I recognize that many of the digital infrastructures we use are built on Indigenous lands throughout the world, remain inaccessible to many Indigenous communities, and that our responsibilities to Indigenous lands and life extend into the digital realm. Land and the digital are always inextricably intertwined. Within the Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed Collective, we lead our writing and teaching projects with this principle and orientation.
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Art and the Public
Earlier this year, I was invited to be in conversation with The Queer Muslim Project and Tvarita Arts Collective at the Museum of Art and Photography (MAP) for their third annual Inclusion Conference entitled, “Beyond Headcount Diversity.” Based on my initial discussions with each of the participating groups, I had developed a set of questions…
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From Archive to Activism
As the transcript of my lightning talk at the Museum of Art and Photography (MAP), Bengaluru, this post begins with a note of gratitude to Mounika Nallani, Sushma Rao, and Breanne Coelho of MAP for making the event possible—and an equal set of shout-outs to my panel co-convenor and session moderator Siddharth Narrain (NLSIU); fellow…
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Connections, Continuities
The year that was, and the connections and continuities that endure. This year end note is a gallery of academic and community engagements, each marking a month and movement through the year from left-to-right, top-to-bottom, January-December 2024: the MA Seminar on the Future of Human and Digital; PhD Seminar on Feminist and Queer Worldmaking; end…
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Felt Notes
In August 2023, I piloted Felt Notes on TinyLetter with the goal to make public the work of the Just Futures Co-lab and the co-labouring worlds of research and teaching in art, design, and the digital humanities that it scaffolds and furthers at Srishti Manipal Institute and beyond. Collectively, the letter writing translates the ever…
About the site
The site’s title, “who speaks and acts,” comes from Gilles Deleuze. In the widely published 1972 conversation between Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, the two theorists discuss the relationship between theory and practice vis-à-vis the distribution of power and changing role of intellectuals in society [1].
Deleuze begins by moving past the traditional view of practice as either an application of, or a basis for, theory; a view that corresponds to the figure of the intellectual as one “representing consciousness” of the ignored and the unheard; he cites Foucault’s analysis of institutional confinement to promote instead a different characterization of theory-practice relationship: “a system of relays within a larger sphere, within a multiplicity of parts that are both theoretical and practical” (206).
This site documents and examines the form and meaning of theoretical critiques produced with those who struggle for power, of sharing voice in the context of art, architecture, and digital public humanities work, and of asking questions about representation in these deliberately connected fields of study and practice. As a savarna queer feminist, it is also my way of studying how and with which tools might we teach, learn, and talk about scholarship, community engagement, and digital pedagogy in such unequal and often violent contexts of race, caste, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and geographical difference lest we reproduce in Deleuze’s words “the indignity [and violence] of speaking for others” (emphasis added) (209).
[1] Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze” [1972], in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald Bouchard (New York: Cornell University Press, 1996): 205-217.