New Member Feature: Aarzoo Singh
Dr. Aarzoo Singh is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Â鶹´«Ã½. As an interdisciplinary scholar, her research focuses on the theoretical and experiential connections between storytelling, objects, locations, and displacement for the South Asian Diaspora. Her research was rewarded the Chancellor Henry N. R. Jackman Junior Fellowship from 2014-2020 and she was a nominee for the Christopher Knapper Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2013. Her current research and teaching interests focus on reparative justice narratives, alternative epistemologies, affective and personal archives, and postcolonial subjectivity. She was interviewed on her research for the British Museum of Colonisation’s platform Paper Trails and her published work can be found in DisClosure: A Journal of Social Theory and in the forthcoming anthology Monsters and Monstrosity in Media (Vernon Press).
Learn more about Aarzoo in the short interview below:
CRiCS: What brought you to academia and, more specifically, Cultural Studies?
AS: I came to academia and the field of Cultural Studies after working as a creative the years prior to starting grad school. I did my undergrad in design, working in the fashion industry for years, one could say more in the role of a producer of culture, before pivoting into academia more formally. My investments in material culture and its varied cultural significance in postcolonial context remain central in my current research—informed by my own postcolonial subjectivity. Overtime, my academic interests evolved to material cultures beyond the adorned, to that of object studies and the ways in which they can create both space and be knowledge-making for unheard intergenerational narratives of displacement, particularly for South Asian diasporas.
CRiCS: How do you relate to the land we’re gathered on at the University of Â鶹´«Ã½?
AS: I come to Turtle Island and Treaty One Territory, on which we gather at the University of Â鶹´«Ã½, as an immigrant settler. My own migratory history is one that is marked by displacement through colonial violence and I think through the ways in which my presence and refuge on Turtle Island comes through the displacement of those Indigenous to this land as this is their homeland. I think about their stories, joy, creation, and relationships that are built on and through this land and that as a settler I work to honour those traditions, memories, and calls for liberation from colonial intervention.
CRiCS: What are your areas of research interest?
AS: I consider myself an interdisciplinary scholar that engages in feminist cultural studies, postcolonial studies, material culture, and affect studies. My research focuses on the theoretical and experiential connections between storytelling, objects, locations, and displacement for the South Asian Diaspora.
CRiCS: What research projects are you currently working on and what is emerging next?
AS: My current research and teaching interests focus on reparative justice narratives, alternative epistemologies, affective and personal archives, and postcolonial subjectivity as informed by and produced from postcolonial subjects. My upcoming projects focuses on the creation of a digital hub that centers and creates space for of BIPOC, Queer, and marginalized creators, students, scholars, and professionals to interrupt the regulating gaze of traditional colonial archives upon postcolonial subjects, in sharing their own transnational affective objects and their stories—to share visual representations of material relics that they define as meaning-making to their experiences of the world.
CRiCS: Why do you think it’s important to have intellectual community and the opportunities for research collaboration that CRiCS might offer?
AS: For me, a community in which I can learn from my colleagues, connect across disciplines, and engage in collaborative works is important to the ways in which I think about and do research. Collaborative work, wherein multi voices and perspectives work together, is also embedded within my feminist practices of research. I find that because my work is interdisciplinary, being able to engage with folks and their emergent research in various fields is incredibly enriching and I look forward to connecting with more of my colleagues in CRiCS.
CRiCS: Has any particular book/film/work of art/cultural artifact influenced your approach to your academic work and your perspective more generally?
AS: There are many postcolonial authors and their works of “fiction” that have been instrumental to not just my academic work, but to the ways in which I move through the world—Toni Morrison, Amitav Ghosh, Thomas King, Chinua Achebe, to name a few. As a student, coming across these writers really revealed to me how their work unmasked the uneven foundations on which the knowledge of the colonial ‘past’ exists. That is, even though some of the writings of these authors are dubbed as “fiction”, it is often much closer to the truth of lived experiences of those left out of the archive—from postcolonial subjects themselves—and what documented history as to tell us. Through this type of “fiction” writing, I found the power in alternative epistemological sites—that another way of thinking about coercive histories can be attempted by rewriting and reimagining those narratives through “fiction”. Encountering these works as a student, I found that their narratives, despite being truer to the actual lived experiences of diasporic subjects, were disregarded as being ‘invalid’ sources of history. And so engagement with these alternative histories allowed me to challenge the pervasive cultural dialogues that undermine the continued equity-seeking efforts of populations effected by the trauma of colonization in my future works.
CRiCS: Cultural studies scholars are also often committed to social change in community. How do you, as Stuart Hall might say, ensure that theory and work in academic spaces is not "letting you off the hook"?AS: As a postcolonial feminist scholar, my academic frameworks, pedagogy, and activism are fully centered around social change that are rooted in anti-colonial practices. Social change is rooted in action, and I often think of teaching as my praxis. Part of doing this kind of work is centering lived experiences, and particularly that of historically marginalized communities in and outside of the classroom and academic spaces. That is, the material realities of suffering are often beyond words, words in which academic works are often dependant on. My praxis considers what it means to be human before it theorizes that very notion, while keeping reflexive practices in place as well (my positionality and accountability matters to these spaces too!). And my investments in alternative epistemological sites is also key to how I foster academic spaces that work towards more capacious futures for those lived experiences.
CRiCS: What do you do in your free time?
AS: In my free time I am often travelling to visit my family and friends living in Ontario. I also like baking, crafting, tending to my plants, catching live music show or some theatre (particularly musical theatre!).