Horizons of the Unsaid: Caste, Gender, and Academic Life in the Shadows of Postcolonial Mobility

Abstract (English)

This paper explores how moral and affective horizons are forged and reshaped through the lived experience of academic mobility under postcolonial conditions. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with Indian social scientists working in the UK and Germany, I focus on the narrative of Chandri, a dark-skinned Christian woman from South India who migrated to Britain in the 1990s. Her life story, rendered through a long and emotionally charged testimony, offers a window into how individuals mobilize personal histories of marginalization - rooted in caste, gender, and regional inequalities - to imagine and inhabit fragile, often precarious futures.
Rather than treating Chandri’s migration as a linear ascent or her career as evidence of meritocratic inclusion, I approach her experience as a practice of horizoning—the labor of orienting oneself amid what is often unspeakable: exclusion, racism, and epistemic silencing within the academy. Her elliptical use of the word "challenges" to name these experiences signals a discursive strategy shaped by institutional risks and moral danger. The unsaid, however, is not mere absence; it constitutes a form of knowing and acting that is attentive to fragility and guided by ethical commitments grounded in her faith and pedagogical mission.
Drawing on Veena Das’s work on witnessing and poisonous knowledge, I argue that Chandri’s narrative articulates a horizon shaped by both vulnerability and responsibility. In the ruins of lost certainties - of family, protection, and academic ideals - she forges a space of action that is quiet yet determined, opaque yet visionary. Her life story becomes a site where affect, memory, and institutional critique converge, producing an alternative imagination of academic labor and ethical community.
In dialog with the panel’s call, this paper considers how moral and affective horizons persist and are mobilized in contexts where structural violence remains unnamed but deeply felt. It asks: what forms of imagination emerge when speech itself is hazardous? How do individuals navigate systems that both include and violate them? And how can ethnography attend to the everyday crafting of horizons in the wake of the unimaginable and unspokable?