When a region goes offline
From India·An enduring case
India records among the world's highest counts of regional internet shutdowns, imposed on public-order grounds. During each one, journalism, schooling, commerce and rumour all lose the same channel at once. A single administrative order redraws what a population can know and verify in real time.
The concepts this raises
Each of these gives a class a different way into the same case.
- PowerKnowledge and Society
- The capacity to shape what counts as knowledge, who is heard, and what gets funded, published or taught. Power is not only censorship; setting an agenda, controlling a platform or being granted authority all change the knowledge that a community ends up with.
Where it sits in the knowledge framework
- Ethics
- The ethical questions internal to the knowledge itself: what may be investigated and how, what obligations the knowledge places on those who hold it, and the ethical constraints the discipline imposes on its own practitioners.
Areas of knowledge
The same ideas, somewhere else
Cases that raise a concept this one raises, but in a different area of knowledge or a different part of the world. That contrast is the point: it is what shows a student the concept travels.
- Africa
When a government doubted the virus
South Africa's government under Mbeki gave platform to AIDS-dissident scientists and delayed antiretroviral rollout, and later epidemiological studies…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- Responsibility
- East Asia
Recognised as indigenous, at last
Japan legally recognised the Ainu as indigenous only in 2019, after generations of assimilation policy that had suppressed language and practice while…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- Latin America
Telescopes on other people's mountains
The Atacama's dry altitude makes it ideal for observatories, and the same plateaus carry deep significance for Indigenous communities who were rarely central…
Current · The natural sciences
- Power
- Values
- Latin America
The vine, the lab, and the elders
As clinical interest in ayahuasca-derived compounds accelerates, Amazonian communities that developed and ritually govern the brew's use are often absent from…
Current · The natural sciences
- Power
- Values
- Southeast Asia
Batik and the question of whose heritage
UNESCO's recognition of Indonesian batik sharpened a recurring dispute with Malaysia, where related techniques also have deep roots, over who may claim the…
Enduring · The arts
- Power
- Culture
- Africa
The bronzes and the museums
Thousands of Benin bronzes, seized in the 1897 British expedition, sit in Western museums that long defended holding them as universal stewardship, while…
Current · The arts
- Power
- Values