I have been thinking about this election – and the previous one in India in 2014, where we elected a right-wing Hindu nationalist govt – a lot, and one of my observations has been about the immense role perception plays in electoral politics. Perception isn’t just naively opposed to “facts” or “truths”, as you demonstrate, but rather a sort of group-think: wild metaphors, TV jingles, catchphrases. In a way, this does reflect a new form of digital literacy in an age of TL;DR, but it’s interesting to think what effects this has on people’s political agency.

To follow your lead, more than anything I think there’s a need to rethink public outreach as some sort of horizontal pedagogy; spaces where we can step out of the hierarchy of academia and speak from different sorts of experiences, and from insights, rather an any sort of vaunted knowledge (Which is precisely where all the pundits went wrong).

This certainly isn’t easy, given that many of us have to commit ourselves to anti-racism, anti-discrimination, etc., much more concertedly. But it’s worth fighting for. You certainly have my support from this part of the world! Cheers!