Transgender People in Indian Science Institutions: Identity, Community & Belonging

Purnaa Muthu dives into Sayantan Datta's work on community, identity and belonging for transgender people in Indian science institutions.

Many aspire to join science institutions in India for higher education: on the one hand, they promise tangible upward mobility, and purported economic stability and professional recognition; on the other, they embody a deeper cultural aspirationality. Belonging in these spaces signifies (and signals to others) a certain respectability.

The question of who belongs in these institutions has intrigued several people; in the past, people have highlighted how (cisgender) women and people from marginalized castes have been systematically excluded from these institutions. However, transgender people’s experiences in these institutions have remained largely undiscussed, despite legislative and judicial reforms in the last decade that have granted them civil and substantive rights.

Sayantan Datta, a science journalist and a gender and sexuality studies researcher, has spent years bridging this gap. As a queer-trans person with a science background, Datta’s work is motivated by their personal experiences in the Indian science ecosystem. In their paper “‘It’s nice that we can do that too’: investigating transgender persons’ negotiations with identity and community questions in Indian science institutions”, published in the Community Development Journal (vol. 59, no. 2), they explore how trans, gender nonconforming and non-binary people negotiate questions of identity, community and belonging in Indian science institutions. To answer these questions, Datta draws upon lived experiences of four gender-transgressive interlocutors who are either working or studying in Indian science institutions, or have been within the ecosystem in the past.

Narratives from their interlocutors reveal a masculinist culture in these institutions. Those who are able to adhere to this culture acquire a “social capital”, a term from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu that refers to the value derived from belonging to networks that provide support, recognition, and shared identity. For gender-transgressive individuals, adhering to such masculinist cultures and, therefore, acquiring the requisite social capital is often impossible – and undesirable. Morpheus, currently a tenured faculty in an Indian science education institution, recalled to Datta their struggles as a student at one of the Indian Institutes of Technology (one of the most elite Indian science and technology institutions): “Because there’s a certain amount of masculinity in these spaces, it’s very hard to fully participate… My social capital in that space was rock bottom, regardless of my academic achievements.”

This suggests that adherence to institutional cultures outweighs academic success – a weighty finding in the context of the dominant narrative’s insistence of “merit” as the primary determinant for entry and success at these institutions. “Despite how ‘merit’ has been at the heart of how (elite) science institutions talk about who can and cannot enter, it seems like belonging is not determined by merit but by how well individuals can adhere to institutional cultures, which are masculinist,” Datta told this writer.

Datta’s study also highlights how caste and class complicate the articulation of gender in elite science institutions. Nyx, an undergraduate student at the time of Datta’s study, explains how they use the term “non-binary” rather than “transgender” to express their gender. The latter term, Nyx explained, might lead peers to associate them with the hijras, a hypervisible and historically marginalized transfeminine collectivity in India. The hijras are often relegated to an outcaste status since they participate in occupations seen as ‘dirty’ by the normative public: sex work and seeking alms. In other words, Nyx’s apprehension in using the term “transgender/trans” to articulate their gender stems from the worry that the term’s association with hijra communities might strip them (Nyx) of caste-class respectability. Conversely, as Nyx told Datta, the term “non-binary” is “a very bourgeois marker.” These negotiations underscore that the need to adhere to caste-class respectability might be rescripting the very articulation of gender in Indian science institutions .

At the same time, it would be wrong to assume that trans people in these institutions are only negotiating and not challenging caste and casteism within these institutions. Datta dives into the case of one trans people’s collective in an elite science institution, conceptualizing these collectives as “hybrid and unstable assemblages” with multiple and shifting compositions and affiliations. Datta highlights how the collective in question not only advocates for institutional changes relevant to gender-transgressive individuals (such as gender-affirming infrastructures) but also takes up anti-caste advocacy.

As these collectives continue to evolve, Datta is hopeful that their effects will be far-reaching: “Cross-movement solidarity will make Indian science institutions a more welcoming space for not only queer and transgender people but also for people from other marginalized locations, including caste, class, region, religion, and disability.”

You can read Sayantan Datta's full paper here.

Purnaa Muthu is an undergraduate student majoring in Psychology at Krea University with tutoring experience at the Center for Writing and Pedagogy (CWP), Krea University.

Call for New Editorial Board Members for the Community Development Journal

Application deadline: Friday 17 January 2025, 24.00 UTC/GMT

The Community Development Journal is seeking to appoint up to five new Editorial
Board members to join us from March 2025. We welcome applications from
academics and practitioners globally, particularly encouraging those from under-
represented groups.

About the Community Development Journal (CDJ)
Established in 1966, the CDJ is the leading international journal in its field, covering
a wide range of topics, reviewing significant developments and providing a forum for
cutting-edge debates about theory and practice. It adopts a broad definition of
community development to include policy, planning and action as they impact on the
life of communities. We particularly seek to publish critically-focused articles that
challenge received wisdom, report and discuss innovative practices, and relate
issues of community development to questions of social justice, diversity and
ecological sustainability.

The journal is published in partnership with Oxford University Press on a profit-share
basis. The income received from the journal is managed by a charitable trust linked
to the journal, of which editorial board members are also trustees. The trust can fund
initiatives such as conferences, seminars and other activities that support its mission.
The strategic objectives of CDJ are currently:

To produce the leading international journal in the field;
To develop critical reflection and theoretical learning on community development;
To promote international learning and exchange;
To promote informed critical debate on community development theory and practice;
To develop and support appropriate relationships, partnerships and networks to further these objectives;
To ensure that CDJ is well governed and financially viable to achieve the above objectives.

With several long-standing board members retiring, we are looking to refresh the
membership with active and engaged people committed to promoting community
development scholarship.

About the role
Board member responsibilities include:

Attending board meetings (virtually or in person) as required. There are currently two full-day board meetings per year, including one residential.
Contributing as a peer reviewer to the journal at the request of the journal editors. This may include reviewing up to four articles per year.
Supporting and participating in our events and initiatives.
Promoting the Community Development Journal and encouraging submissions.

We ask that Editorial Board members commit to minimum of three years.

Who are we looking for?
The Community Development Journal is committed to equality, diversity, and
inclusion. We actively seek to create an Editorial Board that reflects the diversity of
the communities we serve and study.

Skills and experiences we would particularly welcome include some of the following:

Good links to practitioner networks;
Experience as a community development practitioner/academic;
Financial management;
Familiarity with UK charity governance;
Interest in editorial roles;
Supporting people to build capacity for writing;
Organisation of community development focused events;
Knowledge and/or experience of democratic publishing models.

How to apply
Please submit your application including:

A brief statement outlining the knowledge, skills and experience you would bring
and explaining why you are interested in becoming a member of the CDJ Editorial
Board
A two-page CV

Send your application to secretarycdj@gmail.com with the subject line "Editorial
Board Application."

Application deadline: Friday 17 January 2025, 24.00 UTC/GMT
For any queries, please contact secretarycdj@gmail.com

CDJ Plus is Dead! Long Live CDJ Plus!

An introduction to the new CDJ blog, and why we think it’s needed

By Ilya Maude

Academic publishing is a strange beast, and it’s getting stranger. Authors write for free, reviewers work uncompensated, and editorial boards volunteer their time and expertise. Nobody is ever paid for their writing. You’d hope that at the end of that process journal articles would be inexpensive, but of course they’re not. In 2024, you can pick up a paperback for a tenner. A CDJ article would set you back £34, assuming you’re able to read it in the 24 hours you’ve bought.

Most people are not directly paying to read journal articles. Students and staff at wealthier universities, usually those in the Global North, benefit from institutional access. The university pays a flat fee, to make a journal (or more often a set of journals) available to their own. Outside of these institutions, people keep reading. File-sharing ‘shadow libraries’ like Library Genesis and Sci-Hub get millions of visitors every month, despite attempts to shut them down and legal action made against them. Small file-sharing groups proliferate on sites like Facebook, connecting academics in one niche sub-field or another. Academic work keeps happening, and keeps going uncompensated. In theory academic jobs are meant to fund all of this - in practice they are few and far between.

This is not an issue with an easy fix. Open access solves one side of the problem, but often at the expense of the other. Articles are available free to all, but in what is called ‘gold open access’, the gap left by subscription fees is paid by the author. If an author has institutional affiliation with a university, and the university is sufficiently wealthy and well-resourced, this fee may be covered by an open access agreement. Otherwise, the author is left with a bill of thousands of pounds. The proliferation of gold open access prioritises reading at the expense of writing. Marginalised authors are told to shut up and listen. Although there are ways around this, and gold open access is not the only new model, getting your work out there is harder. How will people know to email you, or pay the £34, or request access at their local library in the first place? For a long time twitter has been an imperfect solution to this, allowing news to spread through academic networks outside of institutions. As it becomes an increasingly hostile space for oppressed people, its utility lessens.

CDJ is not an exclusively open access journal. Some articles published with us are open access, and can be read for free. Some are not. This does not always fall down lines of how important the work is. To represent the cutting edge of the field of community development, we have to have an international remit. We have to publish work by activists, and scholars, and scholar-activists. We do this not because it is just, although that would be a good enough reason, but because it is where the exciting work is happening. I’ve worked for CDJ as an editorial assistant since 2022, and I‘ve seen some amazing articles come through the journal in that time - not all of these have been open access. A lot of work goes into mitigating this inequality, and while practices like funding an open access ‘editor’s choice’ article every issue help, the problem remains.

The new CDJ website exists for many reasons. Our old site was old, and looked it. When people tried to follow links to it, they were met with a security warning. We wanted something more accessible, in keeping with our ethos. Another reason is the above. Over the coming months, we will be inviting authors who have published with CDJ to write about their work on this site. We want it to be an overflow, a space for work that doesn’t quite fit, for conversations, and creative responses, and perhaps most importantly, a place where writers can promote their work, regardless of institutional affiliation. We don’t yet know what shape this will take. If we do it right, it will be formed collaboratively.

So welcome to the new site! Many thanks to the Access by Design team for all of their work in making it functional and beautiful and accessible. Please do get in touch through our contact page if you have an idea for a blog or a project, or something we haven’t thought of yet, and enjoy reading years of work and resources and articles all put together in an accessible format.

Ilya Maude is the new Digital Domain Editor for Community Development Journal. He is an early career historian, currently working without institutional affiliation. He’s also an artist, musician, and activist.