In the fiscal year of 2024, Georgetown was allotted $195 million in federal research support, which came predominantly from the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control.
Since the start of President Trump’s second term in January, significant cuts in research and education funding have been made. With a projected $35 million annual loss, many university research projects have been disrupted or terminated, and graduate fellowship programs have been eliminated. Georgetown is currently working to secure alternative research funding sources.
As part of the Professor Research Series, the Voice sat down with research professors across a variety of disciplines to discuss their careers and recent projects.
Professor Arjun Shankar is an associate professor in the Culture and Politics (CULP) program in the SFS. His work focuses on the politics of help, visual anthropology, and ethnographic film, and the relationship between labor, caste, and race.
President Trump’s cuts to funding for research related to diversity, equity, and inclusion has impacted Shankar’s work significantly, due to his work in issue areas regarding inequality and marginalized populations.
“This has looked like less funding towards these issues and a silencing of research on these issues,” Shankar wrote in a statement to the Voice.
Shankar released his first book, Brown Saviors and Their Others: Race, Caste, Labor, and the Global Politics of Help in India, in 2022, an ethnographic project he conducted with an educational, non-governmental organization (NGO) based in Bangalore, India. His main focus is the ways that the caste system in India intersects with labor.
This conversation was edited by the Voice for clarity.
The Voice: Could you tell me about the research you’re conducting?
Shankar: The book I’m writing right now is called Labor, Caste, and Race. It is trying to argue that at this moment in history, to understand why hierarchy and labor stratification looks the way it does, one requires a caste-capitalist analysis to augment and reinforce what we might call a racial-capitalist understanding of the world.
Caste capitalism has two meanings. The way that dominant castes have been able to use their caste positions in India to participate in privileged educational migrations to the US (and other places) and translated this privilege into capital. It can also mean the way that one’s ability to accumulate wealth is based on the particular kind of labor they do and how that is situated in a hierarchy of worth and status.
That’s what the book is about. It emerged from the teaching I did in labor, caste, and race. I realized very early on that students had a lot of confusion about these terms. How are they related in the first place? And so the book is really trying to help students and researchers alike think about what caste means, what race means, how they’re operating differently in the 21st century, and in tandem, to produce the kinds of really difficult world historical situations we’re living through right now.
The Voice: What do you hope are the implications of publishing this book?
Shankar: I think most students that I’ve talked to are really trying to understand how to change the world that we live in presently. We’re living in a moment of extreme inequality. When I say extreme, we’re talking about a form of inequality and concentration of wealth that we haven’t seen since perhaps the early 20th century and definitely before. So it is a moment of dire need for new ways of thinking about the world because we need to figure out how to change it. So what this book is trying to do is explain what is happening at this moment that’s different. I’m arguing that to understand this moment is to think with caste.
I want us to see in the book just how dramatically policies are fixing people into laboring slots all over the world, why that looks like caste, and therefore, what we need to do to change that. Oftentimes when we think about capitalism or when we think about social change, we say, “Oh, there’s this right or wrong and we need to combat the evil that is.” But we don’t know what that evil is. We don’t know what’s actually happening.
The other thing that I’m arguing is that we’re starting to return to a moment of hyper-endogamy. Hyper-endogamy simply means you’re only allowed to marry within your caste group. We find more and more that people are forced to marry into their laboring castes. That is to say that if you’re an academic, you end up marrying other academics; if you’re a plumber, you end up marrying other plumbers. We’re actually fixing policies in place that reinforce marriage and hierarchy.
Finally, we’re coming back to a time of pollution narratives. If people who are in technology are seen as altruistic, doing work that’s above the kind of messiness of everyday life, they should be seen as very high-value workers. Other people are seen as disgusting based on the work they do and their life chances.
So that’s really what I want to show in this book. I want students and other people to start thinking with this framework so that they know what to challenge and how to challenge it.
The Voice: Do you have an idea of what’s next for you?
Shankar: I have been thinking a lot about what kind of film projects I want to do next. I am working currently on an archival film on the mid-20th century moment, looking at third worldism through the lens of the Bandung Conference, which was one of the very first gatherings of newly independent Afro Asian nation states, to think about what it would mean and look like to have a kind of solidarity and set of alliances that were not already tethered to white supremacy and colonial governance. So it’s a really interesting thing to make a film on because it was the first time where European powers were not allowed to come to a conference of world leaders. You really get to see something about what the promise of the decolonial moment or the independence moment was and also the limitations on that moment. So I’m really excited about making that film. I’ve been looking at archives both in Indonesia, India, Ghana, the UK, and the States to really think about different ways those who were attending the conference were imagining a future and how the legacy of that conference continues in the 21st century.
The Voice: What do you want students to know about the work that you do beyond the classroom?
Shankar: For students, a lot of times they see their professors in the university and they assume that all they do is in the university. For most of us in the academy, those of us who really care about social change, we recognize that our most important work generally happens outside of the university.
Bol is a work cooperative bookstore that we started a few years back, myself and a set of other friends, colleagues around the city to begin to think about economic democracy. Worker cooperatives are spaces in which workers are also owners, so there’s no split between employees and employers. So that’s been a way for us to think about what it would mean to have a space, and actually giving back to the communities through the very structure and system that we’re developing.
Because it’s a bookstore project, we’ve been able to run incredible events that center global solidarity, and really link local DC politics to things that are happening all over the world–what’s happening in Palestine to what’s happening in Sudan, to gentrification conversations in D.C. to thinking about ICE raids. It’s really amazing to be able to run programming and events for anybody in D.C. for free. That’s something that I really cherish and probably the most fulfilling thing that I’m doing right now.
If students are interested in reaching out to Shankar to discuss his research or other works, feel free to do so at his email, as6479@georgetown.edu.
