“This Body Has Fought Hard to Be Here!” —Unearthing Mishritata: Using Drama to Map the Multiple Minoritization of Queer Desi/South Asian Young Adults in Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the emergence of Queer People of Colour perspectives in education research, the lives of Queer Desis/South Asians have received little attention beyond “coming out” narratives. Addressing this absence, this mixed-methods study uses a community-grounded approach and mobilizes Desi ontoepistemologies to centre storytelling. Specifically, this study explores and examines how five Queer Desi/South Asian young adults (18–35 years) understand and negotiate their identities in Toronto, Canada. Data were collected over 18 months in the form of a quantitative survey (N = 77), kathās (an extension of life stories), 20 hours of applied drama activities, and “time-pass” (meaning spending time with kin) with five participants, as well as archival research into the history of the community’s presence and activism in Toronto. Analyses yielded a rich framework of mishritata (mixedness) for examining the borderlands social location for Queer Desis/South Asians, mobilized methodologically and analytically to centre embodiment and affect as powerful sites of knowledge production. This project enriches affective ontoepistemological understandings of the quotidian lives of Queer Desi/South Asian young adults across real and imagined borders. It further illuminates how drama can be used to conceptualize new models of subjectivity, consciousness, and (un)belonging to address these concerns. Survey data and life-stories analyses yielded key “disruptions” that pushed against conventional understandings of resilience, kinship, counterspaces, and structural and systemic complicities. Using drama, participants exhibited what I term khush—an organizing strategy that extends resilience research and functions as a consciousness and practice of mishritata through three discrete sensibilities: a dunya-paar (world-crossing), a transgressive, and a strategic sensibility of unbelonging. This research calls on educators to better understand placemaking for multiply minoritized individuals living in and moving between their various communities, within and beyond sites of formal learning. By examining how drama provides a space for Queer Desis/South Asians to creatively and collaboratively engage in “truth telling” and knowledge building about their multiply minoritized experiences and future imaginings, this research contributes to the fields of ethnic studies, queer studies, borderlands studies, critical youth studies, higher education and student-development theory, applied drama/theatre, mixed methods, and community-based research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".