Illinois Global Institute

From Trauma, Anxieties, and Dislocation at Intersecting Margins in a South Asian Experience and Beyond to Social Justice: “If Life Gives You Bananas Make Mango Shake”

Dr. Mehra has established an international reputation for social justice scholarship and advocacy in library and information science with humble roots as a child survivor of family abuse and domestic violence in India and as a gay scholar of color in the United States. In this semi-autoethnographic narrative of memory and resilience, he briefly threads elements of intergenerational trauma, anxieties, and dislocation at intersectional margins from a neurodivergent South Asian American positionality and their continued affecting of his life struggles, resistance, empowerment, and transformation of healing. Drawing on insights as a faculty member, educator, and activist over 25 years, he spotlights past and recent scholarship that decenter white-privilege and other forms of oppressi­ons within the neoliberal academy and beyond. The talk illustrates an “owning of voice" as a dialogic construct emerging from pluralistic marginalities in a South Asian experience to social justice impacts and creative disruption in the United States that is deliberate, systematic, participatory, action-oriented, and community-engaged while promoting meaningful changes in the everyday lives of disenfranchised communities.