I am Harshul Singh, a first-generation learner from Dalitदलित community and early-career researcher working across critical caste studies, political sociology, decolonial thought, and critical higher education studies. My research asks how caste, political discourse, and epistemic authority shape the institutions through which knowledge is produced, authorised, and contested. Situated between South Asian studies and wider global debates (thought) on hierarchy, agency, democracy, and social transformation, I examine how hegemonic-essentialist (brahmanical) dominance as both a social structure and an intellectual formation, shaping the terms through which politics, identity, legitimacy, and scholarly authority come to be understood.

 

My academic training at SOAS, University of London, and the University of Delhi has grounded my work in qualitative research, critical theory, postcolonial inquiry, and decolonial epistemologies. I am particularly interested in how marginalised communities think from lived experience, memory, struggle, and social location, as producers of theory and critique. My engagement with Dalit epistemology (मीमांसा) is therefore analytical as much as ethical: a practice of close interpretive inquiry that attends to the social life of caste while asking how dominant academic traditions may be unsettled, re-read, and made answerable to the histories they have routinely excluded, appropriated, or placed at the margins of recognition.

 

Methodologically, my work draws on discourse analysis, ethnography, and interpretive inquiry (phenomenological), while remaining attentive to the more fragile and affective registers through which social worlds are felt, narrated, and endured. I approach research as a situated practice, attentive to the ordinary textures of power as much as to its institutional and ideological forms. Across my writing and collaborative projects, I examine the genealogies and afterlives of caste (here genius and genesis): how hierarchy settles into language, pedagogy, public discourse, social memory, and institutional habit. Rather than treating caste as a bounded social problem, I read it as a global grammar of graded inequality, an ordering force through which bodies, labour, knowledge, dignity, and belonging are differentially valued.

 

Beyond my individual research, I have engaged with academic and public communities across Delhi, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Italy through collaborative projects, workshops, research networks, public-facing writing, and student-led initiatives. These engagements have shaped my commitment to building more inclusive, plural, and accountable intellectual spaces, especially for those whose knowledge has historically been dismissed, absorbed, or placed at the margins of academic recognition. My work is animated by the belief that scholarship must remain critically rigorous while also being socially responsive, ethically reflexive, and open to forms of knowledge that emerge from struggle, memory, and collective life. Alongside my academic/research work, I find grounding in the quieter practices that sustain thought: cooking, reading, collecting stationery, and spending long hours in libraries. These everyday practices offer a different rhythm to research, reminding me that intellectual life is also shaped by care, attention, routine, and the small forms of joy that make critical work possible. They keep me close to the ordinary, to the small worlds where thought gathers itself before it becomes argument, writing, or public speech.

 

For me, research is both a scholarly practice and an ethical relation to the lives, memories, and struggles of ordinary and extraordinary people who came before us. It is a way of asking how worlds are made unequal, how power becomes ordinary, and how more just ways of knowing might be imagined. This work often carries discomfort because it questions power, inheritance, and the moral arrangements through which inequality is made to appear natural. Yet it is precisely this discomfort that deepens my commitment to research as an Ambedkarite practice of intellectual cultivation, public responsibility, and collective repair. In the spirit of Ambedkar’s call to “Educate, Agitate, Organize”, my work seeks to contribute, however humbly, to more plural, anti-caste, and decolonial forms of academic and public life, and to the beautiful anti-caste futures imagined by Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi students, scholars, and communities