We discuss Dhaneswar's study examining the daily social realities and emotive experiences faced by Dalit university students. The study analyses their mental and emotional suffering caused by the university’s social dynamics, casted behaviours, particularly from upper-caste groups. These contour Dalit students’ casted experiences, potentially leading to self-harm with, in extreme cases, a fatal outcome. The study analysed the gathered data through theoretical frameworks such as ‘humiliation’, ‘disgust’ and ‘everyday social dynamics’ in the university. In a mixed-method approach, quantitative survey data was collected from 250 students and qualitative responses from 10 case studies and 5 focus group discussions with Dalit students in a university located in Odisha, India. Using data triangulation, the study reveals the underlying causes of mental health struggles among Dalit students. The study shows how societal bias, stigma, discrimination, untouchability and a pervasive sense of ‘unseeability’ within the university environment plays a significant role in fostering despair and self-harm.

This paper explores the politics of invisibilising waste through peripheral spaces and built infrastructures of landfills. In particular, it examines the socio-spatial making and unmaking of the Bhalswa landfill in Delhi, from colonial to post-colonial times. It seeks to understand the processes and politics behind the opening of the landfill and the recent attempts at its closure, which have effectively failed. In doing so, it analyses the association of waste with urban marginalities both physical and social—in terms of the spaces it occupies and the lower-caste and class communities residing in the neighbouring areas of the landfill. Furthermore, the article critically explores the role of technology recently installed around the landfill in eliminating the waste crisis by invisibilising it – both spatially and materially, by incinerating waste and converting it into energy for profiteering purposes and creating new peripheries, i.e., in the atmosphere. This ‘dirty’ landscape of discarded materials, thus, offers us complex insights into the production of spatial inequalities, entrenchment of caste-based social hierarchies and the limits of technology.

Post-truth is increasingly linked to the decline of democracy through its association with fake news and misinformation. In recent literature, however, there has been a shift in discussing post-truth as a type of political discourse premised on desire. Building on this shift, I develop a new interpretive methodological framework to analyse textual data for post-truth narratives. The framework is premised on identifying and analysing the relationship between elite rhetoric of desire, emotions, and citizens’ positionality within the narrative using discourse analysis. I apply this approach to 1209 newspaper articles from three leading Pakistani newspapers during national elections between 2008 and 2018. I identify post-truth narratives on democracy and find that post-truth narratives highlight the democratisation attempts in the country. I argue that post-truth discourse can play an important role during democratisation, acting as a powerful mobilising strategy as opposed to being associated with the decline of democracy.