Refusals, radical vulnerability, and hungry translations–a conversation with Richa Nagar

Richa Nagar is Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and holds the title of Professor of the College at the University of Minnesota. Her multilingual and multi-genre work blends scholarship, creative writing, theatre, and activism to build alliances with people’s struggles and to engage questions of ethics, responsibility, and justice. We contacted Richa in December 2021 with a request to contribute to our special issue. Richa kindly agreed to engage in a written conversation on questions of refusal as they emerge in her intellectual and political journey and in her trilogy, Playing with Fire: Feminist Thought and Activism through Seven Lives in India (2006), Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms Across Scholarship and Activism (2014), and Hungry Translations: Relearning the World Through Radical Vulnerability (2019). We present that conversation in this article.