Traditionally, the dissolving human body is the stuff of nightmares. But Yazan Kafarneh is not a dissolved body. The horror we see is the corpus intacta but diminished. It invokes greater horror not because it is broken but because it is whole and yet not-alive.

Should the corpses of the perpetrator be treated as corpus delicti? Does this corpse, of the perpetrator, bring about closure for survivors of those s/he had executed? Or does the very presence of the perpetrator’s corpse, often interred grandly, mark the transformation of the villain into a hero?

A look at the draft Act as an important cultural text of our time for what it seeks to do, and how it fits in with a larger emphasis on rights and risks to those rights. 

Exhortations to certain communities to breed because they will otherwise be overrun by other communities is a political plank that is reminiscent of a Nazi-era eugenics progamme – a history lesson we ought to learn.

It is absurd to ask which gender dominates the genocidal state. Build a genocidal state and there will be men, and women, to run them.

The Nuremberg indictments show that a history of hate speech and disenfranchisement preceded the violence against Jews in Nazi Germany. They offer us a way of thinking through the consequences of hate speech for our time.

Onlookers who watched or even jeered at the Jews’ humiliation in Nazi Germany may not have fired a gun or released Zyklon B. But they inevitably facilitated the Jews' genocide through their tacit implication of and silence during the Holocaust.

Erasure, negation, writing-over and destruction of cultures precede acts of erasure of people. Cultural desecration is merely a pretext: the text of extermination follows, assuredly, inevitably.

Education through rewritten textbooks, proscription of materials and textualised hate towards the Jews was central to the Nazi plot and storyline. The war for global domination and extermination began, as it were, in curricular battles.

Today, we may think of several of the publicly funded higher education institutions as constituting a new category called the 'doomed university', where academic freedom and privileges are misused.

It is time education is recast as a public good for 'unlearning bias, prejudice and divisiveness'. When human rights norms become mainstreamed into the curriculum, the transformative potential of higher education can be realised.

Should the erosion of student skill sets, quality of research output or employability in the global space not call for accountability from our higher education institutions?

'To implement any fee structure, be ignorant of the urgency of access and equality of opportunity.' This is one of the ‘freedoms’ gifted to offshore education centres to establish their campuses in GIFT city.

The literary invents worlds for us, but also shows how life ought to be lived, or how the world could possibly be.

When cultural shifts that encourage superstition, and are decidedly discriminatory, emerge leading to extreme acts such as human sacrifices, the field that needs to respond swiftly is that of the liberal arts.

Students are wards of the institution, they are not and cannot be treated as a resource, unless we believe they are resources for the promotion of knowledge.

Commentators see the National Education Policy 2020's emphasis on choice, modularity and autonomy as disquieting because they see it as pushing the education system into a neoliberal governance mode.