This post is co-authored with Aditya Gupta, an enterprising IP scholar and a dear friend! Aditya is studying LLM at the American University Washington College of Law and is a recipient of the Arcadia Fellowship for 2025-26. He completed his law degree from NUSRL, Ranchi, in 2020.
Salam Readers,
We have recently been working on a short piece titled “Academic Anxieties and Visa Woes.” The piece is our experiment with a duo-ethnographic methodology, through which we explore how visa delays and denials contour the academic trajectories of Global South scholars, including our own. The piece extends many of our long-running conversations and contestations—as friends, collaborators, young scholars, and constant academic sparring partners who share (to some extent) overlapping positionalities and relationalities.
We began with two simple threads. First, the anxieties we carry into academic spaces—where they come from, why they cling to us, and how they shape our movement. Second, how these anxieties contour our place within knowledge production: how we read, participate, and create; how some claims are invited into the room while others are kept waiting at the door. But when we actually sat down to put the proverbial pen to paper, yet another disagreement surfaced. We call it, for want of a better phrase, the paradox of privilege.
This short post offers a glimpse into the thought process behind the essay. We try to sketch out some ideas around epistemic privilege (especially how they occurred to us). This is, of course, not to settle them, but to mark them as questions worth lingering with. Discussing this epistemic privilege, we sense an inherent paradox that continues to trouble us, that we suspect needs collective reflection, critique, and conversation.
Thanks, Geertz, for “Thick Description”
First things first, we asked ourselves a simple but unsettling question: what are we really doing here, other than intellectualising our undesirable experience? And is there anything wrong with intellectualising it—after all, isn’t that what academics are meant to do? Clifford Geertz (an American anthropologist), and particularly his idea of thick description, came to our rescue. Though it’s worth noting that the notion of thick description was first introduced by the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle in 1968 in “The Thinking of Thoughts: What is ‘Le Penseur’ Doing?” and “Thinking and Reflecting“. Here, thin refers to surface-level observations of behaviour, whereas thick emphasises adding context to such behaviour.
This notion helped us see that experiences—no matter how mundane or routine, one may call them—carry peculiar cultural meanings that deserve to be understood, interpreted, and investigated. Geertz allowed us to shift both the frame and focus of our analysis, encouraging us to stop chasing or chagring generality through the rigours of social-scientific theorisation and instead embrace humanistic interpretation.
For those unfamiliar with the distinction: a thin description might state, “He closed one eye,” recording the bare movement. A thick description would situate the same act within the shared meanings that make it intelligible. For example, “He winked eye in a crowded café while catching his coworker’s gaze; among the staff, this well-known signal marks a private joke about the manager, recognizable because of their earlier banter and the café’s playful culture, distinguishing it from a nervous twitch or a flirtatious cue.”
Thick description, thus, interprets actions by placing them in the local webs of significance, showing not just what happened (physically), but how participants know what it means and why that meaning holds in that setting. We take this idea to underscore the importance and relevance of distinct and unique experiences (i.e., visa denials and delays in our case), without an innate pressure or requirement to theorise and situate them in a larger, more identifiable mould.
But as we began to brood these ideas—articulating our experiences and reading how others have written about similar moments—we encountered an unexpected sense of isolation. Stories of visa denials and delays, scholars missing conferences, being unable to attend crucial courses or deliver keynotes, or even being turned away at airports, are all over the place on social media platforms. (see here). As per this CNN news report, Africans lost nearly $70M to denied visa applications to Europe in 2024. Many visa denial or delay accounts sound uncannily alike, with many of these voices sharing certain identities: they hold not-very-privileged passports that do not guarantee easy mobility.
This pattern initially struck us as surprising—or rather, it was the absence of surprise, the sense of normalisation, that became the most surprising element of all. Based on our ongoing research, we found this issue as one of the very few areas of academic scholarship where voices from the Global North were noticeably absent. Even the few voices that could be traced to the Global North had some degree of identifiable similarity and relationality with the larger set of voices and articulations within the discourse. Say, a professor from Columbia University, who holds an Indian passport, or a French professor with a Ghanaian passport. It felt almost as if this issue was only being articulated from a very discrete echo chamber.
The Complexity of Epistemic Privilege
Neither of us understood this. We have written about and talked about how citation politics work and how scholars who belong to certain epistemic traditions are given more weight and influence than others, but this time, the game seemed a bit different. To understand this, we read standpoint theory/epistemology and, more specifically, epistemic privilege. The concept of epistemic privilege remains broad and oft contested. However, the term generally refers to the forms of privilege that accrue from one’s social position. For standpoint theorists, these positions in a social circle provide them access to evidence, group knowledge, sui generis ways of knowing, or some other distinctive epistemic good. It argues that members of certain marginalised, oppressed and excluded groups can have superior insights into the workings of society, especially hidden biases, injustices, and exclusionary practices, thus affording an epistemic advantage in understanding how knowledge and power interlock.
This idea, to some extent, assuaged our anxiety that our concern was not unwarranted. There was, indeed, a privilege in being an outsider, in being outside the reward network of systems. This privilege allowed us to think, theorise and articulate in a certain manner. It extended unto us an audience. In terms of network theory, it created an in-group of subjects who were outside the network of privilege.
However, it is worth pausing to recognise that even this in-group privilege—the ability to engage with issues like visa delays or denials—comes with its own layers and hierarchies. Well … realistically speaking, having a passport is itself a privilege in India. As per this Times of India report, in 2022, 7.2% of Indians own passports, a number set to cross 10 crore soon. And per this The MapsDaily report, only 8.71% of Indians hold a Valid Passport in 2025.
Coming back to the point of epistemic privilege, it allows us to turn our lived experiences into knowledge: to translate uncertainty, anxiety, and bureaucratic precarity into insights that become legible within academic discourse. But there is something more subtle at play. Not everyone within the group shares this privilege equally—there are meta-privileges embedded within it. The way I can interpret my visa denials and evangelise it into an academic issue is something that our other friend will be able to do.
This makes us believe that there exist two overlapping privileges underlying epistemic privilege. First, the privilege of being an outsider and being privy to a thought process and knowledge framework that often remains unnoticed and overlooked. This is a privilege that we inherit by way of experiencing an event which brings within it a pre-defined audience that can engage with, comprehend and even empathise with the positions we articulate. Second, the second form of privilege shares something with what Bourdieu might call cultural capital (e.g. education) and social capital (family associations, networking, etc.). Meaning, it is our educational backgrounds, intertwined with the institutional support around us, that furnish the material, institutional, and cognitive tools which ultimately reinforce our epistemic privilege.
Conclusion: Knowing is never neutral!
Herein lies a hitch, however. Recognising this privilege also introduces a sense of responsibility. That is, once you begin to notice and interrogate how these systems function—how visas operate as technologies of control, how borders govern intellectual mobility, how academic structures simultaneously generate opportunity and precarity—you lose the comfort of innocence. You become acutely aware of your own position within these arrangements. So, if Stan Lee could say, “With great power comes great responsibility,” perhaps we might add: with greater knowing comes greater responsibility (and anxiety?).
Knowing is never neutral. Knowing alters us; it asks something of us. It produces a form of responsibility to see, to name, to stay with the discomfort rather than look away on the pretext of being mundane, commonsensical, routine, etc. Although epistemic and standpoint privilege—along with the overlapping layers of advantage identified above—may enable us to articulate these issues and situate them within broader structures, they also leave us wondering: to what extent, and toward what ends, does this very privilege carry our articulated concerns? What capacities does it open, and what limits does it quietly reproduce? This is where the paradox of privilege becomes palpable: even when we possess epistemic advantage to see, sense and sensitise certain issues, we remain uncertain about where it ultimately leads us and what our articulated concerns can, in fact, accomplish.
What do you think of this paradox? Let us know.
Note: As always, we owe a debt of gratitude to those who nudged this work along. A big thanks to two very kind and supportive professors, Suresh Canagarajah and Bryan Khan, for their thoughts/comments on the essay. If you’d like to read it, we’re happy to share a working copy and would appreciate any thoughts you might have—we’re currently working through the suggestions we’ve received. Thank you!
See you in the next post.
IP Musings 