"What Is We? : Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan in conversation with Tara Emelye Needham

The concept "we" is central to every field in the interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences, yet it has been overdetermined by the question of “who we are”, leaving its basic conceptual operations undertheorized.
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan argues that “we” is not a collective to belong to or be excluded from, nor is it a specific group to be identified. Rather, “we” functions as a method – one that organizes inclusion and exclusion, communion and isolation, coercion and liberation, division and incorporation, forgetting and remembering.

By seeing “we” as a method for enacting, apprehending, contesting, and instrumentalizing boundaries, this event will invite us to confront the challenge of failure, embrace the possibility of impossibility, and acknowledge the hallucinatory nature of the universal.

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is Assistant Professor of English at Rice University. She works at the intersections of ethnic, postcolonial, and Anglophone literary studies, with an emphasis on Asian American and South Asian Anglophone cultural production. Her last book, What Is We? Was published by Columbia University Press in 2025.

Tara Emelye Needham is a writer, editor and educator. She is Co-Director of The Philosopher since July 2025. She has worked extensively in non profit cultural organizations and within academia, including serving as Assistant Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. 

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