1/ Zoom academia may have intriguing possibilities I hadn't thought about. I tuned into #SHEAR2020 out of pure curiosity. I would never have entered that conference IRL. I am sure there were many people, including non-academics, who attended because it was easily accessible

2/ I wonder if the presence of people like me witnessing the rank gatekeeping that produced such an appalling plenary will force @SHEARites to change. I have no doubt that people within the org and field have tried for years to dismantle the hierarchies clearly at work here.

3/ I am also sure that, by dint of their own position within these hierarchies, the people pushing for change have done so at great risk to themselves and, as this plenary suggests, limited success at best.

4/ The harsh glare of scrutiny from scholars unlikely to be affected by these power dynamics, however, may actually create the kind of pressure needed to effect real and rapid change. Nobody likes their dirty laundry aired and boy did this one stink.

5/ For my part, I want to see this happen for South Asian history. I would even end my boycott of Madison if the whole thing was openly accessible online. For one, the patriarchal creep=fest that is the hotel bar in which so many women have been demeaned will not be possible.

6/ Secondly, it may finally puncture the overweening and parochial self-regard of South Asianists, so convinced of their theoretical sophistication and yet mostly peddling in theory that other fields got over decades ago.

7/ Having an Africanist in the room, for example, or a Latin Americanist may finally shake up a field that looks mainly to Europe(anists) for validation and ideas, let alone methodologies.

8/ It may also force us to confront the strange grooves the field takes, e.g. our endless obsession with court culture, as if pre-modern South Asia was only inhabited by kings (and occasionally, queens), an obsession I might add that plays into the hands of Hindu nationalists.

9/ Lastly, it will be impossible to play the kind of white diversity accounting we often do in university settings. That the field marginalizes not only minoritized South Asians but non-white non-South Asian scholars is an open secret.

10/ We may finally have to answer for it when the obfuscatory games South Asianists have played as "people of color" in white majority academic institutions are laid bare in institutional contexts where they are dominant. So in short, bring on Zoom academia.