INHERENT RESISTANCE: PEDAGOGY AND POLITICS OF EVERYDAY MATERIALS

Resistance is often seen as a position taken against something from a critical distance. This paper reveals that resistance can be material: enacted rather than adopted. It examines two bodies of creative work, Desire for Belonging and Inheritance, where turmeric, Khadi, reclaimed sarees, and gum tree branches perform resistance by staining, fraying, and resisting permanence. Living as a first-generation Bangladeshi-Australian artist-researcher working from within bicultural in-betweenness, I develop this practice-led, critically autoethnographic methodology grounded in a decolonial theoretical ecology — Third Space, hometactics, and Asia as Method — that treats materials as epistemic agents rather than symbolic illustrations. The paper’s central claim is that this resistance is inherited rather than adopted: transmitted through postmemory, ancestral practice, and family history, requiring no institutional validation to be legitimate knowledge. My research grounds Bangladesh as an epistemic centre rather than a cultural case study. This repositioning suggests that resistance doesn’t have to be loud, destructive, or violent; it can reside in the collective impact of small, repeated, embodied gestures. In a time marked by censorship and cultural division, this approach emphasises disobedience as a continuous, relational inheritance rather than a rupture—where art fosters a space for resistance, survival, and transformation.