By Karen Bullock and Aldona Bird
Professor Shubh Mathur began hearing the story of the torture and disappearances in her native Kashmir shortly after she emigrated from India to the United States in 1989.
As the woman with a Ph.D in sociology she looked further, and found more and more people whose family members were taken away by the Indian army, never to be seen again.
“I love hearing about her work in India, I can just imagine her there,” said Veronika Panagiotou, a junior psychology major who is taking her courses.
Those horrible stories caused the woman who has taught at Point Park University since Fall 2009 to investigate the horrors of this unspeakable torture of minorities for the United Nations as well as direct her scholarly, anthropological research with advocacy for the disappeared.
She grew up in India, and earned her B.A. in India at Lady Sri Ram College in history, her M.A. in anthropology University of Delhi, and her Ph.D from the New School for Social Research in New York.
She had intended to work strictly as an anthropologist, not thinking her career would entail any teaching. In grad school, however, she found that teaching was part of the job description. She taught as an adjunct both for the money and for the job experience. She had not anticipated how well she would like it. She has now been teaching for ten years.
“I think the fun part was discovering what students make of the discipline and the ideas that I can bring to the class,” said Dr. Mathur. She learned to teach from her students and then developed her own teaching style which is heavily based on class participation and discussion.
“You need a degree to teach kindergarten, but to teach undergraduates they just throw you in the deep end,” said Dr. Mathur explaining the difficulties of teaching at the college level.
Dr. Mathur joined the Global Cultural Studies Program Point Park University in the Fall of 2009. Her classes include Women in Global Perspectives, Introduction into Global Cultural Studies, and Human Rights in Theory and Practice.
Point Park students impress Dr. Mathur through their desire to learn and their curiosity about the world they live in. “I think there is a kind of intellectual honesty and integrity…and open mindedness,” said Dr. Mathur. She understands that all the material she teaches is not easy, but is impressed with how students process and use their newfound knowledge, and so enjoys teaching at Point Park University.
Sean Morrison, a freshman human resources major, liked how well Dr. Mathur used videos and readings to spark class discussions in her Sociological Foundations class. She moderated the discussions to keep them productive, despite clashing views about uncomfortable topics such as the death penalty, capitalism and communism.
Upon entering Dr. Mathur’s class for the first time Morrison was uneasy about how the class would turn out, especially because she has a rather quiet voice even while lecturing, but by the end of the semester this class was easily one of his favorites because the in-class debates and subjects covered not only introduced him to new topics, but taught him new ways to look at ones he was already familiar with.
“I think I learned more in her class than I would in someone else’s without the discussions,” said Morrison.
Dr. Mathur would like to see the study abroad program at Point Park grow in size and scope, by adding trips to India, Pakistan, and other South Asian countries.
Dr. Mathur brings her Kashmir experiences and research into the subject matter of her Point Park classes. She uses the plight of these Indian citizens as a starting point to demonstrate the wide assortment of human rights issues around the world.
She also wants to improve the global cultural studies program by adding new and diverse classes which relate to her research and field work with families in Kashmir.
Dr. Mathur is excited about a class she is teaching in the fall, Human Rights in Theory and Practice, because it directly relates to her work in Kashmir. She works directly with families whose members have been randomly and violently been taken away by the military, and never heard from or seen again. She helps the voices of these broken families be heard, and hopefully helped, by the UN. She works with the founder of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, APDP, trying to bring world attention to Kashmir.
In 2006 and 2007, Dr. Mathur traveled to Kashmir, and met the victims of human rights abuses face to face. She hopes to return this summer, and to continue documenting the disappearances, arrests, and torture of minorities in Kashmir for the United Nations Human Rights High Commission in Geneva.
She intends to connect her experience researching violence and the victims of violence with topics in her new course at Point Park University on human rights issues. Dr. Mathur thinks the class will be a good opportunity “to bring the issues that [she’s] been dealing with in a practical way to the classroom and again to work through them and think through them with [her] students.”
Dr. Mathur would also like to see Point Park students become involved in global and local human rights issues. She gives gentrification of urban neighborhoods as an example of a possible Pittsburgh issue to study. Her presence might inspire both research and activism. Panagiotou, for example, signed up for Dr. Mathur’s Women in Global Perspectives class “because of my previous knowledge of her as a world activist.”
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