FemIDEAS

So thank you so much, everyone, for being so patient with us this morning as well. We
had a bunch of tech difficulties for no reason, and we’ve just been scrambling to get everything
sorted. But so thank you very much for being patient and still being here. We also wanted
to start by, you know, that hope you all are doing well and your loved ones are safe. These
have been extremely testing times for everyone. So we wanted to start by sharing our love
and solidarity with all our comrades and friends who are present here and people who couldn’t
be here because of care responsibilities and health issues. So this event is to mark the
release of our report called North-South Feminist Dialogue. And yeah, so this report or activist
handbook, as we imagined it to be, was a result of a three-day workshop called North-South
Feminist Dialogue, which happened pretty much this time last year. So academics, activists,
survivors working in the area of sexual and gender-based violence in higher education from
India and the UK came together for the first time to collaborate, learn and share. So this
report is our attempt to share some of the knowledge produced in this workshop with other
academics, activists and organizers in this space. And it is also our way to continue
this conversation and take it forward. So just to give you a little background of this project,
I started my postdoc on the topic of sexual and gender-based violence in Indian universities in 2018.

So this three-day workshop emerges out of some of the work that I’ve done
in my postdoc around Indian universities and my activism around the same issues in the UK.
So it not only emerges out of my work, but it also emerges out of the work of my fellow activists
and comrades of the account for this movement, Shelza, who’s here with us, Chandni, who has been
instrumental in shaping this workshop. So account for this was a campaign which was started by a
group of women of color who tried to navigate the exceptionally complicated system of getting
justice for survivors of gendered violence and sexual harassment within the university system
in the UK and failed. And hence started a campaign to demand policy sensitization and accountability,
the three questions that framed this particular workshop as well. We also realized that
sensitization is a very Indian term and people in the UK don’t know what it means. It basically
means raising awareness, consciousness raising. But in the spirit of decolonization, I will
continue to use the term sensitization for this process. So as a part of the campaign, what we
very quickly realized was the complete lack of policy mechanisms and structures around sexual
violence in universities in the UK. We were predominantly a group of South Asian women and
this lack of policy and structure was extremely surprising to us because in India, every workspaces,
including universities, are mandated to have investigation committees to address sexual
violence. We talk about these committees in details in the report, so do read the report
for more information on that. But we were all surprised about the complete lack of knowledge
about these mechanisms, these practices, these policy documents. Leading publications
around sexual violence in higher education still has very, very few voices from the global South
represented, even though some very creative and effective works in theory and activism around this
issue is being conducted there. So the place where we came from was that if you truly want to
understand the depth of the problem and think about laws and solutions, there was an urgent need
to decenter the theoretical understandings and practices and bring focus to the global South.
In a scenario where most higher educational institutions across the world shed similar
issues and concerns, constricting the process of knowledge creation based only on empirical
evidences from the global South created these silos and echo chambers. In many ways now,
decolonization has just become a buzzword used by institutions to further marketization.
But through this workshop, we actually wanted to disrupt that. We wanted to break these silences
and start conversations about new theories, new policies, new practices in the field,
which can be developed through collaboration and communication. And in that process,
we were striving to decolonize the discipline by actually shifting the imperial geographies
of knowledge production a little bit. And things that work in India could very easily be implemented
in the UK because of colonial legacies. So the universities in India were shaped in the exact
same structure and model of the University of London. So this knowledge transfer process is
also structurally possible. Also, higher education is not commonly recognized as a site of violence,
and nor does it recognize itself as an agent of oppression. So its hierarchical nature
gives rise to these visible and often hidden power dynamics which oppresses certain minority
bodies while privileging others. This acknowledgement remained at the core of both this
report and our discussions in the workshop. And finally, this report does not contain
recommendation. It focuses on sharing some of the knowledge, raising questions based on what we have
collectively learned as a group. As researchers, activists, and organizers in the space, we have
all struggled to develop concrete questions and intersectional feminist methods to campaign around
sexual violence within higher education, to campaign for better policies, practices,
institutional accountability. So drawing from our own collective experiences in this workshop,
we shared, discussed, reflected, and spoke about best practices. This report will be available
for everyone to read on the 1752 group website in the resource section. I will do it as soon as I
can figure out how to do it, but it will get done very, very soon. So please do read and give your
feedback, share your thoughts. Feel free to email us. I will drop our email address on the chat.
So feel free to please reach out. And this is a collective work. It’s a labor of love and solidarity.
So please feel free to circulate freely and widely with your fellow comrades, friends,
activists, organizers, researchers in the space. And just one last thing. I wanted to thank
every single person who’ve been involved in this process. This is not a standard workshop. This is
not a standard report. So thank you for putting in your labor and time in the process. I’m truly,
truly grateful for the tremendous love, solidarity, and support that I have received
personally, but also collectively as a group through this process. A special thank you to
Shelza, Sara, and Chandni, who have been my comrades in arms right from the beginning.
They’ve been the facilitators of the three discussion groups, which framed the conversation
of policy sensitization and accountability. And they put together the three main sections
of the report as well. So this would not have been possible without them and their work. So
a big thank you to all of them. And yes, I think I am done. But I, at this point of time, would like
to hand over to Mary and Anna, who’ve also been both involved in this process right from the
beginning. Mary is a professor at the Center for Women’s Development Studies in New Delhi.
And Mary has played a key role in shaping the debates around sexual violence in universities.
She was the co-chair of the suction task force, which was the committee to review the measures
for ensuring the safety of women on campuses and programs for raising awareness. The suction task
force put together a report called the suction report, which is an exemplary report. And we
highly recommend that you read it. The link of that is there in our report as well. And I will
put it in the chat as well. But Mary has also been extremely vocal around the MeToo movement
and recently written an article on feminism, sexual violence, and the times of MeToo in India.
We have been so grateful to have Mary’s support throughout the project. She was our keynote
speaker last year, but also was gracious enough to write the forward to this report. So thank you
so much, Mary. We know that these times have been trying in India with everything that’s happening
with COVID. So we really, really appreciate you taking the time out and doing this for us.
Anna was a senior lecturer at sociology at the University of Portsmouth, and she would be at the
University of York now, and one of the founding members of the 1752 group. Her research focuses
on gender and class inequalities in music education and higher education. She led on the work with the
National Union of Students on behalf of the 1752 group in producing the report called Power in the
Academy Staff Sexual Misconduct in UK Higher Education in 2018. She was also the lead author
of the report called Silencing Students. They’re both available on the 1752 group website,
and also the links of that is there on our report. So we highly recommend these as reading materials
if you want to know more about the sector. But yes, I think that’s all from me. Again,
thank you so much to everyone for being here and being a part of this report launch.
It’s also a reason for us to celebrate because it’s taken a while for us to put this
together collectively. So we will celebrate with some music at the end of our conversation with
Mary and Anna. But at this point of time, I would like to hand over to you, Mary,
to start the conversation. And thank you so much.
Thank you. Thank you, Adrija, Anna. First of all, congratulations to stay on course. As it were,
you had this three-day workshop last year. I was there for a bit of it. And the fact that you have
brought it to this stage, I think, is something to really commend. Secondly, I also want to say
that it’s the very way you began your remarks today. In a sense, your own location, I’m someone
who believes very much in the politics of location, your own location as South Asian,
I don’t know if you use the phrase, people of color in the UK context, and how that was indeed,
you know, when we do feminist methodology, we always say, you know, what’s the space from
which you ask your questions. And in this particular instance, I want to say it has been
so remarkable that your own location as students or young lecturers in the UK
with a certain connect to India and its history, its struggles,
gave rise to, you know, I don’t know if there’s time for all of that, but it gave rise to the
sets of questions that you then addressed to the institutions in the UK. You know, I find that
really fascinating. And as I mentioned in my foreword, it’s not just the fact that this is
a conversation, but, you know, we use the word, you know, decolonial sometimes rather carelessly.
But in this instance, it seems to have a certain, how shall I say, traction in the sense that
you are the ex-colonized in the now post-colonial context of the UK,
raising questions to the empire in a way, to its institutions, its higher education
institutions and discovering strangely enough a lack. You know, we are much more used to the idea
of a traffic that works from the first world to the third world, where we make up our sense of lack
in the third world as behind and backward and so on. And I’m not suggesting that the UK is
backward. That’s not my point at all. But I am saying that it was by virtue of that location
that you discovered certain understandings, practices, mechanisms, policies as
you know, in the breach. That is to say they were not there or they were either or, you know, and I’m
not enough, you know, I’m not as knowledgeable as I might be on the situation in the UK. But I,
but the extent to which that was the case and therefore that this was then the energizing,
how shall I say, process that led to this workshop, which had, I know, pandemic not been there,
would probably have been an offline face-to-face experience of exchange and then took the version
that it did. So I see this as an ongoing process, you know, and the point is not, and as my few
remarks will indicate to you, the point is not to indicate that we’ve got it and the UK hasn’t. That
would be absolutely a gross misrepresentation. But to indicate that these lines of connection
can happen in unprecedented ways by virtue of the location that you now currently inhabit.
And that it has been a productive one for those reasons that we have. And then I’m looking forward
to this being there for a genuine conversation between Anna and myself. And by way of just a
little bit of context setting, I thought, so, I mean, we are now, of course, the pandemic is
overshadowing everything as it is throughout the world in different ways. But we are also inhabiting,
I don’t know what to call it, an ecosystem of a sort that has many, and I don’t wish to sort of
specify it further. I think everyone here would understand what I’m referring to. An ecosystem
within which the very elements that you want us to talk about, the activism on the one hand
and institutions and their mechanisms on the other, both of these are in a situation of
instability and uncertainty as never before. And that’s the point I want to sort of note here,
that even a year ago, perhaps between last year and this year, there have been more
instabilities and uncertainties and not only pandemic related. So I thought this might be a
valuable opportunity for both Anna and myself to situate our conversation by taking a step back
and actually locating some of the moments of this history that was or has been the source of the
inspiration for what we are attempting to do. And not to make this, I can’t, in the space of 10 or
15 minutes, provide anything like a review, but just to mark a few moments. Because you see,
in your question, Adrijya, your first question for this conversation was what is the role of
activism in engaging with institutions and in making institutions more accountable?
And if I were to apply that question here and look at our movement or our history of legal reform,
then the simple answer is that activism has been the backbone, has been at the back of
any and all forms of change that we have seen on issues, specifically on issues of sexual violence
and harassment. If we go back to, say, the 70s moment, to put it very dramatically,
I think if we had not had that kind of movement, if we had not had that kind of activist intervention,
to this very day, we would still be governed by the Indian Penal Code of 1860.
The Indian Penal Code of 1860, it had a whole section concerning what we would today call
violence and sexual harassment. But the biggest shock for groups, the new groups that emerged in
the 70s after the emergency, was that these sections of the IPC, as we call them, had never
been looked at and had never been revised. We had a brand new constitution, but none of these. So
we have a language embedded in our law books on rape. And I find the language on sexual
harassment particularly telling, it’s called Outraging the Modesty of a Woman. This is
19th century Victorian language. This was the language of 1860. This was the language in our
law books in 1978. And continues, by the way, some version of that language continues to be in our
law books to this very day. We may have worked on performing the laws connected to that. But
when it comes to the IPC, so it took the Mathura, as we call it, the Mathura case of 1978,
which was a case of custodial rape, for women’s organizations to recognize the state of play
and to raise questions in this particular case around sexuality of the woman, consent,
and the state of the law, which are with us to this very day. I mean, the letter that was posted
by the four law professors in the name of wanting to revisit this particular case and bring it back
to the Supreme Court, because this was a case where the policemen were exonerated by claiming
that the victim was habituated to sexual intercourse and therefore could not count as rape.
This case has been seen as a kind of takeoff point for activism in India around violence.
So I just want to mark that for us. The next moment, a parallel moment if you like,
was around precisely sexual harassment, which had the rather quaint terminology which we used at
the time called eve teasing. The phrase eve, I’m not even sure where that came from,
but the daily harassment, the daily harassment that young women, especially students and other
young people, were facing. At that time these were students, invariably students or young lecturers,
but they didn’t exactly name the university campus. They named public spaces in general,
in which streets and public transport were key. These were their key sites for naming where this
kind of harassment took place and why it needed redressal and what was required to actually bring
it to the notice of the public and the law. So I want to mark these and then jump forward to
the moment that we are maybe more familiar with, which is the Vishaka guidelines that were brought
in in the late 1990s in the wake again of a case of rape, Bauri Devi’s case in Rajasthan,
which was then renamed because I don’t think when the rape took place she was an animator,
a village animator, a satin as the phrase was, in the rural areas of Rajasthan and I won’t go
to the details of the context within which it happened, but when in fact her case failed in the
courts and it was claimed that this rape could never have taken place, the guidelines that were
put in place became workplace guidelines because she was a so-called voluntary worker under the
government and hence it was seen as a case of workplace violation. So these were our Vishaka
guidelines and again it was purely and only activism movement interventions that brought
it to this particular stage resulted in the Vishaka guidelines being put together
and they are becoming having the status of guidelines no doubt for as long for about a
decade or more until such time as a law came into place. Subsequently again if I were to point to
the first location for actually universities becoming the site for thinking about alternate,
so till now what we had were legally sanctioned forms of redressal and the idea of needing
alternate forms of institutional redressal took birth in Jawaharlal Nehru University which could
be called one of our activist universities if you like, it’s not accidental that it took birth there
and that it was and I think you had Aisha Kidwai with you last year, she was you know as you can
imagine she was one of the spearheading people who she was part of the gender studies forum which
was a forum of young young faculty in that time in the 1990s in JNU and it was they who spearheaded
the campaign to demand the formation of an institutional mechanism which came to be known
as GSKASH, the one that is I think amongst the most well known in India but it was purely their
campaign it was led by young faculty and then of course joined by students and others took some
years for that to be established in the late 1990s early 2000s and then we come to Saksham
and then we come to Saksham which you’ve already mentioned which is another kind of moment I would
say now when I look back you know I would say that was the kind of it was after the most one
of the most horrifying the so-called Delhi gang rape case of 2012 which for reasons you know
we may wonder what or the range of reasons that this hit such a degree of public outcry
as well as institutional accountability that is the remarkable thing that post this particular
case we saw a form of not just the fact that tens of thousands took to the streets but that
two laws were created the amendments to the rape laws that had been pending for a very long time
that were expanding the definition of rape and that we had the first sexual harassment
workplace act of 2013 these happened in rapid rapid succession after after 2012 plus the university
the UGC the university grants commission also experienced accountability right and therefore
calling for the section task force which you know then put together the report that you’re familiar
with and which I happen to be a part of so this is 2013 and these section guidelines were in
fact we were we were amazed that this was possible we were not told what to say or what to do every
word of the of the of that report was ours it was not edited by anyone else that is I think a
remark now when I look back I just think that was a some kind of a special moment in our history
but soon after that when those guidelines had to be sort of converted into something legal
for for for universities to follow on that’s when the system kicks in around 2015-16
it’s a complete the the the ICC the internal complaints committee rules that were brought in
around 2016 were completely top down they were really quite I mean I would say almost the polar
opposite in terms of not in terms of content that would be simplistic not at all that would not be
fair but in terms of their creation and mechanism in terms of the fact that they were a product of
the ministry of law and none of us played any part in their creation and they were top down in fact
in the case of JNU in particular as we as you may have heard last year it was so dramatic that it
coincided with the locking of the GS cash office you know as dramatic as that and the putting in
place of the ICC in its place which also did not which which does have some I mean it’s not it’s
not it’s not a lawless law anything as dramatic as that but it certainly did not carry much of the
spirit of suction forward and it certainly did not carry some of the more democratic principles
of the GS cash structure forward so that’s 2016 and then I don’t take too long now
um then we have the Losha moment and the Me Too moment which were 2018-19 which if we think of
the mechanisms um the alternate mechanisms of institutional accountability being the the GS
cash type of structure as an alternative to the law courts and the police then we had an alternative
to the alternative if you like in the form of Losha in the form of Me Too right so that’s 2018-19 I
don’t need to say more about that now except to say that we are now in 2021 and we are in a movement
therefore of very deep reckoning at every level in other words we would be looking at this point to
any and all modes whereby activism can indeed connect to our law courts our police force
um our institutional mechanisms such as they may be whether compromised or otherwise and voices
on social media with their own ethos their own ecosystem and so on with all its pluses and
minuses um this is this is I want to I want to stop my my my initial intervention here to say
that this is a remarkable moment for us you know for instance in the case just to give an example
that in January 2000 I think was in 2019 when there was a very clear case on the part of a
faculty member from the sciences um lodged by several women several women who worked in his lab
given the compromised status of the ICC the institutional mechanism was letting him off
and making it possible for him to continue so what does the what does activism do then
activism actually goes to the police it lodges its protests in front of in front of the police
station outside JNU and attempt and makes efforts then to demand that this case be brought before a
court of law so it goes all the way back to the very mainstream modes that we thought were not
the best when it comes to institute when it comes to experiences on campuses where we thought a nicer
a more humane a one that would give better relief a one that would enable complainants to speak up
more easily these were the reasons we wanted an alternative to the law courts and the police
and here we were going all the way back to the police and the law court so so so you know I’m
trying to say that this is a moment where it depends on what are the sets of equations at a
given time the back of most of our movements the attempt right now is attack on the part of the
state movements are doing what they’re doing but under these severe restrictions most of the time
we don’t know how we can be not even committed together we do what we do online or even online
can have its dangers institutional mechanisms I won’t say they’re broken but in so many institute
instances they are compromised so here we need to then ask ourselves given all the kind of wisdom
of your of your workshop last year and the best practices that you thought about
what what is possible then you know in a in a moment of this kind which maybe maybe a different
question later it may also I live in Delhi and I will allow for the fact that my understanding
is deeply colored by being too close to the seat of power that’s not a good place to be
and it’s you know there may well be other strategies and other examples that maybe
state universities might be able to offer we are central universities on the on the whole or
central institutions coming under directly coming under the central government and so on so let me
stop there and invite Anna please do share I’m very very interested to hear what you might how
you might wish to describe your situation your your location for us to think ahead thanks
thank you so much Mary and thank you Adresha both for organizing the initial event last year and
for inviting us back to speak about this report I found the event last year a revelation because
having been working for several years on these issues in the UK it was actually embarrassing and
shameful to me to realize that a lot of the issues we had been grappling with had been grappled with
for years by activists feminists in India and there was a huge amount that we could and should
be learning from them so I did go away and read the section report and and I’ll say a little bit
more about what I think those learnings could be and of course in terms of the politics of
positionality which yeah I appreciate Mary centering that I think you know it’s interesting that the
7052 group was set up by myself and Tiffany Page were the were two of the co-founders and we’re
both New Zealand white New Zealanders living in the UK it’s almost like it’s almost like
you know yes we were the colonizers my family were the colonizers in New Zealand but you know
but there’s there’s some politics there to unpack but then obviously our whiteness very much giving
us some you know giving us power and voice to speak up and be taken seriously I think
um so uh actually Adresha and I have um just finished writing a book chapter comparing um
the India in the UK in terms of responses and it was really illuminating and fascinating to
write this it’ll be out I think next year in a edited collection by Miranda Horvath and
Jennifer Brown um and yeah it was it was a great privilege to work with Adresha on this because
I think we found that there were um there was some surprising similarities so there’s actually
quite a different context so in the UK it’s you know much more um marketization of our education
has been underway for a lot longer than in the UK than in India so we’ve got really 20-30 years of
kind of marketization and neoliberal reforms and yet there is no statutory duty for universities
to act on sexual violence sexual harassment activism goes back um well we don’t really we
need a historian to really look at what’s been going on with activism um for staff to
students sexual exploitation there was a report in a conference of the 90s from Tony Jeffs and
Pam Carter um and I think there’s been there was activism going you know going on in the 80s 90s
2000s but it’s quite um there isn’t a narrative for that or at least if anyone’s got any publications
around that please share it um but then actually the national union of students took this up
from 2000 on 2010 onwards with their report hidden marks um and then at that point about
2015 onwards it has been taken up by sector bodies and most recently by the regulatory
body in England the office for students and so we’re at a very interesting moment because
suddenly regulation in this area in higher education is on the cards and universities
are jumping to attention um or at least some of them are um because they think that they
might get regulated and and it’s been very interesting to me you know carrying out research
um I’ve been carrying out research interviews the last couple of days actually um with my
Erin Shannon who’s a research associate working with me and we’re carrying out interviews with
complainants um making reports of sexual misconduct to higher education institutions as well as to
people handling complaints and students union activists trying to make change within the
universities and um so you know I find myself in a difficult position because I can see that
the kind of threat of regulation actually does make universities jump and suddenly take this
seriously but of course we don’t want to rely on the state to bring in anything that um you know
responsible types of regulation we it’s not very likely to happen and and suddenly the state we
have at the moment is not um you know doesn’t have the same priorities as we as activists and
feminists might do um so my um our organization 7052 group was set up in 2016 um as activists
at Goldsmiths University of London and my colleague Tiffany Page um along with others who were being
who had been doing activism with against against the institution for about three years at that
point to try and tackle endemic sexual harassment by staff within their within their department um
um you know realized that actually this wasn’t a local problem to Goldsmiths this was a national
problem we couldn’t find the expertise that was needed I wish we’d been in touch with um activists
and india at that point because you had the expertise that we were looking for we were
we were literally scouring the internet to try and find who had dealt with this issue before
particularly staff as perpetrators um and so we realized we needed to become the experts and we
set up our group um as the 7052 group with the 1,752 denoting the amount of money
that Goldsmiths was willing to you to put into tackle this issue uh to remind ourselves that
these kind of sticking plaster solutions this kind of like small payoff to make you shut up
uh is not you know is not adequate and it’s not going to make a difference to a kind of
decades-long entrenched problem um so just to say a little bit about what I think activists in the
UK can learn from um you know from Indian activists and feminists firstly around um the limits of
regulation now in India uh you know as as Mary was touching on um there is a statutory there is
statutory duty on universities to have an internal complaints committee to address sexual harassment
and it seems like at JNU you know they’re kind of prototype for that that was quite as far as I can
tell pretty successful because there was a groundswell of feminist activism behind it
but at other universities it’s on paper or it’s kind of um it’s not effective at all so you can
have this regulation telling universities they need to do stuff but it’s worth keeping reminding
ourselves and you know as a as a bourgeois white feminist is particularly important for me to remind
myself because I still think oh the state can solve it and I need to be remind myself no it’s
you know the state is a tool that we can use to make change but the state isn’t going to solve this
um so there’s a fine line I think towards between us using the state to try and push
in the direction push it in the direction we need to go and for me that’s around transparency I
would like to see I think regulation around pushing institutions more transparency in this
area could be very helpful but they’re not being used by the state and I think there is a bit of
it is still a bit of a kind of a um a hopefulness among um the just the conversations of the UK that
that the state that regulation will save us and I think regulation will make a difference but um
there’s a you know there’s dangers as well as possibilities there so that’s one learning from
India I think a second learning from India is around the way that feminists and activists need
to engage both with due process within institutions and we need to be shouting outside the gates at
the same time so I think one thing I’ve learned because as a feminist who’s engaging mainly with
due process now I was shouting outside the gates and now I’ve kind of gone in and trying to change
from within um and you know it’s reminded me that we need both that you can’t have one without the
other there have to there has to be people on the inside thinking about what would a feminist
process look like uh to keep you know to to I was going to say keep women safe but I don’t like the
you know protectionist connotations of that to try and bring justice for survivors the justice
that survivors want and need um so engaging with the process within the institution but then also
realizing that we’re going to have to be shouting outside the gates as well in order to get the
kinds of changes we need and then a third uh point I could probably go on but I’ll just make
three three points um is around the boundaries uh between public and private in terms of how
institutions deal with uh with with with um cases of sexual violence and misconduct so at the moment
I can see some of the people on this call are very more familiar than me with the issues around the
GDPR the general data protection regulation and that’s proved to be a real barrier
um within the due process side of things for how institutions um can um offer justice to survivors
who come forward and you know and to support survivors to get what they need now in the section
report actually um there’s some really interesting recommendations around um sharing um sharing
sanctions um uh for example if if there’s this happens a lot with staff cases if there’s going
to be multiple students coming forward with a complaint about a particular member of staff
it suggests they um the section report suggests that they may consider any earlier complaints
against the defendant um and actually in some cases there can be the option to make this public
now this is hugely contentious and I know we could talk about it all all day and I would love to hear
more from Mary about um um you know about how these issues have been negotiated because this is
this is precisely the point that some of you know some of us who are discussing these
problems are at um so yeah I suppose um maybe I’ll pass over to Mary and if you you know it’d be
interesting to hear your reflections on on what we can learn from you and just to just to finish
you know you said um you were you were hinting at the UK isn’t uh behind in there on this issue
and actually I think it is I think I think progress has been made over the last 10 years
and particularly the last few years but I think in terms of the sophistication in the you know
complexity of the discussion that is happening in India is actually beyond where we’re where
we’ve been in the in the UK and I think we can you know the the balancing of um of you know
creating the spaces we want to see and this kind of more utopian blue skies vision of activism
and then working with what we’ve got now and how can we how can we make you know how can we just
allow students and staff to carry on with their jobs with their careers make the institution safe
enough to keep going and balancing those two um imperatives I think that there’s a much more
sophisticated conversation going on in India.
Interesting Anna to listen to you and also to get a sense of your own uh location in the sense
that it’s probably not accidental that you’re you’re coming from another space uh whatever
that’s his it’s you know New Zealand’s uh relationship to to to to the UK has its own
you know deep deep histories uh but I’m I’m somehow not surprised to hear this that that
indeed it is these uh you know when you’re sort of uh in some sense insider outsider of of another
kind uh with white skin in this case nonetheless that insider outsider doesn’t go away it would
appear uh because I am actually uh you know uh you know when I remember last year hearing Adrija
and and hearing about some of the issues and the campaigns and so as and a couple of other
universities all led by by it seemed from by South Asian uh women um and whatever you know
one hears on the grapevine about oh Cambridge what kind of places Cambridge Oxford you know
the the top top universities of the country uh where there is very little in place or where the
sense of of privilege of senior of of of male faculty appears or you know quite quite feudal
if I may say so um uh this in turn I I would say and I and I’m I’m very much in agreement
with what your you know your your praise if you like of our league of our legacy of reform on
the legal front and our experimentation with I mean we have the one of the most I mean we have
a legal system which is actually extremely extremely problematic I mean we have we have
under trials millions of under trials who never get to you know uh go anywhere um so there’s
nothing to be said in favor of our legal system but for within that we have um lawyer feminist
lawyers and lawyering and those skills having been used in these parallel alternate uh
institutional spaces second to none in the world I would say you know I mean we we could probably
say we have our own Catherine MacKinnon’s or whatever you want to call them uh in that sense
in our spaces but what I what I feel now when I now when I when we grapple with the state of play
and this is I think is coloring everything that we now experience today when an institution itself
is under attack when in fact the you know genuine or or the center where I work or any number of
spaces where you get things the feeling that the that the powers that be will rather you didn’t
exist or that you were you were you were restructured in in a way that would depoliticize
you all together um then one of my questions is have we actually looked at our these very
institutions the university system higher education have we do this the space within which we want to
do what we what what what we are all talking about today which is engender them make them
freer have mechanisms that are suitable to a space of this sort which is to say sensitize them in
uh preventive and pedagogic means I think that was something that our suction report emphasized
a lot that in fact we might we might even be accused of not paying enough attention to legal
and giving so much more if you look at the section on workshops
and so on um there was so much more of a pedagogic or sensitizing nature um that now I ask myself um
have we understood and and I would say post me too also uh when we heard from people how difficult
it was for them to speak up especially when it involved a faculty in a situation of power
and popularity um the then and this would be a contrast I would say when I when I look at our
university which is which has been fundamentally a state created with a colonial history uh our
university system um how how will we describe it and I’m almost tempted to use the word feudal here
that you know uh sexual harassment and workplace uh rules were created for capitalist workplaces
when in fact there is a bottom line that a workplace has to look into uh and hence very
often for capitalist reasons the the administrative system will indeed kick in when there is a case of
sexual harassment that they need to do it’s for capitalist reasons it’s because they can’t afford
to look bad and lose uh uh in terms of the market what kind of spaces are universities and why has
it been so difficult in the Indian context to actually uh indict or put in some way in whether
whether by virtue of the ports or in our alternate institutional mechanisms when it comes to uh
faculty or administrators in a certain kind of senior position we have very very few examples
of those we have a lot of examples of student student uh forms of harassment and excellent
cases of or bringing into play this kind of sensitizing uh and some of them were horrific
cases we had cases of attempted murder and things like that which uh or suicide and um and those were
in fact very much there in front of our faces when we did the suction report writing um so uh
I think that that level we were very sensitized to the culture of our universities uh I am less
certain about our having put our finger on and I think Lasha was for that why was it a lightening
rod of some sort this is not about whether we say yes or no to what it was doing it’s more about I
think it it it did pinpoint a certain aspect of the culture of our universities and the ways in
which uh power equations uh worked there and the extent to which the very idea that asking after
why weren’t there more complaints we are very aware of cases why were there not more complaints
coming forward to the GS caches or the other you know the FASH in in Delhi University or the
similar ones in Hyderabad Central University or EFLU or the other you know where they were where
systems were there where people there was a whisper campaign that told you that things were not as
they should be um but people did not come forward uh and what was it about those structures that made
them feel they might be worse off if they spoke up after all the whole idea of these mechanisms
is to give relief is to make uh people feel supported if they come forward and why was it
not possible in these in within these systems prior I’m talking prior to the compromise status
of the internal complaints mechanisms that are now being imposed uh there was a sense of disquiet
around this and and and this is something I think the need the nature of the you know the
relationship between teachers and students uh in the context of university the power the unique
power that teachers can have by virtue of the role they play as pedagogues the very thing we
wanted was pedagogy a kind of feminist pedagogy but lo and behold there are forms of you may call
it eroticized pedagogy uh that works very powerfully in classroom contexts such that
it becomes almost impossible then for for speaking up to take place uh and the fact
that this kind of power relationship is not just you know confined to that particular classroom
but may follow up especially if you’re a research student and and your relationship with your
supervisor or the or the or the or the or the or the you know the the committee uh and and there
and there and their colleagues which follows you well after you complete your degree and and and
in fact shapes uh your future or job prospects or and so on and so on how much the fact that there
was something less that I’m calling feudal is a careless word don’t don’t mind but it is a
careless word it needs much more specific description um that that somehow that vitiates
the the the the the very excellent mechanisms that one had put in place to try and enable
people to come forward I think that is one kind of question we are still stuck with um uh uh quite
apart and which has made us at times look to the courts there are many many more court cases today
uh uh regarding universities and cases pertaining to universities in now in our courts
than there are in our ICCs so this is this is you know you know so so so what does that tell us
uh that we’re now placing more hope in in in the in the you know in in our court structures
that they may deliver a little more justice than maybe the institution mechanisms might what does
it tell us I I’m putting this forward uh as as a sign of where we need a little more reflection
though I I think and though I am very uh you know I’m full of admiration of our feminist lawyers
and and so on in the space of some of the most uh you know uh regressive judges and judgments
nonetheless they they manage to hold their own to considerable extent um but within with the
mechanisms within I feel today in a kind of crisis uh in spite of all that has gone into them
because of these power equations that I think um we have not yet come to terms with
yeah so these are sorry go ahead yeah I was going to say these are some of the questions that you
know Tiffany and I and others have been grappling with for four years and I think it’s um yeah it’s
never possible to underestimate to overestimate the amount of fear that people will feel in coming
forward to um to disclose violence abuse or harassment from a from somebody in a position
of power and um you know it really um you know one of the things that surprised me in my research
in this area is that um you know I have come across uh women professors as perpetrators um
you know junior male professors as perpetrators it’s um um it’s institutions protect all abusers
it’s not just the I mean they protect high profile ones for sure but they’re actually
protecting all abusers and I don’t and I think it’s more about the kind of um you know patriarchal
history of universities um you know when we we look at the history of universities in the UK
you know women have been sidelined very very recently and of course in many um you know in
positions of power women still are underrepresented and sidelined as well as you know particularly
women women of color um so that kind of longer history of you know longer patriarchal history
of universities really um is still with us today um and it’s you know my previous research on on
classical music and classical music education has got these similar you know bourgeois structures
of power um to universities and for a long time people were pointing out to me those
similarities between the structures of power and classical music and in higher education um but
you know it’s it’s the more I look into it the clearer it is um yeah um I’m just I suppose I’m
um I feel like you were saying that you know that you’ve almost got to an impasse around um
people going to the legal system for justice as opposed to within their institutions and I
almost feel like it’s the opposite here in the UK because the legal system the criminal justice
system is an absolutely appalling state in terms of dealing with sexual gender-based violence
huge backlogs you know cases not being taken forward um uh you know it’s it’s very very very
difficult process that people really don’t want to go through and so in a sense I feel that’s
partly why we do need uh higher education institutions um we need um this focus on what
can higher education institutions how can we do this differently how can education institutions
and workplaces and institutions in society more generally respond to the challenge which that
challenge from second-rate feminism which I feel like institutions have not sufficiently stepped
up and addressed you know so 50 years ago uh you know there was all this amazing work done by my
feminist forbearers around making visible sexual gender-based violence across society but it’s not
until really in very recent years um you know since the me too movement or just a little bit
more recently that education institutions and even workplaces have stepped up or have haven’t
stepped up but are being forced to step up and confront um their role in tackling sexual gender
based violence so you know my feeling is that a lot of uh university schools even workplaces
just don’t realize the scale of the challenge they don’t realize what you know we’re trying
to do something quite new here and we’re asking institutions to do something quite new which is
to not replicate what the criminal justice system is doing but to create new systems
and to create new systems that do something differently that do justice and recognition
and care differently or better or do them at all I suppose uh and so we are actually creating new
systems and I think that there’s you know there’s a discourse around best practice or good practice
in the UK and um that that discourse almost really underplays what what we need and what we’re asking
for which is um you know which is thinking about what does justice what does safety look like
for uh you know for students and staff who’ve been victimized and I feel like we’re still figuring
those questions out and quite often um people ask me you know you know journalists are asking all
time you know what needs to happen and you know they want a kind of a quick three-line responses
to do this do this do this and I’m you know after years of doing this work I still really struggle
to to come up with those kinds of responses because actually it’s not a quick fix and and
if it would be would be belying the system if we if we suggested you know if we suggested oh just
do this and this and this and things will be okay because they won’t so you know maybe my kind of
very academic responses to all these journalists is um is a more honest because um it’s you know
it’s a it’s a big ask it’s a big change and I think I mean maybe I’m you know I’m bourgeois
and white enough to be hopeful about the possibility for institutional change but um
I do see some a minority of institutions in the UK that are making I think a really impressive
progress you know progressive change you know often despite uh despite the kind of wider
conditions of higher education uh so I you know I do feel that it’s possible for education
institutions to offer an alternative to the criminal justice system and um and I guess that’s
the direction of travel that that I’m working towards in my work um so it’s it’s kind of ironic
that you know there’s so much that we can learn from indian institutions but at the point where
we’re starting to feel like we’re making a little bit of progress um that actually in india you’re
feeling like things are slipping out of your grasp
I should a small maybe I should make a small um caveat here in the sense that because we’ve been
closed down since uh february of last year and there’s no end in sight to that we are we are
functioning under the lockdown of the pandemic uh since early 2020 and into 2021 uh and obviously
when we’re all you know online all classes are being held entirely online uh and I think that
online uh and so on and there is therefore no community uh outside of that uh there are no
campus there’s no camp I live in Delhi university um you know there’s nobody here um since since last
year other than those of us who happen to have residential uh quarters here um there are no
students here uh so that has played its own part in terms of you know what might have been in the
sense of what kinds of struggles we had prior to the you know to march of last year which included
by the way student-led campaigns of a rather different kind um uh regarding our uh you know
our uh uh citizen event with act uh this you know the the the delhi at least and elsewhere
the uh the protests uh against the ca uh in in our context the the riots that took place in in in
in uh in parts of delhi uh and so on so those have colored uh and the and the kinds of arrests that
have happened many of them students um from our from our central universities um uh this is the
this is the climate within which we are now uh and and the the this directs uh and of course
there’ve been other agitations so there’s been a farmer’s agitation outside the outside uh at the
borders of delhi uh or with you know against the farm laws in which issues of sexual harassment
there have been raised um on the part of women present and so on and how was how does one address
uh issues of that sort within a so-called movement you know apart from talking about
mechanisms within a university context or workplace context what about movement contexts um
these kinds and and and these are all being the point i’m making is that it’s not a separate
space this has been deeply influenced by all that has been happening uh you know the fact that we’ve
had institutional mechanisms and so on plays its part in then the fact that the movement then says
uh well what about a movement space can we imagine a mechanism a kind of new process here what
would that look like um but everything is colored by the moment we’re in right now and even our
memories are being sort of deeply i should say uh you know there’s a truncation of memory even
for someone like myself i can’t quite remember what life was like uh before 2020 when we had
regular you know classes and regular interactions with one another and the issues at that time which
was sort of as it were just forced into a kind of you know ending a forced ending uh at one level
and shifting of focus uh on another so so no so i i do i i wonder whether if in the in the months
to come we were to actually see you know with vaccinations or whatever a return to a quote
unquote a new normal whatever that might look like uh what kinds of questions about mechanisms
what kind of experiences might come to the fore uh given that the space of the home has occupied
such a large you know for the first time i this is i think happened all throughout the world that
the space of the home and its its structures its everydayness its violence its powers gained us
gained visibility as never before under the under the lockdown uh because everybody was at home uh so
so what would happen if we repopulate our institutions tomorrow uh and in within what
kind of political alignments might be enter and what kind of questions might be asked of of these
institutional mechanisms tomorrow uh based on you know what has happened so far i can’t predict that
you see and and and but i’m so i don’t want to say that we’re in an en pass which is sort of forever
that’s not not no it’s it’s in the current moment that we inhabit so uh i do think that uh and and
and there was a question i think from from adrija regarding private universities and and and state
universities the backbone in india has been state universities we’ve seen uh an expansion on
philanthropically structured private universities which are elite and we’ve had a massification of
commercial private universities and i must say about the latter i i really don’t know to what
extent they even subscribe to any of these uh are mandated they may come broadly under the ugc
mandate but whether in fact they have uh any of these things in their systems in whatever shape
or form i i actually don’t know uh the philanthropic ones in some shape or form yes um and they are
they are often in an imitate they are often trying to imitate um if not the uk then the u.s
they try to be liberal arts institutions uh given the high fees that they that they are able to
commandeer uh and sometimes even foreign faculty they would like to claim lay claim to a very
liberal space uh and possibly therefore would also have uh sexually you know sexual harassment
mechanisms but you know i have to say i have yet to hear
and adrija you correct me please but from the ashokas and the jindals and the you know snus i
i um or even epu i’d like to hear what have we got from those spaces
excuse me by way of uh um experiences
sorry
perhaps it’s time to pass back over to you adrija and uh hear from everyone else
really thank you so much uh both mary and anna um just just a quick thing that i wanted to add
was that also that you know that moment of change that mary you were talking about like just post
suction so suction happens in 2013 and and then immediately in 2014 uh elections we have a fascist
authoritarian right-wing patriarchal uh homophobic transphobic government uh at the center who kind
of like actively look at dismantling university spaces and because uh the main voices of dissent
around the government was coming from one the university spaces and second the workers and
farmers so they actively looked at dismantling these university spaces from banning of books to
banning of protests to banning of elections uh to sacking of teachers to placing right-wing vice
chancellors in all universities at the top so that they could be governed from the top down
and the dismantling of gs cash like became a part of that process of dismantling campuses but also
so kind of that they’re kind of reinforcing their patriarchal protectionism so when i interviewed
some uh feminist activists who’ve been working on campuses they actually said that you know before
this government came in uh uh things were not great but after they’ve come in when we said that
you know we are getting sexually harassed instead of like actually addressing it and putting
mechanisms in place and actually provide making these fully functional committees what they have
done is they’ve made the walls outside our hostels bigger longer so that the men can’t look into the
women’s hostel they have put cctv cameras directly looking into our rooms they’ve put barbed wires
outside our hostels so that uh and nobody can jump in so i think it’s also and i think what
what was important about the the workshop and the conversations that we had was also
i think uh in our sessions uh we had a very strong emphasis on looking at sexual harassment and
campuses on on this like larger socio-political changes which were happening both in the uk
and in india at that point of time so i think and and we talk about that
a lot in the report as as well like how these like you know these these larger socio-political
changes are affecting campuses but also the importance of looking at what both
you and mary were talking about is that not looking at it as an individual problem but
as a structural problem like the structures of academia are violent towards certain bodies
towards certain communities and if we actually need to start addressing this problem we actually
need to kind of think about how we can start dismantling these power relations these hierarchies
these basic violence structures that academia and and relations that academia uh is uh is
primarily uh built on uh and i think the third thing that i wanted to highlight was uh the fact
that uh you know both in the report and in the workshop we kind of looked at sexual harassment
as like precarity was gendered violence uh and you know how the changing natures of academia how
new democratization was also affecting certain bodies and in in that trajectory also leading
to more forms of violence within the campuses and there was an urgent need for us to kind of think
through uh those patterns as well uh uh i was just wondering do we have any questions comments
reflections um unfortunately we had to do this webinar format which i’m not a huge fan of
uh myself but uh those of you who were here last year know that uh we got hacked one of our first
sessions got hacked by uh right-wing trolls from india uh so this had to be done for security
measures and we yeah but please please feel free to come in with your questions comments reflections
thoughts uh and i can uh enable your mic so that you can come in with your contributions as well
if you can raise your hands i can i can start bringing you into the conversation uh one by one
like while you’re waiting for people to respond like i like this is something that you know i
have been uh thinking about myself uh as well and i would really like to know your thoughts
on that so first of all like how do we pass the baton and i think this is something that like a
lot of us have been thinking about like you know these are campaigns that we curate moments of
activism that obviously some of it is around specific cases some of it uh but it kind of
fizzles out right and it’s just become so difficult to find strategies on how to keep the momentum
going how to bring new people into the movement uh and and this is something that i was wondering
like if you had any any strategies or advice from your side uh but also like how do we get
student staff and uh the university administration so they’re all different like stakeholders within
the university right how do we actually make them care about that this is important because
you know as activists in the space we have seen that you know it’s it’s sometimes very very
difficult to even have these conversations with other fellow academics or colleagues
to like that this is important and we need to tackle this as a community
right there’s the only way that things can change is if we can find community solutions so
how do we actually like have these conversations
uh sure and then i can read out geeta’s question well you know actually i’m not sure
to me i’ve always been it’s i i haven’t had to you know yes i think things fizzle out uh me too
now seems to be a little bit of a problem but i think it’s a little bit of a problem but i think
it’s a little bit of a problem but i think it’s a little bit of a problem but i think it’s a little
yes i think things fizzle out uh me too now seems to be you know a part of history
but i think that’s as it should be uh and i that doesn’t worry me too much uh because we are called
to account willy-nilly uh one way or the other one is pulled and pushed uh and if there is a lull
so be it i mean i think it’s very important uh see it’s one thing to institutionalize
its mechanisms but let’s not institutionalize activism uh activism must have its event flow
you know uh and and it must also have its own internal dynamic it must have its own conflictual
structures uh i mean uh aspects to it where some will feel you know that that was you’re not
representing me uh you know in your in your in your struggle uh and and so on i think those are
intrinsic and i would hesitate to think that we need to make sure that that that our whoever we
may be that our work is somehow um uh kept alive when it is maybe not looking very alive at that
point in time i think that’s and all the recent kinds of debates we’ve been having around you
know all these issues that are have been circulating in recent years both in the uk and in india
as it so happens around feminist leadership um around uh you know alternate uh positions around
marginalization within movements within uh um um you know uh activist or NGOized spaces
i think we should take those seriously and one of the lessons we learned from that
is not to push an agenda when it’s when the when the residence doesn’t seem to be there
i would say that which doesn’t mean we just it is not to say there must not be organizing
but i think we must be sensitive to the to the dynamic of organizing and the fact that there are
new voices that that must find space and sometimes it means stepping sideways i don’t i don’t believe
in the idea of stepping away but we have to move sideways at times um i don’t know if that’s an
answer but i think that’s a really important answer uh and uh you know things that all of us
should think about in this space anna sorry you wanted to comment uh yeah just to um echo what
mary said i think one of you know in my kind of younger feminist organizing i remember that
that feeling when you’re doing activism and you think your group’s going to fall apart because
of internal divisions and it feels like the end of the world and actually the thing i learned was
it’s okay if a activist group ends it’s okay if one group you know just because a group finishes
it doesn’t mean it was a failure you know you have your two or three years or five or ten years of
organizing and then as you state you make space for others although i have to say it does worry
me when it’s when it’s organizations particularly those second wave organizations providing
violence against women support that is so sorely needed and you know locally here in port smith
we’ve seen sexual violence support organization being subsumed due to lack of resources very
recently and so it depends what kind of organization we’re talking about but yeah um yeah a group is
not a failure because it finishes i suppose um but yes i suppose to to move to geeta’s question
which i really appreciate thank you geeta um to me this comes back to what mary was saying before
about thinking about uh within movements how do we how do we address sexual violence and harassment
within political movements um and what lessons could we learn in universities from kind of
movement organizing um um and i think it helps if we think of um and techniques and processes to
address sexual violence within universities as more similar to um to that and community
organizing and movements at rather than the criminal justice system um which which has got
to mean we think much more seriously about whose voices are heard and whose voices are represented
um i mean in my research you know particularly looking at staff as perpetrators i’ve found that
student complainants and staff complainants what justice means to them is not punishing
the perpetrator for the most part they might think yes this guy should not have any contact
with students um and they might think that he has to lose his job in order to ensure he doesn’t
have any contact with students but actually it’s not about um punishing somebody and i think that’s
um you know what i’m finding from our ongoing wider research is that that’s that’s the most
that’s the most common response people don’t want somebody else to suffer they just want safety
for themselves and others they just want to be able to continue with their studies with their
careers and not have to give up the space um to their perpetrator so so i think that that kind
of you know if we if we rethink justice we’re not thinking about you know kind of sanctions
or punishments we’re thinking about um we’re thinking about safety and we’re thinking about
how to negotiate the shared space and and keeping everybody in that process safe um and yeah and
so actually those negotiations you know thinking about what um you know what complainants and
survivors want and need from the process can you know sometimes make some of those conversations
more different more more possible but i think more generally you know where universities have
a long way to go is to is thinking about student student voices and at a wide range of student
voices coming into this process rather than just you know as i’ve found in my research is predominantly
white students who are white women who are coming forward to be able to um to feel that they can
make complaints and be taken seriously as far as i can tell it’s obviously very very hard to kind
of get that data but that’s the impression that i’m getting is that it’s it’s um it’s white women
who are more likely to come forward for justice and cis women of course from the institutions
because they expect to be treated fairly and therefore everybody else who does not fall into
that narrow category is uh is is just not even going to bother coming forward potentially
sorry i’m leaving that in a really bad place to pass over but that’s yeah that’s where it’s at i
think um yeah to add that’s wonderful and i i think uh just echo and and say i think when it’s
see one and i think you put it really well what is it about um in in the Indian context possibly
the upper caste or middle class woman uh who is so outraged and i sometimes like the 19th
century language who is so outraged by incidents of harassment unwelcome sexual advances and so
on because she she has more likely assumed that this space is hers uh uh and that you know this
is this is that and that she’s entitled in some way to to be there uh compare that to say a Dalit
student uh in fact one of the curious uh one of my colleagues has recently uh written an essay
which you know might interest uh um Gita and and all of you on sexual harassment this is based on
her field work uh in a in a in a north Indian university um where in fact the the the interesting
uh finding if you want to call it that is that uh the Dalit students the Dalit women students
are not are bypassed they are not the beautiful uh sexually attractive uh subjects of sexual
harassment by faculty uh and hence they are sort of rejected if you like uh and in so far as they
occupy that truly marginal status their experiences are of caste-based uh a violation caste-based
discrimination rather than being you know subjects of unwelcome sexual advances um and
at the at the hands of upper caste male faculty and in fact they sometimes even vent their
frustration in relationship to to upper caste uh students uh seeing them as playing a game uh you
know a quid pro quo game uh for their own advancement through the system uh um uh by
being you know whatever hanging around with faculty spending the day in the faculty’s rooms
um in order for their you know phd’s to to to come to fruition uh compared to where they
whereas they are not even visible they’re not even visible uh in the system so i think we need if
you want to say use the term intersectionality with meaning uh with substance then we need to
actually get to you know intersectionality is actually naming a problem it’s not some easy way
in which all multiple identities will find their place so so let us look more closely at uh at what
exactly makes maybe some women find it easier to even come forward when they do what makes others
believe that this is not a space where they’re likely to find redressal um and that has to be
done in a in a different mode but that has to be done through through a different kind of
organizing um uh pedagogic kind of effort uh and if if in fact upper caste women are constantly
discovering the the perpetrator in a lower caste man and not naming the the the upper
caste faculty member what what is the dynamic here it doesn’t mean that lower caste men are not
harassers it doesn’t mean that they never perpetrate us but we need pedagogic and other
mechanisms then uh to to to put it to put this and as i think anna put it so beautifully the purpose
was not to find someone to blame the purpose was to actually make life uh more wearable um and if
that is the case then what are the kinds of interventions we need so that this you know this
the the dream of an intersectional feminism is to find a better description of the problem it seems
to me
thank you mary and anna there is a question by lena and uh you already started both of you
started addressing that so uh she basically says one wonders what happens to student activism in
the post-pandemic era i mean the online space in many ways has de-politicized the teaching learning
processes
uk you uk you you have you started offline have you gone back to your classrooms we’ll be going
back online i think in september october i’m sorry offline we’ve been online since november yeah
so we should be back i mean it’s all a bit up in the air right now but the plan is to be back in
person in september october god i really hope we are
because i i don’t know what to say lena i i uh i think let that moment come why wouldn’t i
wouldn’t like to i wouldn’t like to uh speculate actually on that i would say a lot it’s still
going on i yeah online i don’t think things have stopped certainly not in the uk the student
activist groups i’m in touch with are still still doing a lot doing even more because they’re able
to reach more students who are online um um you know changes you know changes and and ongoing
reforms reforms is that the right word within universities to their process there’s a lot of
universities are doing kind of top-down reforms of their discipline student disciplinary policies at
the moment um in response in england in response to the office for students um kind of threatened
regulation this kind of very high level statement of expectations that that says oh you should have
fair disciplinary processes and of course what on earth does fair look like this you know that’s a
huge question um anyway so they’ve so so there are kind of a lot of changes going on in the
mechanisms you know kind of in the in the undergrowth there that nobody really knows about
and then um yeah and then um student support is still ongoing you know anyone i think there’s
people on the call here who are dealing with kind of case work and student complaints and
so that’s not going away so it’s probably just made it more difficult for students to maybe start
and get involved in new organizing and activism but what’s already there is certainly
carrying on but yeah i’m not sure to be honest yeah if i could actually add a little bit
to this um i think i agree with you ana i think that there is i mean there are some very interesting
trends in activism which has happened and i think like in the uk especially we’ve seen
massive protests get around the kill the bill uh which has which has been happening so it’s a bill
uh which is um in many ways echoes like in india if i have to draw comparisons like section 144
so like around uh organizing of protests around uh you know curbing of dissent and you know these
are laws which have been tried and tested in the colonies and and now coming back to the mother
country uh the imperial nations in a way but there has been massive feminist protests around that
and and the people who are organizing that are are are people like sisters uncut uh and they
who’ve done some amazing work uh in the space but what i personally actually thought happened
during the pandemic in a very weird way because like suddenly our lives moved online and the fact
that you know when we envisioned this workshop right in the beginning when the process started
was for three academics from india to come to the uk and three academic academics activist survivors
from the uk to go to india uh and but now what happened we ended up with like 25 amazing people
who could come together and it was possible because of the online space we could get so
many different perspectives um it’s also like you know uh in in a very weird way we we didn’t have
to navigate the politics of borders and and visa regimes and uh you know all of that to bring these
people together while we were also very actively thinking and reflecting about about that politics
uh and another thing which i saw was that like at least in in the in the very small circles that i
have been involved with there’s been a lot more internationalist conversations so we’ve been
having like organizing around what was what is happening in india we started having conversations
with comrades uh in chile and columbia around state violence and like drawing parallels between
what was happening we actively organized with comrades in brazil to say that hey with with
bolsonaro and covid response and modi and covid response how can we draw draw uh these connections
uh also conversations between india and pakistan though we are next to each other borders don’t
permit these conversations happening very organically uh often so uh i think like that
was something that the the pandemic taught me and kind of opened up opened up more more opportunities
for uh i’m just trying to see if you have any other do you have any closing comments
uh mariana like anything that you would like to end with
uh um i i agree that you know it’s been a strangely isolating yet reconnecting space
you know we’ve been more isolated than ever before at an everyday level and it’s been very
debilitating and i would say particularly for young people especially for education no question
and i think the losses are massive uh and at some other level there’s been this other possibility
of connection um whatever that and i and i think we will know this that the repercussions of that
i think will become apparent to me later it’s hard to to make a make it you know conclude based on
that uh you know i think we’re all going to be different human beings as a consequence of these
last one and a half years uh it will have affected us in ways we cannot you know predict and um it
maybe in the last one and a half years domestic violence has been much more central
in public discussions than perhaps workplace harassment uh online harassment obviously has
been huge uh continues to be huge um so it will be interesting to see whether when we actually
reconnect i mean very interesting you know i don’t know you know if if in if if you care you are
dying to get together again we don’t know yet certainly the coming uh semester is still going
to be an online semester um though there’s some talk of some classes being what they call blended
whatever that means um it’s one of those funny phrases so uh um i would say wait and see and
let us see what the life my feeling is that you know there is so much that has been happening in
the last decade or so in india at least since at least since the delhi gang rape moment it has
definitely been a new moment uh let us see what what that what that what the next moment is let
let us see and and i think your workshop will have new life i i i’m sure there will be iterations uh
if not in not if not that that whatever that visit that you had envisaged uh in whatever other form
i’m sure it will have another life yeah yeah and just to say i very much hope we can continue
um this dialogue and i feel that i have been learning so much you know just from talking
to you today and from our conversations last year and from reading all of the materials
um and you know for those of us who are based in the uk you know i think you know the main
learning we can take away is about the power of activism to make you know to push institutions
towards progressive change um and i think that we’re in a really good moment right at this point
particularly in england um to to do that pushing because i think that um at the moment institutions
are are working on this issue and they’re bringing in changes really really quickly
the office for students is asking to do that quickly but students voices are not being heard
and the changes that are happening are not necessarily going to take into account
or you know questions of difference among women questions of the wider inequalities
in society and institutions so this is a really important point for activism for pushing for
change and i think one of the things that we really need to do as activists is to try and get
institutions to be more transparent about what they’re doing and trying to make sure student
student and staff are represented fully in these processes and to try and get them to just um just
tell us what they what they’re doing i think um you know in terms of in terms of activist demands
you know both to do more um but also to actually you know just move away from these habits of
secrecy um and to and and to work towards more transparency in what’s going on would be you know
would be really really helpful so i think it’s a really interesting time um in the uk and hopefully
if we speak in a year or two we will actually have some progress to report but fingers crossed
brilliant thank you so much uh mary and anna and you know i forgot to say when i was talking about
you know activism and i forgot to say this very other interesting thing that happened
that suddenly during the pandemic um we became parts of all these reading groups and i found
that extremely joyous uh because you know we are forced to live in an educational system which
prioritizes individual learning and individual uh achievement and individual grades where we
have forgotten the in in many ways the joys of collective learning and collective education
and i think that like provided like the pandemic and on being online provided that opportunity of
rethinking new ways of of learning and working together um and also conversations around care
and the politics of care like at that point we were in the middle of a pandemic and how to
prioritize taking care of our health and ourselves and our bodies and our minds uh and and of our
loved ones around us so i think that was also a very important conversation which should exist
and continue even without the pandemic of how we envision care work uh within our academic
environments uh thank you so much for your time and uh for your support your support uh for this
project actually this workshop would not have happened online if anna and i hadn’t had a phone
call i think two years ago where she said said just move it online and i said yeah sure actually
why not i don’t think you remember anna and and at that point of time i had a conversation with
sara and shelza to say that you know what let’s do this online because we need to we need to do
this so so thank you so much because both of you have been so instrumental in in shaping our
conversations and this is definitely going to be an ongoing conversations at least i’m going to try
my try my best from my side to kind of at least do this as an yearly event uh and actually bring
in more voices beyond uh beyond india uh and uh and the uk into the conversations there’ve been
some amazing work happening in places like egypt nigeria south africa chile brazil so to kind of
bring uh comrades and friends uh and see what we can learn from each other in a more internationalist
feminist intersectional uh context in this area um we also want to very so i’m going to wrap up
this session uh and uh move on to the celebration part of uh of uh of today
and i want to share with you something actually what what a comrade from uh the kurdish movement
told me a few years ago and i’ve kind of kept that uh with with myself uh she said um i wake
up every day because uh there is joy and love and celebration in the movement and we need to make
our movements more joyous because if we are not if there is no joy if there is no love in the
future that we imagine together then what’s the point of our struggle uh and uh revolutionary
feminist music has given us a lot of energy uh in this process we had had music to wrap up our
sessions uh last time as well so we wanted to make this into a tradition to think about the songs and
the music and the poetry uh that energize struggles and form such an intrinsic uh part of it
i am actually at this point of time going to
pass on to sarah uh i’ve just made her a panelist so she should be here sarah can you hear us
i can hear you hello everyone hello so a lot of you know sarah so she has been instrumental in
uh shaping the workshop and the report and we work we both worked together last year to put
the first workshop together but also sarah there’s another side to sarah apart from being a part of
the north south feminist dialogue so she’s a theater activist a street theater activist
and a feminist performer from lahore she is pursuing her phd the department of english at
the university of cambridge and her research looks at left-wing anti-caste feminist punjabi writers
from eastern west pakistan in britain uh so over to you sarah
thank you um it’s really nice to be here and not be here to harass people about like filling out
forms and all of the paperwork that we had to do for so as and just to be here to sing a song um
and and just be part of kind of what i would say is there’s been a great conclusion to the project
which is just a it’s and have another dialogue today which was it was great to listen to ana
and mary and the discussion um the song i’m just going to sing today is also um it was written by
saptar hashmi who was a theater activist um based in um in delhi in india and saptar hashmi also had
an um that kind of cross border connection because he came to lahore in the late 1980s
and he trained a team of um sort of theater street theater practitioners and i so my theater
mentor uh did that workshop with saptar and we’ve performed some of their plays and translated them
into punjabi as well um so um i mean the commitment to kind of working across borders and the commitment
to um forging those feminist solidarities against i mean it across what is one of the most
militarized um borders in the world um i mean it’s a part of it’s part of that um to keep singing
each other’s songs and of course with the the the protests um in india over the last two years
the way fairs came up and even habib jalib so we know that that that those bonds are still still
running really strong so um in the spirit of that i’m just going to sing um saptar hashmi’s
poem so this is or thing or tina he thought
foreign
or
oh
Look at these women, they have come before you.
If you join them, you will not be able to stop the flood.
If women do not rise, the oppression will continue.
The fear in the heart, break it from within.
With just one push, we will be able to stop the flood.
With just one push, we will be able to stop the flood.
If women do not rise, the oppression will continue.
Come, let us fight together, and snatch away our rights.
Come, let us fight together, and snatch away our rights.
If women do not rise, the oppression will continue.
If women do not rise, the oppression will continue.
Thank you.
Thank you, Sarah.
This is the moment when I actually feel that we should be all in a room after our conversation with our tees and singing together and clapping along.
So this is the part of online when I always miss of all of us being together collectively in person in a group, but inshallah it will probably happen someday very soon.
Sarah, I was just wondering, could you just give a little, for people who don’t speak Hindi, like a tiny summary of what the song meant?
Of course, it’s just going to be obviously not as poetic.
That’s also just my constant struggle as a literature student who’s translating lots of material from Punjabi into English, that it loses a lot of the kind of poetry.
But the refrain is quite simple, which is if women don’t rise, violence will just keep increasing and violence will just turn into might, into patriarchal might.
So the violence and oppression will turn into, will harden into these structures.
And then the other, the stanzas are just also just asking women to break the fortress of fear that resides in our hearts and also realizing that it just requires a single push to actually bring the whole edifice down.
And the last stanza is just a celebration of women organizing and protesting and coming together to take what is rightfully theirs.
And it refers to the movement as a kafila or as a procession that has left and cannot be stopped.
Brilliant.
Thank you so much, Sarah.
And, and like you know, while you were singing I was reminded and you were talking about borders and how like even during audit March.
You know you were talking about pinjra tour and the movements in India, and at the same time we were talking about songs of freedom and from movements in Pakistan.
Right throughout this year I think.
I am going to move to our second performer, who is Ananya, a comrade, a writer, an activist. Ananya, can you hear us?
Hi, yeah.
Hi, yeah, yeah, yeah, I can hear you. Yeah, thanks so much for bringing me on and yeah so sorry about like, I had a really bad like connection for quite a few hours and then yeah lots of things happen but I’m here now.
Don’t worry at all.
Over to you.
Should I start? Okay, um, yeah, thanks so much for inviting me to do this, and everything seems like, yeah, really exciting.
So yeah, I’m really, really glad to be here.
Sorry, I’m just trying to set a good angle with my guitar as well.
I’m going to, I’m going to start with a song that I, a song that I wrote a little while ago, a few years ago, which, yeah, just kind of, yeah, I guess I guess when when you said like feminist songs I thought of singing this one because just sort of like the kind of
that women have to like exist in space and not be questioned too much and that kind of thing so I haven’t performed it very often but I’m going to give it a try.
See that girl sitting over there.
Well I’m telling you, she doesn’t care.
What people say they’re walking by, she’s all right, she’s all right, she’s all right.
Whenever she is out on her own.
People will say, she looks alone.
She doesn’t need them. Yeah, don’t mean she said she’s all right, she’s all right, she’s all right.
Those little things they say.
What they’re saying behind her back.
Why can’t they say it to her face.
She’s walking home at the end of the day.
Not trying to get in anyone’s way.
Someone somewhere might say she makes a string say she’s all right, she’s all right, she’s all right.
She doesn’t need to hear
all those things they might say.
While they’re saying it behind her back.
Why can’t they say it in the light of day.
She was never looking for a fight.
Standing up for herself and what’s right.
Well that river runs deep and the water is white.
But she’s all right, she’s all right, she’s all right.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much. Do you want to do another one?
Yeah, I can do one more if you’d like. I was gonna ask about her time. Yeah, I’m gonna do, it’s just a little cover by singer Joan Alma Trading, who, yeah, I think of as like a feminist singer songwriter icon. And yeah, she’s really underrated. But yeah, she wrote this in the 70s. And I think it’s still quite empowering now. And so this one’s called Down to Zero.
Hold that feeling when you’re reeling. You step lightly thinking you’re number one. Down to zero when they were leaving. For another one. Now you walk with your feet back on the ground.
Down to the ground, down to the ground.
Down to the ground, down to the ground.
Brand new dandy, first class seat stealer.
Walks through the crowd and takes your man, sends you rushing to the mirror.
Brush your eyebrows and say,
There’s more beauty in you than anyone.
I remember who walked the warm sands beside you.
One in your heels and the waves come rushing.
She took the worry from your head. Then again, she put trouble in your heart instead. And you fall down to the ground, down to the ground.
You know heartache, still more crying when you’re thinking of your mother’s only son.
Take to your bed, you say this piece of sleep but you dream of love instead.
The heartache you’ll find can bring more pain than a blistering sun.
While you fall, while you fall, fall at my door.
Open feeling, when you’re reeling. You stop lightly thinking you’re at number one, down to zero where they were leaving.
For another one.
Now you walk with your feet back on the ground.
Down to the ground, down to the ground.
Down to the ground, down to the ground.
You know heartache, still more crying when you’re thinking of your mother’s only son.
Take to your bed, you say this piece of sleep but you dream of love instead.
Thank you.
Thank you so much Ananya, that was beautiful.
I think the time has come for us to wrap up.
So thank you everyone again for, thank you Anna, Mary, Sarah, Ananya for this wonderful event. Thank you everyone who participated.
Thank you Shelza for putting in all the work and making sure things didn’t fall apart, especially this morning with all the tech difficulties.
And thank you to all the participants who participated in the process right from the beginning.
Some of you might remember that we ended our last year’s session with a poem from Kishwer Naheed called Sinful Women.
And, you know, these are testing times but it’s also like with the pandemic, it’s also a time for us to think about, think about change, think about new forms of, you know, new imaginations of institutions and society.
So, and we will, as we said, we will continue this conversation, this will be an ongoing conversations between us Sinful Women who are not awed by the grandeur of those who wear gowns, who don’t bow our heads, who don’t fold our hands together.
So this was what Kishwer Naheed said, but we will also attempt to make this into an annual event, but most importantly, a space where we can come together across borders, together in raged love and solidarity.
A space where, like last year we plotted to bring down fascist authoritarian institutions, a space where we connect our oppressions, we understand precarity as gendered violence, we talk about care work, we demand education to be free, and we collectively stand together against the marketization of our institutions and its patriarchal structures.
A space where we continue to learn, collaborate, share, critique, care, and rebel, but also continue to fight for bread and our roses.
So I’m going to end here.
And in the coming few weeks, maybe we can start having a conversation of how we can take this forward. If you have any ideas to share, please write to us, reach out.
We’re thinking of having a dedicated social media page where we can keep having these conversations, but yeah, so any advice, any thoughts, reflections that you have, we would love to hear.
So reach out. If you want to copy of the report and you still don’t have it, you can email us on femdialogues at gmail.com. It’s there on the chat, but also it’s going to find a permanent home very soon on the 1752 page website in the resources section.
So again, thank you very much. And as we end things in India, saying in clubs in the bad, which means long live the revolution.
Bye.
Thank you so much, Adresha, and everyone for organizing. It’s been lovely to talk to you.
Thanks, Anna. Thanks, Anna. Thanks, Mary.
Bye everybody. Bye.