Registered in 2003, Zubaan is a charitable trust based in Delhi. It follows in the footsteps of its parent NGO, Kali for Women, and has been an active participant, chronicler and publisher of the women’s movement since 1984. It works to increase the body of knowledge on women with a special focus on South Asia and India.
Zubaan has often brought forward the voices of marginalized communities through its publishing work, focusing on women, queer and trans experiences and in the recent past, has also shifted its focus to research and action work. With prior work chronicling the women’s movement through Poster Women, Zubaan is also currently engaged in working on multiple projects focusing on cultural and knowledge production, partnering and collaborating with women’s unions, collectives, grassroots activists, etc. across the region. Details of ongoing projects are available here.
Zubaan is an equal opportunity employer and is attentive to issues of social exclusion of groups and individuals. It is our constant endeavour to address this in both the content we produce and our hiring policies.
Procedure: Please note that this call for applications reserves staff positions for women, trans and non-binary people from Muslim and other religious minority communities. Applications from persons outside of these communities will not be considered.
Please send your resume and a 500-word cover letter, detailing your fitness for the role as well as your interest in working at Zubaan, to contact@zubaanprojects.org by February 24, 2022. Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted further. Please put “Application for Projects Associate (Outreach & Communications)” in the subject line.
Location: Anywhere in India, with some travel required to Delhi/project locations (when safe)
Job description: Managing Zubaan’s online (social media, website publicity, newsletter) and offline (dissemination, output, events, etc.) media programme as well as outreach programme to further collaborations with partners, organisations, etc. The selected candidate will have to coordinate with their counterpart at Zubaan Publishers, our sister organisation, for a streamlined social media presence.
Essential requirements:
— Two years’ experience in an outreach and communications position
— Demonstrated engagement with groups and work related to gender, partnership-building, and managing offline & online relationships with general audiences
— Familiarity and experience with management of social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Mailchimp)
— Some experience with design software (Adobe InDesign/PhotoShop), web-based design platforms (Canva) and WordPress
— Bachelor’s degree
— Excellent written and spoken English; good spoken Hindi/other Indian language
Job responsibilities:
Overall management and maintenance of the Zubaan trust’s social media channels and creating content for the same from Zubaan’s project activities in the areas of gender, labour, violence, cultural and knowledge production support for marginalised communities, etc
Handling collaborations and partner relationships with organisations, collectives, individuals working on similar project themes/issues, both offline and online
Engaging with audience, participants and partners in ensuring visibility of project work, research and outputs
Designing social media and online campaigns to further these engagements, including commissioning art and design via cultivating a pool of resource persons with a special focus on those from marginalised communities
Curating and updating content on Zubaan’s website in coordination with the overall projects team
Coordination and planning with projects team for monthly social media calendar and outreach planning
Participating in team meetings and collaborative tasks
Compensation & other job details:
₹42,350 per month (TDS applicable on a consultant contract)
We received an excellent response to our call for applications this year, and while we were pleased to see the interest among young researchers, this also made our task of choosing grantees much more difficult. However, we were lucky to have the support of a strong and informed jury, and this final selection is the result of their evaluation of the proposals. We’re delighted to announce that the following candidates have been selected for the grant:
Stuti Mamen Lowang
Brishbhanu Baruah
Pranami Rajbangshi
Rachel Issac
Rimpi Borah
Sikha Das
Sneha Roy
Swati Baruah
Nayani Sarma and Juri Baruah
Kinriwiliu Ringkangmai
Lamneihoi Vaiphei
Monica Kanga
Sophia Lisam
Jerry Lucius Pyrtuh
Florence Laldinpuii
Hannah Lalhlanpuii
Lalchhanhimi Bungsut
Kamongla Longkumer
Kekhriesituo Yaotsu
Anisha Debbarman
Sanjana Chhetri
Anisa Bhutia
Sagareeka Pradhan
Ranu Kunwar
Chingkheinganbi Mayengbam and Ankita Goswami
Congratulations!
We’d especially like to thank all applicants for the effort and thought that they put into their proposals. We hope that you will continue to engage with Zubaan’s work, and keep an eye out for future grants or other opportunities from us; and wish you the best of luck in your future endeavours.
UPDATE (10/09/2021): An earlier version of this list contained the name of two other researchers who have since given up the grant due to personal reasons. Taking this into account, this is the final list of grantees.
It is a rare moment in time when upheaval is felt across cultures and geographies. With COVID-19 classified as a pandemic in early 2020, its impact on our lives in all its different forms — increased authoritarianism and State apathy, heightened inequalities and vulnerabilities, job precarity and strained labour relations, gender violence and inequity, etc. — has been one such moment.
If any human experience can be said to capture the complex consequences, it is loss. Loss is everywhere: loss of loved ones, of certainties, of faith and trust in the State. Human beings have always lived with loss, just as much as they do with hope, but collective and sustained losses over such a long period of time are something difficult to grasp.
And yet, if this time has been marked by loss, it has also shown us human resilience, the ability and determination to survive. Individuals/community centres have set up oxygen camps, or worked to provide medicines to the homeless. Trans activists have worked out ration schemes for their community, while social media groups have provided verified information to those who need it. People have paused their lives to offer support and solidarity however they can. However, as the pandemic rages on, there is inadequate media representation of the healthcare and ecological crises, and the structures of support and solidarity across communities in the Northeast region, apart from the tireless documentation done by feminist and local on-ground groups.
In the years that this grant has been in existence, its focus on knowledge creation and documentation by communities in the Northeastern states has generated a rich seam of writing and thinking on the diverse histories and stories of the region. In its final year, we want to offer support to young writers, researchers, photographers and scholars in capturing this tumultuous time through the lens of their own experiences — to provide multiple narratives of how the pandemic was lived and experienced in the Northeastern region. This is also particularly important as the media’s fragmented focus on the impact of COVID-19 in the Northeast has often failed to capture marginalizations of gender, ethnicity, class, caste, etc. within the region.
We encourage proposals set against the broad framework/themes mentioned below, examined through the lens of gender in the Northeast:
Dealing with the loss of lived time, and the loss of an understanding or knowledge of the future.
Navigating and adapting to loss — of education, jobs, human contact, friendships, physical spaces, community, compassion and mental health — and human resilience in the face of collective grief.
How individuals and communities have been/are trying to support each other and build resources during this time — stories of success as well as of failure.
Envisioning a future and building our communities in the face of pervasive uncertainty
To support this work, Zubaan Publishers and the Sasakawa Peace Foundation are offering research grants for the year 2021 to young researchers from the eight northeastern states and the eastern Himalayan region. The grants provide a modest fund to prepare a research paper/essay/oral history on the themes detailed above.
Background
As a geographical category, the term ‘Northeast India’ can be used to refer to the territory beyond the chicken neck bordering Myanmar and Bangladesh, which comprises the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura. In mainstream discourse, the region has been continually defined, described and constrained within a particular identity that in manyways deprives it of its internal richness and variety. What exactly do we mean when we speak of ‘the Northeast’? This region is home to many peoples, religions, customs, ethnicities, practices, languages and histories. Their collective grouping, the brainchild of colonial administrative practices that have been carried on by the present state, has also become a sort of marker of their ‘separateness’ as an entity, despite the wide internal variety. The cultures, communities, geographies of this region are similar in many ways to those of Darjeeling, Kalimpong, Kurseong and the eastern Himalayan region. An argument that is often used to hold the category of ‘the Northeast’ together is ethnic identity — and yet, not only are these states ethnically very diverse, but ethnicity often extends beyond state and national borders into other, neighbouring territories.
The debate around #AChapterforNE under the CBSE curriculum in recent months has also underscored the need for multiple sites of knowledge production — with indigenous people arguing against a single chapter for the whole of Northeast, which may whitewash the region’s troubled history with the colonial mainland as well as further the exoticization and fetishization of the population. The rupture in this discourse has been important in understanding how different groups of people within the region relate to each other against a backdrop of peace and conflict and building of solidarities to preserve their own histories and reclaim knowledge.
Details of the Research Grant
This research grant, in its fourth and final year, hopes to encourage young writers and researchers to contribute in the diversification of knowledge production.
We are looking for applications under the theme of loss, as detailed above. Please feel free to explore the theme through academic research papers, long-form journalistic essays or long interviews, visual essays, graphic stories on a particular subject, thematically aligned with the call and a gendered lens. Hybrid or creative forms are welcome. The papers will be written in English. All papers written with the support of the grant will be published electronically by Zubaan Publishers on various digital platforms. They may also be compiled in print form and made widely available. Mentors will be assigned to all the grant recipients for research and writing support during the grant duration.
Eligibility criteria
If you are from Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura and are less than 40 years of age, you are eligible to apply. The research grant is also open for applicants from hill regions of districts Darjeeling, Kalimpong and Kurseong.
[Note: Preference will be given to candidates currently based in the physical location of research, keeping in consideration travel restrictions within the region due to the COVID-19 pandemic.]
2. You must be fluent in reading and writing English.
3. You must commit to researching and writing a 10,000 words (minimum) essay. The grant also allows for you to develop graphic narratives, or do extended interviews, or produce creative works such as a story, in lieu of the essay, all within a specified timeline.
To apply
Send in a grant proposal (maximum two pages) which clearly describes what you wish to do, what sources you will tap (primary and secondary), the subject of your research and a timeline.
Submit a writing sample of roughly 500 words OR a two-page spread of a graphic story OR an extract from the transcript of an interview conducted by you.
Submit your CV and any other relevant information about yourself that you think is necessary, including proof of age.
Include two names of referees, ideally people you have worked with, along with their contact information.
Shortlist and selection of grantees
All grant proposals will be screened by a selection committee. The committee will prepare a shortlist based on pre-decided criteria and may wish to interview some candidates. Interviews can take place by Zoom or phone. The committee will then decide and the candidate will be informed. The committee’s decision will be final.
Duration
The first draft of the selected papers is expected in four months after the methodology workshop/webinar, details of which are mentioned below. Papers may need to be revised after the first draft depending on the feedback. Depending on the extent of the feedback, up to a month may be given for the required revisions.
Grant
The fellowship carries a grant of Rs 35,000 less applicable taxes. Payments will be made in two instalments: 25 per cent on approval of the project and signature of contract, and the remainder on submission of the final draft.
Methodology workshops/webinars
All successful candidates will be required to attend a preliminary methodology workshop/webinar, as well as a midterm online review where they will present a draft of their work in order to get feedback from peers and resource people. In the time remaining for the grant, candidates will be required to take the feedback on board and to finalize their papers.
Interested people can send in their applications to projects@zubaanbooks.com. The last date of submission of application is 15 July 2021.
Shortlisted candidates will be informed by the first week of August 2021.
FAQs:
Q: Can I submit my PHD proposal/proposal linked to my PHD thesis for this grant?
A: Papers which are a part of an ongoing or recently completed PhD thesis will not be covered by this grant.
Q: My proposal/idea fits into the grant requirements but I’m not sure of how to write it in English. How do I put a proposal together?
A: If you feel that you fit into the eligibility criteria and have an interesting proposal to discuss, which may not be in English but has the scope of being translated/adapted, please write to us at projects@zubaanbooks.com before submitting your proposal.
Q: Is there a format for writing the proposal?
A: Grant proposals may be creative and do not need to be written in academic language. If you are unsure about the format of the research proposal, please write to us at projects@zubaanbooks.com for a sample research format.
10 journalists were selected in total, with their proposals looking at different dimensions of the gendered impact of the pandemic, be it women’s work, access to healthcare, migration, or LGBTQI+ rights. This section contains their articles/photoessays on these various themes that have been published on various online portals and written with the support of the grant.
Articles
Mayanglambam Merina Leimarenbi’s articles chronicle the impact of the pandemic in her home state of Manipur.
Her first article Uprooting Lives: The Covid-19documents the various ways the lockdown imposed in Manipur impacted the lives of the women vendors of the Ema Market. It also highlights inconsistencies in the execution of various aid and relief packages and policies.
Her second article A pinch of blessing with a tonne of a curse looks at the precarious position of nurses in Manipur during the pandemic, and looks at the ways in which the nursing community mobilised to demand their rights.
Manash Pratim Dutta’s pieces look at how the pandemic and lockdown affected the transgender community in Assam.
His first article, Tough Times, focuses on one transgender resident of Bongaigon district and how the lack of access to healthcare facilities (caused mainly by stigma against trans people) affected her and her family.
His second article, Struggle for Survival, looks at the loss of livelihood of trans people experienced during the lockdown, and the violence they faced as a result.
Bhabesh Medhi’s article Ready to Fightprovides an insight into the lives of ASHA workers in Assam during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ngurang Reena’s two part series investigates the gendered implications of customary law on women and women’s rights during the lockdown period in the Papum Pare district of Arunachal Pradesh. Read part one Hurt, Angst and Struggle here, and part two (Mrs. Yaji and the Lockdown) here.
Photoessays
Millo Ankha’s photoessay Forgetting Mustard Seeds follows a mother and her family in Arunachal Pradesh as she welcomes a new child during the pandemic.
[Find a downloadable PDF version of this call here]
Through Her Lens III: The Space Without
The Space Without engages with the themes of Gender and Public Space using the visual as a starting point. This edition of Through Her Lens attempts to look at space—public, private, temporal— as a site that gains meaning from the stories, questions, dialogues and negotiations that unfold within it, both shaping it and being shaped by it. Gendered battles to claim space—for women, queer and trans communities—were fought alongside larger questions of visibility, representation, or sometimes even for the joy of sipping tea at a roadside stall. This already difficult situation has been further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent national and state lockdowns, as a result of which even those limited spaces, which women, queer and trans people had access to, have disappeared.
The claiming of public spaces by those in power results in/creates the conditions for the oppression, silencing and forgetting of marginalized identities. The COVID-19 pandemic has, perhaps, made this even more clear. The nightclubs of Gangtok, where queer people could freely express their identities, have not opened since the first phase of lockdown in March. In Imphal the Nupi Keithel, both a place of trade and a political site, has remained closed for months. In Assam, women handloom weavers suffered setbacks as markets were shut during the most remunerative season of Bohag Bihu in April.
However, public spaces have also been claimed by these groups through various struggles—from shaping women’s movements, ecological struggles to peacebuilding and organizing workers collectives. During the national lockdown and the subsequent selective ‘unlocking’, different communities in the Northeast continued to protest and demand their rights: we saw the road blockade in Tinsukia district by families affected by the Baghjan gas leak, demonstrations against the construction of a shopping mall at Barik point in Shillong and the sit-in at Itanagar showing solidarity and demanding justice in the Hathras rape case.
Balancing safety concerns on one hand and their need to approach state institutions on the other, marginalized communities are claiming public spaces in familiar as well as new ways. Yet, questions remain –– how accessible, inclusive and representative are these gatherings? How do these public contestations affect the private space, or is there even space to bring them home? What does it mean for younger women, queer and trans persons to continue these movements for identity and representation — movements often born out of the activism of their mothers and grandmothers? How do older women relate to and remember their activism and struggles in light of the current mobilization through online methods?
The exhibition hopes to establish a closer understanding of gender, sexuality, power and spatiality in different societies and cultures in Northeast India and enquire into the role of the visual in helping subvert the creation of this often biased and exclusionary space.
Has COVID-19 changed public spaces for marginalised groups?
How do we remember public spaces before COVID-19?
How do we reimagine public spaces after COVID-19?
What are the memories of public spaces for older women in the family? What were the struggles, the pushback and the moments of joy they experienced while inhabiting public spaces?
What has the loss of public spaces meant in terms of the private space for groups that are marginalized?
The idea is to look not only at how the visual medium can represent gender and public space, but also what it can do to transform this space into arenas of belonging and alliance. Participants are encouraged to explore the material and symbolic meanings of public space through an intersectional lens––access to and rights over these spaces is highly contingent on social, economic and cultural distinctions.*
[*To get an idea about which sub themes you can possibly bring out and explore through your submissions, scroll down to the section after ‘For Enquiries’.]
Objectives:
To visually document the experiences of women and other marginalized identities within public spaces during and post COVID-19 in Northeast India.
To use the visual medium to help build knowledge on the social construction of gender and sexuality in public spaces in different cultures/societies in Northeast India.
To understand how the visual medium shapes public and private spaces and vice versa, and how it can be used to reimagine/re-construct public spaces.
To build an online archive of women’s memories of public spaces and create conversations around intergenerational struggles of claiming space.
What is the ‘visual’?
We have used the term ‘visual’ to include media such as photography, photo collages, painted photographs, photo montages, edited audio-visual projects (3-4 minutes) and photo/video archives such as family albums*.
[*Archival photographs and videos can also be sourced from groups such as the Northeast India AV Archive, the Confluence Collective, Sikkim Picture Library etc. Please get in touch with the curators for this.]
Who can submit?
Applications are open to women, queer, trans and nonbinary individuals from Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Tripura. Those from the regions of Darjeeling, Kalimpong, and Kurseong are also welcome to apply.
Applicants must be 18 years and above.
How can I submit?
All submissions should contain the following information:
Name:
State:
Email id:
Contact no:
Social media handles (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook):
All submissions should consist of a short description of the work. (300 words)
All submissions should consist of a short bio of the applicant. Please state your preferred pronouns in the bio. (100-200 words)
[Note: If you need help with drafting the description and bio please feel free to reach out to us via the given contact details. You can also reach out to the curators of this exhibition via email if you’d like to seek help regarding technical support, thematic support or both. If you have an idea in mind prior to submission that you’d like to discuss further, the curators will provide you with feedback.]
Final images should be low-resolution, not more than 1MB in size.
Images should be in JPEG file format.
Images should not have watermarks.
Phone photography is allowed.
Up to 15 images can be submitted.
Audio-Visual Submissions:
File formats can be AVI, MPEG, MPG, MP4, MOV, XVID, MXF, FLV.
File size should not exceed 1 GB.
Recommended resolution is 780p-1080p.
3-4 minutes is the maximum per video*.
[*THL is not responsible for any hands-on technical support. The curators will only offer guidance and recommendations, but for the final submissions, participants must send edited videos.]
Selected participants will receive a small honorarium and letter of participation.
Copyright
As per the Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International Creative Commons License which rests with Zubaan Publishers, the copyright of the work displayed in this exhibition will be shared with Zubaan Publishers Pvt. Ltd (ZPPL) and the participants.
The files displayed in this exhibition can thus be used for non-commercial purposes with due credits to Zubaan Publishers and Through Her Lens.
All participants share the rights with Zubaan Publishers Pvt Ltd (ZPPL) for publishing the selected images on their website, social media, related accounts and communication materials, which will be used in accordance with the company’s Privacy Policy.
Through your submissions, you can also choose to bring out and explore the following sub themes under the larger umbrella of gender and public space:
Protest/Agitation/Social Movements:
From Zamthingla Ruivah’s creation of the Luingamla Kashan to the protest at Kangla Fort, how do we revisit women-led protests and movements now that the public space where marginalised bodies could once be in alliance has now become more restrictive?
What are lesser known protests/movements/agitations that our mothers/grandmothers have been a part of, and how do we situate them in the context of COVID-19 and the loss of space it has brought about?
Despite this loss of space, how have women continued to build solidarity in different parts of the Northeast (for e.g the sit-in at Arunachal Pradesh against the Hathras rape) through protest?
Digital Spaces: With limited access to physical spaces, digital platforms (Tiktok, Instagram, etc.) seem to serve as a communal space and outlet for personal and creative expressions. But how safe, accessible and ‘public’ is the digital space? How do marginalizations in offline spaces replica themselves online?
Street art: The enforced erasure of Akhil Gogoi’s mural in Assam in December 2020 leads us to reflect not only on how artist-activists are continuing to intervene in public spaces during COVID-19, but also on the privatisation of public spaces by the state. How are artists and citizens from marginalised communities using these spaces now? How do we expose misconceptions around such spaces being ‘public’? How can we reimagine these spaces as being more democratic?
Community Sport Centers: With the visibility of women/girls in community sports centres being low to begin with, how has the pandemic and the subsequent loss of these complexes further limited and restricted how women and other marginalised identities interact with these spaces?
Media: Media, in all its forms, is an important actor in providing a platform for the portrayal of diverse stories and backgrounds. Do the media and its spaces serve as allies or antagonists to marginalised identities? How can we use artistic license to reframe these media narratives to be more inclusive and representative?
Agriculture: Pandemic or no pandemic, in most rural areas, people are compelled to abide by their daily routine, as it is these activities (farming, fishing diary, etc.) that serve as their basic source of livelihood.
Religious places: How has the pandemic changed the dimensions of places of worship, the access to and ownership of which is already extremely contested?
About Zubaan Publishers Pvt Ltd
Zubaan Publishers Pvt Ltd is an independent publishing house based in New Delhi and has been a participant and chronicler of the women’s movement in India and South Asia. It was set up in 2003 as an imprint of India’s first feminist publishing house, Kali for Women, and continues to publish books on, for, by and about women in South Asia. For more information, please visit www.zubaanbooks.com.
About Fragrance of Peace
Fragrance of Peace is a collaborative project between the Sasakawa Peace Foundation (SPF) and Zubaan Publishers Pvt. Ltd. This project started with the objective to build networks and nurture solidarity through dialogue, literary exchange and peace-building within the Northeast region. It also aims to build a platform for artists, writers, journalists and researchers from the region to discuss, ideate and work on their regional specificities, and support these conversations by participating in literary festivals, book fairs and cultural events in different locations across India. For more information, please visitwww.zubaanprojects.org/projects/fragrance-of-peace/
Mridu Rai, Curator
Mridu Rai is an independent writer, curator and researcher based out of Sikkim, India. She is the curator of Through Her Lens, a visual research programme in collaboration with Zubaan Publishers Pvt Ltd and the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, which aims to expand women’s photographic practices in the eight Northeast Indian states and Darjeeling Hills. Mridu is an alumna of the University of the Arts London and has worked at various publications including India Today and ARTEM. She is a member of the Confluence Collective, a collaboration of photographers and research scholars from Sikkim and Darjeeling Hills.
Anushya Pradhan, Assistant Curator
Anushya Pradhan is the assistant curator of Through Her Lens. She has recently worked as art programmes coordinator at The People’s Studio, ARTEM where she curated creative events such as film screenings, printmaking and zine workshops. At present, she is also involved in developing art, reading and education programmes.
We’ve seen an incredible response to our call for applications for Participatory Visual Learning: A Through Her Lens workshop on Seeing, Understanding and Constructing the Visual. We are overwhelmed by the number of applications we received, and excited by everyone’s interest in learning more about visual culture.
We’re delighted to announce that the following people have been selected to attend the workshop:
Panchali Bhagawati
Moumita Chakravarty
Lubna Shaheen
Sristi Sharma
Shushanti Mutum
Sonam Choden
Nancy Choden Lhasungpa
Congratulations! We’ll be getting in touch with all of you with more details via e-mail shortly.
We’d especially like to thank all the applicants for the effort and thought that they put into their applications. We hope that you continue to engage with Zubaan’s work, and wish you the best of luck in your future endeavours.
[Find a downloadable PDF version of this call here.]
Zubaan is now inviting applications for Participatory Visual Learning, an online workshop that intends to explore key ideas of learning in visual cultures, and to develop the skills to articulate this understanding. The workshop seeks to open the term ‘visual’ to include media such as photography, illustrations, graphics, audio-visual material etc. This participatory workshop will look at questions of gender, representation, culture, identities, body politics and more. While no prior theoretical knowledge of visual culture is required to apply for this workshop, preference will be given to people working in grassroots organizations, communities, etc. in Northeast India.
Details
Facilitator: This workshop will be facilitated by Ruchika Gurung, an educator and researcher trained in film, media and culture studies. Ruchika is currently a faculty member in Whistling Woods International’s School of Media and Communication.
Number of sessions: The workshop will consist of 4 sessions spread across 4 weeks.
Dates and timings: 5-7pm on Saturday evenings, from 31 October 2020 to 21 November 2020.
Location: Owing to the ongoing public health crisis, the workshop will take place entirely over Zoom.
Fees: Participation in this workshop is free. Following the successful completion of the workshop, participants will receive a letter of participation from Zubaan.
The workshop will follow a participatory learning model, wherein each session will be geared towards participants using the learnings from the workshop to construct a narrative, and produce their own body of work. Each session will have a component dedicated to mentor feedback and review. From the basics of visual construction and its usage in research and documentation, to the focus on the role of identity and performance in art and media, and the way these materials construct narratives of gender, sexuality, caste, race and form, these sessions will be tailored to reflect the concerns of researchers working on the ground.
With confirmed participation from women’s collectives and community women leaders (from earlier editions of Through Her Lens), the workshop is also designed to be a place to build on existing understandings of research and documentation through a multimedia approach, keeping in mind the existing political, ecological, social and economic realities, and provide an extended network of support through these platforms.
It aims to instil in researchers an understanding of these visual constructions, and enable them to use this understanding to complement their research practices in ways that also discard stereotypes about what ‘traditional’ research methodology constitutes.
Eligibility criteria
Applications are open to women, queer, trans and nonbinary individuals from Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Tripura. Those from the regions of Darjeeling, Kalimpong, and Kurseong are also welcome to apply.
Applicants must be 18 years and above.
The workshop will primarily be conducted in English, therefore familiarity with the language is ideal.
As mentioned earlier, no prior theoretical knowledge of visual culture is required to apply for this workshop, but preference will be given to people working in grassroots organizations, communities, etc. in Northeast India.
To apply
Send in your CV and a 200 word cover letter* that details your reasons behind applying for this workshop by Wednesday, 21 October 2020.
Interested people are required to send in their details to BOTH of the following email ids: projects@zubaanbooks.com and herlens.exhibition@gmail.com. The last date of submission is Wednesday, 21 October 2020. Please put “Application for Participatory Visual Learning Workshop“in the subject line.
[Note: If you’d like to send in any other material — audio, video, visual — to supplement your application, please feel free to do so.
*You can also send in an audio clip or a video recording detailing your interest instead of a cover letter. Please limit it to 60 seconds or less.]
Selection of participants
All applications will be screened by a selection committee. Only selected participants will be contacted further, and the committee’s decision will be final. Selected candidates will be informed via email by Tuesday, 27 October 2020.
Outcomes
As mentioned above, participants will be required to produce a body of work during the workshop that reflects their learnings and journey. The final materials produced, with support from the mentorship programme, will be displayed in an online exhibition under Through Her Lens.
A note on copyright
Regarding the material that is produced, all participants will share the rights of the work produced by them as an outcome of this workshop with Zubaan Publishers Pvt. Ltd. (ZPPL) for publishing the selected material on their website, social media, related accounts and communication materials, which will be used in accordance with the company’s Privacy Policy. All participants will be given due credit for any material used. The participants will also be free to use this material in their future work, with due acknowledgement to ZPPL and the workshop.
A contract will be signed with each participant following selection regarding this.
The Alphabet of Violence & Resistance
Visual art is a powerful and effective way to draw even the ‘apolitical’ into thinking about issues that are difficult to stomach, and provoke strong discomfort. That is the idea that underpins this project. The Alphabets, a collaboration of various artists across India and Nepal, are typographic posters that illustrate different facets of impunity that initiate discussions contributing to our collective understanding of the same. Read more and view the alphabets here.
Give Youth a Voice initiative
Zubaan and IDRC’s SVI project emerged from the cross border collaboration of feminists, academics and researchers across South Asia. Following the legacy of its predecessor, the Stepping Stones and Body of Evidence projects also exist in the context of a larger network that spans countries and cultures—they form a part of IDRC’s Give Youth a Voice initiative that spans the 5 South Asiancountries of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
South Asia is home to the largest youth force in the world, which faces unique vulnerabilities exacerbated by their geographical and social locations (gender, religion, class, caste, ethnicity, etc). However, they are also best positioned to use the various creative mediums at their disposal to meet the challenges that sexual violence and impunity pose, head on. In this way, they become the drivers of social change. This initiative therefore seeks to support programmes led by the youth in these countries to help them play a critical role in strengthening their communities and societies.
While the youth engaged by the Stepping Stones and Body of Evidence projects (India and Nepal) used performing arts like theatre and slam poetry as a medium to challenge structures of impunity, our sister projects across South Asia looked at youth led research, community-led outreach programmes, art, music and cognitive behaviour therapy sessions with at-risk youth as ways of confronting these structures.
Read more about this initiative and the work of the 8 organisations implementing it in greater detail here.
We received an excellent response to our call for proposals and while we were pleased to see the interest and engagement among the journalists who applied, this also made our task of choosing grantees much more difficult. However, we were lucky to have the support of a strong and informed jury from the region, and this final selection is the result of their evaluation of the proposals.
We’re delighted to announce that the following candidates have been selected for the grant:
Millo Ankha
Ngurang Reena
Bhabesh Medhi
Manash Dutta
Mandira Sarkar
Niloy Bhattacharjee
Medolenuo Ambrocia Loucu
Shradha Chhetri
Merina Mayanglangbam
Prashansa Gurung
Congratulations! We’ll be getting in touch with all the grantees via e-mail shortly.
We’d especially like to thank all the applicants for the effort and thought that they put into their proposals. We hope that you continue to engage with Zubaan’s work, and wish you the best of luck in your future endeavours.
