The Act of Doing

A day that is ordinary? A day within the everyday? Feminists have theorised the everyday extensively. Everyday is when the doing happens. The work is done. The cooking, the editing of the draft, the googling, the waiting for the eggs to boil, legwork, emails, paying of bills, waiting with the camera as the time lapse happens, finding the letters for that one word in Rathi, having a drink with a Tharu brewer in Chitwan. All of these are the doing. The Act of Doing, the critical step before making.

How do we revisit this everyday? Maybe by stepping outside of it and articulating it as work that is necessary for the final performance. To place ‘process’ on the same stage as the product. Making place and giving space for knowledge and pedagogy to speak to each other, to understand how our societies are built and documented.

As The Third Eye enters its fifth year, the feminist question of how knowledge is created, by who and for whom, continues to confront us and inform all our work, especially in the Learning Lab. In 2024, we decided to open this question out to fellow practitioners, educators, artists, filmmakers and researchers who have rich histories of engagement with the field (physical, historical, sensorial). Thus was born The Act of Doing, a two-day festival of learning hosted by TTE’s Learning Lab in collaboration with Goethe Institute, Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi which invited those who have innovated and subverted ways to produce knowledge, and developed innovative ways to work with communities.

From a granular view into how Shabadshala educators take Kabir and Bhakti music to school classrooms, to what Aaina Education aims to do by putting out comics on pedagogy in the digital publics— the curated conversations were an honest and vulnerable confluence of feminist theory and praxis.

The discussions over the two days were strongly rooted within the South Asian context and featured practitioners working at the interstice of ‘Social Work/ Field’, ‘Research’, ‘Art’ and ‘Teaching’, some of whom were articulating fundamental questions around their “doing” in public for the first time. Why is it important to locate knowledge creation and narrative change as fundamental to social justice today? How can we look at digital technologies as productive, provocative tools that could influence the stilted or set knowledge discourse? How do feminist praxis and theory talk to each other? Can pedagogy expand the scope of the “artistic” through concepts and designs that are alternative, urgent and intersectional?

The varying pedagogical frameworks opened out some of these thematics and built a network for a trans-disciplinary dialogue and future collaborations. Over the next few months, we shall be sharing glimpses from these two days with you (stay tuned to our social media handles!), in the hope of initiating a network of knowledge creators working with feminist and social justice standpoints. In the coming years, we hope that the Act of Doing can make a space where people can come together to ideate on challenging the massive knowledge hegemony that marginalizes, isolates, and divides.

Programme:

Day 1

Shabnam Virmani & Prashant Parvataneni (Shabadshala): Radical poetry, classrooms, teacher-learner inversions. | Moderated by Dipta Bhog

Madan Meena and Vasanth Rathwa (Adivasi Academy): Indigenous aesthetic, language, and the written word. | Moderated by Dipta Bhog

Diwas Raja KC (Nepal Picture Library): Living knowledge, collective archiving, and digital forms. | Moderated by Ruchika Negi

Rita Banerji and Chajo Lowang (Green Hub): Dismantling political geographies, building solidarities, redefining conservation. | Moderated by Shabani Hassanwalia

Sanyukta Saha (Aagaaz Theatre Trust) & Ektaa and Angarika (Maraa Collective) and Varsha Malviya (Freeda Theatre): Violence, caste bodies, and theater for cultural justice. | Moderated by Neel Chaudhari

Public performance by Shabnam Virmani

Day 2

A Mangai and A Revathi: Queer lives, transgender experiences, & feminist theater. | Moderated by Brahm Prakash

Ruchika Negi & Madhuri Adwani (The Third Eye’s Learning Lab): Image, text & sound to repopulate the internet from a feminist lens | Moderated by Gautam Bhan

Swati Dyahadroy, Anagha Tambe, and Nupur Jain (Women’s Studies Centre, Savitribai Phule Pune University) Building a Phule-Ambedkarite-Feminist classroom. | Moderated by Rukmini Sen

Vrinda Bhatia and Sayan Chaudhuri (Aaina Education) Chasing education inequities into the digital publics. | Moderated by Shabani Hassanwalia

Purnima Gupta and Prarthana Thakur (Nirantar Trust) Feminist pedagogies in the field. | Moderated by Gautam Bhan

Du Saraswathi Documenting movements by embodying knowledge. | Moderated by Uma Chakravarti

Public performance with Du Saraswathi

The Third Eye is being written and developed by a team of educators, documentary filmmakers, storytellers; people with extensive experience of gathering narratives, oral histories and developing contextual pedagogies for the rural and the marginalised.