F se Field is a podcast show that emerged from The Third Eye Learning Lab’s processes of mentorship, where narratives are built using the feminist lens. Every story that emerges is an aural landscape, a soundscape of everything that constitutes the ‘field’, and our relationship with it. It could be our field of action, or imagination.
The first season F se Field, Sh se Shiksha is a series of 10 audio stories coming from the lived experiences and imaginations of education in rural India. Each episode offers a different take on education and its connections to caste, health, technology, and sexuality. How do we look at education outside classrooms? More importantly, who gets access to education at all? We explore all this and more, as members of our Learning Lab team—Khushi, Manisha, Ajfarul, Rani, Shobha, Vikas, Kulsum, Arti, Choti Rajkumari and Badi Rajkumari take us along on their journeys of shiksha.
In the second season, after going to school, our podcast series is going to jail. Featuring social workers who work in prison, and the deep relationships that she forms with those on the other side of the law, F se Field, J se Jail brings you four very-short stories narrated by Krupa from Prayas, a field action project based in Mumbai, which does social work intervention in the Criminal Justice System. In these episodes, Krupa tells us of her long-term client and friend, Sarita.
The third season of F se Field re-imagines the ‘field’ as the landscape of psyche, peopled by desires, fantasies, pleasures and dangers. F se Field, Issh se Ishq is a series of audio stories that help us understand our encounters with sexuality by centering the psyche. These stories emerged in a facilitated setting: Participants were discussing their dangerous pleasures and pleasurable dangers, while they were taken through concepts like the Charmed Circle by Gayle Rubin or Jacques Lacan’s articulation of how prohibition eroticises. The stories that emerged after this process surprised even the people who wrote them. There were moments of intimacy, discovery, hope, astonishment, shame, helplessness, betrayal – stuff that is often buried within us. Be it the bliss of reaching the pinnacle of pleasure in a jungle, the pain of a hidden love bite, or the burden of ‘what could have been’.