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UK funding (£79,259): Resources of Hope: Giving voice to underprivileged communities in India Ukri 1 Nov 2016 UK Research and Innovation, United Kingdom
Overview
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Resources of Hope: Giving voice to underprivileged communities in India
| Abstract | 'A picture is worth a thousand words' but there are those who suffer by being in the frame. In the media, the poorest inhabitants of India's cities are portrayed as slum dwellers-- the product of the migration of low- skill labour from the countryside and consequent underemployment. Rural populations living through small-scale farming fare just as badly. They are regularly represented as ignorant, backward-looking and an obstacle to development. Building on the AHRC Remaking Society project, Resources of Hope will respond to the International Development Theme and spark a cultural shift for disadvantaged members of urban and rural Indian communities, one that will replace hackneyed stereotypes with their own vivid portrayals of life in India in 2017. Our UK-India team of community engagement practitioners, artists and researchers will create counter-narratives using multi-media materials and co-production methods to reorient global images and media representations of life in Dharavi and Telangana. Dharavi, Asia's iconic 'slum', featured in the 2008 blockbuster Slumdog Millionaire. Part of Mumbai, Dharavi degrades the city's 'world-class' image. For policy makers and government planners it is a symbol of employment-, education-, housing- and sanitation- failure that they would rather erase. The UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) suggest that local decision-making in self-organised, informal settlements can be effective at dealing with housing-related issues. Yet policies of self-help and slum upgrading have often been replaced by demolitions and evictions. Telangana's population is 69% rural. Many are small-scale farmers, nomadic shepherds or harvesters of forest products and members of indigenous and Dalit ('untouchable' caste) communities. They are regarded by developers as 'peasants' who are inefficient and resistant to modern industrial approaches, despite increasing evidence that their traditional techniques could be vital to achieving food security. Many are forced off their land to make way for larger industrial units. We will engage ten community artists in each location, particularly women from disadvantaged castes. They will: 1) reclaim and re-interpret media images of communities so that people can appreciate how they might represent themselves; 2) retrace the unrecorded histories and testimonies of people subjected to 'development' by the state and private sector agencies; and 3) generate records of communities with little documented history of their own, using approaches that are easy to make public. By June 2017 we will deliver: 1) an engagement programme of 20 community artists who will have critically appraised current media portrayals of their communities and generated an authentic multi-media alternative using participatory approaches; 2) a two-site multimedia festival covering the inner city (Dharavi) and touring rural communities (Telangana), bringing film and digital media to an audience of tens of thousands; 3) a co-authored illustrated booklet to be shared among community members who have no access to digital media and are unable to participate in the festival; and 4) a new pilot approach to stimulate community-led creativity in aid projects to be launched at the at a meeting at the Royal Geographical Society hosted by our collaborators, the People's Archive of Rural India, ACORN Foundation, Yakshi and the Remaking Society network, formed as part of the AHRC Remaking Society project. Legacy: i) a rich historical multi-media archive illustrating the importance of personal histories in allowing those whose collective voice has been silenced to communicate and articulate the circumstances of their lives at first-hand; and ii) in collaboration with our long-term partners in India, we will create a UK-India community of practice, demonstrating how citizen-generated multi-media can directly address the Sustainability Development Goals. |
| Category | Research Grant |
| Reference | AH/P00637X/1 |
| Status | Closed |
| Funded period start | 01/11/2016 |
| Funded period end | 31/03/2018 |
| Funded value | £79,259.00 |
| Source | https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FP00637X%2F1 |
Participating Organisations
| COVENTRY UNIVERSITY |
The filing refers to a past date, and does not necessarily reflect the current state. The latest known state is available on the following page: Coventry University UNIVERSITY, Coventry.