🌺 Prajanma - a intergenerational dialogue and creative workshop
Highlights from our Feb event, upcoming workshops and more!
Listen to our audio newsletter here
Hi everyone!
It’s Habiba saying hello from East London. I hope you’re all well and the sun is shining where you are. For those who don’t know me, I lead communications and outreach at The Rights Collective! We’re trying a new thing where a different team member writes the newsletter every month - I hope you like it. I’ve been with The Rights Collective since it’s inception in 2018 and I lead the comms and outreach, as well as pitching in with lots of other things.
It was wonderful seeing so many of you in person a couple of weeks at our event at the Halley Space! Despite the heaviness of the world, I feel that the year has begun on a note of solidarity, hope and action. We hope to see more of you at our upcoming in-person event later this month with Jaspreet Kaur — read on for more details.
Sending love and solidarity,
Habiba 💘
☄Sharing highlights from “To Look Forward, We Must Look Back”
Huge thanks to everyone that joined us for our first large in-person community event after four years. It was wonderful to be in physical space with our community again, to be able to share thought provoking conversations, joy and laughter with each other.
Shout out to our incredible speakers Saqib Deshmukh, Neelam Keshwala, Mya Mehmi and Kavita Bhanot. And to our DJ Samia! We also want to thank Anandi Ramamurthy for giving us permission to display archival materials from Tandana, and Shalimar books for letting us use their archival book fair flyers.
💬 Building a Movement: Challenges in Making Change
Thank you Toynbee Hall for giving us the opportunity to speak to your amazing young people about our work, some of the challenges we’ve faced and how we try to navigate through!
We had discussions around holding space for conversations away from the state gaze, aligning our actions with our values and community organising online during a pandemic with some powerful young change makers. We learnt a lot about ourselves in the process. If you want to collaborate on a workshop with us, feel free to drop us a line.
🌺 Prajanma - an intergenerational dialogue and creative workshop with Jaspreet Kaur!
We’re excited to host a collaborative workshop with Brown Girl Like Me author, Jaspreet Kaur! We hope to bring the community together across generations to focus on discovering and sharing our diverse experiences, identities and definitions of what “being brown” can look like today.
We will be anchoring a dialogue using the themes and extracts from Jaspreet’s book with the intention of co-creating a multi-media showcase to celebreate the expansive, contradictory and ever-changing nature of ‘being a brown girl.’
Bring your mums, aunties, nanis, bijis or any other woman in your life!
🔊Events we’re attending…
For International Women’s Day, London branches of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign are hosting ‘Palestine is a Feminist Issue’ - sign up here to attend
An eclectic mix of events at the Richmix this month including Daytimers Mehfil: An evening of South Asian Poetry!
#SaveBrickLane Coalition are hosting a conference on the 12th March to discuss the future of the East End and lessons from the Truman Brewery redevelopment. Sign up to attend here.
📖 Anti-Caste Reading Circle: Resources
As most of you know, we hosted an anti-caste reading circle, facilitated by Jyotsna Siddharth and Varun Khanna. Carrying on from our last newsletter, this is a regular column in our newsletter where we will share anti-caste resources with you every month - from readings to videos to events. Feel free to send us anything to feature and check out some of this month’s readings below.
This month’s readings focus on caste and love:-
Caste broke our hearts and love cannot put them back together by Dhrubo Jyoti which talks about sexuality, love and the experience of lower caste status in India.
Project anti-caste love focuses on narratives and discourses at the intersection of caste, gender and religion.
📚Things we’re reading…
The NYTimes Podcast ‘The Trojan Horse Affair’, has re-ignited conversations about institutionalised Islamophobia in Britain and the governments ‘Prevent’ strategy. Read more by Novara Media.
Indian journalist Rana Ayyub speaks to Carole Cadwalladr about the campaign to silence her that has led to charges of sedition and ‘defaming Hindus’ by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP). Read here.
Retiring at the age of 23 by Fabliha Anbar connects to Britney Spear’s powerlessness as a young woman facing societal confinement.
Read here.
💭 Have you checked out our resource hub yet? We’ve compiled articles, podcasts, and videos to expand and aid existing knowledge on issues including caste, class, and race.
🖊 We’re accepting blog pitches!
The Rights Collective blog not only seeks to amplify the lived experiences within our communities but also to invite dialogue, critical thinking and introspection. We invite writers to explore issues through personal essays, socio-political analysis, thought pieces, and more.
We can pay a stipend to anyone whose pitches are accepted and published! If you have any questions, you can email our blog editor Tasha.
Most of our spaces, workshops and events are free but if you feel called to contribute to the community and invest in sustaining our work, please donate here.