Highlights from Prajanma 🌺
Highlights from our various community events over the month and introducing our team members!
Listen to our audio newsletter here 🌻
Hi guys!
It’s Jasmin here to say hello - a fairly new member of The Rights Collective team! I wanted to start by giving a brief introduction to who I am and what I hope to bring to the collective. I believe strongly in collaboration with other people and believe that collaboration holds that the potential to birth untold beauty. I want to make and write things together that it makes impossible to decipher where one person’s trail of thought begins and the other ends but a mixing of minds. I have a keen interest in political education and organising and the future we wish to envision not awaiting in the horizon - but in the now. I am looking forward to making/ building/ creating at TRC!
We’ve been taking the time to focus on priorities for projects to focus on for the duration of the year. With these decisions we’ve been bearing in mind capacity, realistic time frames for projects and the commitment we are able to give them whilst attending to our values, visions and goals of the work we seek to do as an organisation. Ultimately, this has been a time for reflection and alignment with our inner truth.
Have a read below to hear what we’ve been up to including our long awaited Prajanma intergenerational workshop! This week, I’ve been focusing on studies and trying to take care of myself as much as possible due to being in a state of transition/ newness/rupture in my life in general. Trying to tell myself I deserve and need newness and learning to sit in it. I will be attending a play that tells the story of events leading to the Grenfell Tower Fire later this week titled ‘Dictating To The Estate’ by Nathaniel McBride.
I hope you had the chance to rest and recuperate over this bank holiday weekend but abolish the monarchy always!
Take the time to look after your hearts.
With love, Jasmin x
🌺 Highlights from Prajanma, an intergenerational creative workshop!
Over the weekend, we held our much anticipated intergenerational creative workshop; Prajanma with ‘Brown Girl Like Me’ author Jaspreet Kaur! We had a brilliant and diverse group with us and created a beautiful collage on theme of ‘being brown’.
We want to say a HUGE thank you to all of our participants and Jaspreet for creating such a beautiful space for dialogue and discussion. It was really special 💛
Community plants swap 🌱
We held a plant swap last month at Holland Park lead by our community member Niharika Pore! Check out some of the plants who now have a new home. We’ll be hosting more events like this soon, so keep your eyes peeled!
We’re on YouTube! 📺
All of our past teach-ins and videos covering caste, partition and abolition are now available to watch on our YouTube channel! All recorded content will be uploaded on our channel going forward.
📓Anti-Caste Reading Circle: Resources
This is a regular column in our newsletter where we 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.
Carrying on from on our last newsletter, this month’s reading and videos continue to focus on the theme of Caste and Entertainment:
Indian Cinema and the Bahujan Spectatorship by Jyoti Nisha
The Discreet Charm of the Savarnas by Neelam Social
Caste and Colourism by International Dalit Solidarity Network (IDSN)
💭 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.
Meet our team!
Introducing Habiba, our communications coordinator based in London, and our peer advisor Jyostna Siddharth in India. We caught up with them last week to see what they’ve been up to!
Meet Habiba 👩🏽💻
What book are you currently reading? I’m reading a collection of short stories edited by Omar Kholeif called Transactions of Desire, which explores heartbreak, loss, unrequited love and all the other things in between. I picked it up from the bookstore inside Whitechapel Gallery for a fiver!
What is one gift you want to share with the world? The ability to have enduring hope amidst the madness that is life, I think having hope is an important part of revolutionary practice and allows us to imagine a better world.
Meet Jyostna 🙋🏽♀️
Jyostna Siddharth is a peer advisor with The Rights Collective. Jyotsna is an actor, intersectional activist, self-taught artist and writer. Currently, they are working as an India Lead for Gender at Work. In the past, they have worked with several non-profits, bilateral organizations and are currently, an India Lead for Gender At Work.
One piece of advice you would give to your younger self? Have the conviction to create and pay for the life you desire, be ambitious and claim your space- gently and with love.
📣 Events we’re attending…
Connected Sociologies Curriculum Project are hosting an event examining how historic and continued processes of extraction must be understood in relation to colonial histories. Sign up and join the team on the 23rd June.
Toynbee Hall in East London are hosting an event on ‘Rewrite.Reclaim: Celebrating a Rich & Inspiring History of Melanated People’ on Saturday 4th June. Sign up here.
Join Hackney Museum on the 16th June for a free talk on the lives and histories of Ayahs and Amahs in London.
NIjjor Manush continue their Bangla Fora with session six on the 19th of June discussing the rise and fall of radical anti-racism work. Join the discussion and book launch at Pelican House. Free tickets can be purchased here.
Join writer and artist Maymana Erefin on a foraging walk on the 16th July. Sign up here.
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.