New beginning: LifeStories Project begins work

Quietly, in the shadow of the Prajnya 16 Days Campaign against Gender Violence, we began to work yesterday on the Prajnya Resource Centre on Women in Politics and Policy’s LifeStories Project.

The project comprises long, recorded interviews with women who have been involved in political movements, politics or policy work. They will be asked about their life, their experiences, their views and the changes they have witnessed.

Our first LifeStory documents the experiences and perspectives of Vasantha Ramakrishnan.

On Saturday, October 31, 2009, we visited Vasantha to brief her and get her consent for the interviews. We also used this opportunity to gather biographical detail which we will use towards our preparation for the recorded interviews. The recordings will take place over 2-3 sessions. We plan to store the raw footage, transcribe it and make it available to serious researchers. We also hope that during our visits we can gather photographs for our Visual Archive.

We are really excited to be finally doing this. LifeStories is one of our dream projects, and while we still don’t have any funding for it, we are getting started using our personal resources because we cannot wait any more. If you can think of people who should be featured in this project; if you have photographs that should be archived; if you can think of organizations that might fund this project… do get in touch and let us know!

Our excitement was not one-sided. Vasantha also had papers and photographs out and ready to share with us!