3. & 4. September 2021
Online Conference

Welcome Address by Mr. Berthold Franke, Regional Director, New Delhi and Dr. Katharina Görgen, Director, Chennai.

Spoken Word - Poetry by Anamika Joshi und Angshuman Sarma

Keynote Addresses
Male Domination under Pressure: Change and Persistence of Hegemonic Masculinity by Michael Meuser
Men Behind Bars: Patriotic Masculinity in the Age of Colonial Incarceration by Sumathi Ramaswamy
 

A Text Concert
By Susanne Sachsse

Moderator: Urvashi Butalia  
Speakers: Madhavi Menon, Anindya Hajra, Meena Kandasamy, Romit Chowdhury, Dr. Sharful Islam Khan 

Explorations through movement
A Workshop by Mandeep Raikhy
 

Masculinity Discussions
A Workshop 
By Glocal Film
 

Fikri Anıl Altıntaş and Esha Aurora in conversation 

Moderator: Namita Bhandare
Speakers: Ravish Kumar, Sania Farooqui, Nadika Nadja, Alka Dhupkar. 

Destabilizing Gender and Sexuality through Dance
A Presentation by Mandeep Raikhy

A Talk Session by Anokhi Shah 

Performing Masculinity in Contemporary South Asian Cinema with: Mostofa Sarwar Farooki (Bangladesh), Rubaiyat Hossain (Bangladesh), Devashish Makhija (India),Tillotama Shome (India) moderated by Meenakshi Shedde.

Esha Aurora is Editor of Business at Dhaka Tribune,  Bangladesh. She is an unapologetic feminist. She is passionate about dismantling systemic discrimination and building awareness on the intersectionality between economics and discrimination that includes racism and sexism.  
 

Aditi Mittal is a writer, comedian, actor and barely managing any of the three roles with competence. She is not related to the rich Mittals. She has two stand up comedy specials on Netflix and one on Amazon Prime. Her comedy has featured in several documentary films and she has performed at comedy festivals all over the world. 

Shreyas Manohar is a writer and stand-up comic whose work has been on Amazon Prime, Disney+ Hotstar, Vice Asia, Netflix, AIB and more. A graduate of English literature and Creative Writing from Columbia University, Shreyas chopped his comedic muscles in the New York stand-up scene before returning to join the thriving stand-up scene in Mumbai. 

Fikri Anıl Altıntaş [he/him] is a freelance writer from Berlin and #HeForShe catalyst for UN Women Germany. ...

Romit Chowdhury is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Erasmus University College in Rotterdam, where he primarily teaches courses in Urban Sociology and Gender Studies. He has published on masculinities in the contexts of urban life and mobilities, men's rights movements, feminist methodology, sexual violence, care-giving, and men doing feminist research and activism in India.

Urvashi Butalia is an independent feminist researcher and writer based in Delhi. Co-founder of India’s first feminist publishing house Kali for Women in 1984, she is currently Director of Zubaan, an imprint of Kali. She writes and publishes widely in India and abroad.

Anindya is a transfeminist, transgender rights and social justice activist based in Calcutta, India whose relationship with transfeminisms has spanned about two decades.

Florian Fischer is a freelance trainer, consultant and writer on social justice issues, focusing on colonial heritage & de-coloniality, racism & whiteness and masculinities.

Anamika Joshi is a Hindi Spoken Word Artist based out of Jaipur, India. She writes & performs poems under the name “Batto Ki Bakwaas” on women empowerment, gender equality, and other unspoken social issues.  

Meena Kandasamy is an anti-caste activist, poet, novelist and translator. She has always been interested in deconstructing violence, understanding the trauma caused by caste, gender, and ethnic oppressions, and spotlighting the militant resistance against these powerful systems.

Dr. Sharful Islam Khan obtained his MBBS in 1992 from Dhaka Medical College, Masters in Health Social Science from Mahidol University, Thailand, and his PhD in Sociology/Anthropology from Western Australia in 2004. Since 1997, he has been working in icddrb and now works as a Scientist and Head of Program for HIV and AIDS.

Madhavi Menon is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality at Ashoka University.

Michael Meuser is a professor emeritus of the sociology of gender relations at the TU Dortmund University.

Mandeep is a dance practitioner exploring the intersections between dance creation, performance, research, and pedagogy. 

Sumathi Ramaswamy is James B. Duke Professor of History and International Comparative Studies, Chair of the Department of History, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA, and President of the American Institute of Indian Studies.

Susanne Sachsse is a Berlin based actress. In 2001 she co-founded the artists' collective CHEAP. Sachsse has worked internationally in various performance, film, and art contexts.

Meenakshi Shedde is South Asia Delegate to the Berlin Film Festival, independent film curator, journalist and feminist, based in Mumbai, India.

Angshuman Sarma, spoken word poet, storyteller and an educator. He works as freelancer and a mentor at MyCaptain, mentoring 1000+ students.
Currently, he's doing #1000daysofpoetry project on Instagram @ipoemmythoughts where he posts one poem a day.

Glocal Films is a nonprofit film production company based in London and was founded in 2004 by Kerstin Rickermann and Silke Beller. They conceive and direct a wide variety of participatory film projects worldwide
in the field of educational cultural work. 

Anokhi Shah is a curator, architect, artist and a new media designer based in Frankfurt and Pune. She is the founder of company IOVR -an Interdisciplinary Design Research startup. She is currently a curator at TIFA Working Studios, Pune. She has hosted and curated multiple art exhibitions in Europe and India. 

Alka Dhupkar is a multilingual journalist based out of Mumbai, Maharashtra currently working with Times Internet Limited as an assistant editor. As a journalist for the last 17 years Alka previously worked with newspapers in Marathi and English and worked for seven years with a Marathi news channel, travelling across India to cover a range of social issues. 

Sania Farooqui is a New Delhi based journalist and a filmmaker who recently launched The Sania Farooqui Show across social media platforms. The first series of the show, Not Just About The Sharia, is a deep dive into the lives of Muslim women worldwide. The recent second series, Women for Press Freedom, these are sharp conversations with journalists from around the world. She also writes opinion pieces and reports for IPS News and has worked as a news anchor, reporter, producer and writer for Indian and international media outlets. 

Nadika Nadja is a writer and researcher, with interests in history and archaeology, gender, technology and the internet. 

With a Masters degree in journalism from Stanford University, award-winning journalist Namita Bhandare has 30 years of writing and editing experience with such publications as Sunday, India Today and Hindustan Times. Since 2012, she has written exclusively on gender including a 12-part series on women and work for IndiaSpend and an ongoing fortnightly column for Hindustan Times. In 2014, she was appointed India's first gender editor for the publication, Mint, a position she held for three years. She is presently an independent journalist living in New Delhi. 

Devashish Makhija has written and directed the multiple award winning films 'Ajji' (Granny), 'Bhonsle', 'Taandav', 'El'ayichi', 'Agli Baar' (And then they came for me), 'Rahim Murge pe mat ro' (Don’t cry for Rahim LeCock), 'Absent', and ‘Happy’; ...

Rubaiyat Hossain is one of Bangladesh's handful of female filmmakers, known for her critically acclaimed debut feature film Meherjaan (2011) which faced political and cultural wrath in Bangladesh for its antiwar narrative, and its critic of masculine nationalism from a feminine point of view. 

Bangladesh’s most widely internationally feted director, Mr Farooki has directed about 18 creative works, written 17 and produced nine that have been at festivals worldwide. 

Actress Tillotama Shome has created a repertoire of exceptional performances in critically acclaimed award winning films both international and national. She is an extraordinary actress who navigates between cultures and languages effortlessly. 

In a stifled media environment characterised by “fake news”, sensationalism, TRPs, larger than life anchors, and the silenced on the ground reporter, Ravish Kumar stands out through his insistence on journalistic ethics, sobriety and adherence to fact-based reporting. Using social media to connect with his audience, he travels extensively, researching on and documenting the oft-ignored ordeals of the common Indian – caste atrocities, unemployment, farm distress, crippling education system and sectarianism amongst others.