Keynote for the second week of CERN LIVIANA
The keynote for the second week of the 2024 CERN LIVIANA online conference will be delivered by Bhavya Chitranshi who will reflect on 10 years of doing collaborative action research work with Eka Nari Sanghathan (ENS, the single women’s collective) in the village of Emaliguda in Odisha, India.
LIVIANA is the annual online conference of the Community Economies Research Network (CERN) and in 2024 it will be held from 4 to 15 November.
The second keynote, entitled "Storying Paribartan (transformation) with Adivasi single women farmers in Odisha India: A Journey of collaborative learning and praxis" will be delivered on 12 November (or 11 November in the Americas). Click here for more details and to register.
Chitranshi says "The question I reflect upon in this talk is: What can be learned from Adivasi single women farmers engaging in alternative practices of transformation, beyond ‘development’?"
"In the rural Indian context socio-economic transformation is framed as ‘inclusive development’ and delivered via micro-finance programs and industrial agriculture interventions. These practices of inclusive development, commonly termed Bikas, deploy capitalist and Orientalist logics, and aim to launch ‘underdeveloped’ spaces onto the path of growth-based development."
"Departing from this development imperative, in rural Odisha, a collective of Adivasi single women and I have been engaging in reframing and enacting our own practices and strategies of transformation, which we call Paribartan. While Bikas envisions a step ladder agenda of progression, the praxis of Paribartan pursues ever-evolving processes of reflective becoming."
"These processes help cultivate transformative relationships to the self, to each other, and with the human and more-than-human world around us."
"In this presentation I reflect upon 10 years of doing collaborative action research work with the Eka Nari Sanghathan (ENS, the single women’s collective) in village Emaliguda in Odisha. Since forging this collective in 2013, we have been working on postcapitalist-feminist and decolonial ways of 'surviving well-together.' Building upon land relations and land-based learnings of Kui-lukon (the Adivasi community in Emaliguda), ENS and I have been engaging in collective and sustainable agricultural practices on commonly leased plots of land."
"In current times, when Adivasi farmers are being encouraged to pursue individualized and industrialized farming for profit, we have been attempting to recover lost knowledge and practices in agriculture through a reclaiming of land and communitarian relations. This is the 9th year of collective farming and successfully sustaining ENS. These postcapitalist enactments have continued to be slow, uncertain and challenging."
"I draw upon our learnings on the process of Paribartan through sharing of stories that represent our journey. These stories are insights into our collaborative excitements, experimentation, collective joy and labouring, while also speaking of the challenging, messy and complex realities that is the process of becoming a postcapitalist-feminist subject."
Image: Eka Nari Sanghathan (ENS, the single women’s collective). Courtesy Bhavya Chitranshi.
Bhavya Chitranshi is a PhD fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at the Western Sydney University. She has completed her Masters in Gender Studies and MPhil in Development Practice from Ambedkar University Delhi. She is the co-founder of an Adivasi single women's collective, the Eka Nari Sanghathan, in Odisha, India. For the last 10 years, in close collaboration with the collective, she has been doing action research on issues related to singleness, gender, sustainable agriculture, socio-economic transformation and postcapitalist-feminist politics. Her PhD project explores connections between decolonial perspectives-knowledge-practices in sustainable agriculture and possible postcapitalist-feminist praxis in the Adivasi context. For more on Bhavya's work with ENS click here, and here.