Pandemic of Perspectives

Rimple Mehta is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work and Communities, School of Social Sciences, Western Sydney University. She has previously worked at the Tata Institute for Social Sciences, Mumbai and Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She has studied Sociology, Social Work and Women’s Studies. She researches and writes on gender, criminalisation of mobility, trafficking and incarceration. Her monograph titled Women, Mobility and Incarceration: Love and Recasting of Self across the Bangladesh-India Border was published in 2018. Her latest co-edited volume titled Women, Incarcerated: Narratives from India was published by Orient BlackSwan in 2022. She has researched with women in prisons in Mumbai, Kolkata and The Netherlands and also worked with organisations such as Swayam and networks such as Maitree against violence on women in West Bengal.Sandali Thakur is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Women-centred Social Work, Tata institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. She has taught Women’s and Gender Studies/Social Work/Sociology at the Azim Premji University Bengaluru, Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Youth Development Sriperumbudur, Savitribai Phule Pune University, and Tata Institute of Social Sciences Mumbai and Chennai. Sandali has been part of anti-caste struggles and co-founded a New Delhi-based organisation (funded by Ford Foundation) to intervene in the area of social exclusion in higher education. She has also been involved in the Women’s Studies movement and helped set up the Women’s Studies Program in Patna University. Her doctoral work explored social relations of caste, class and gender amongst ‘folk’ artists of Madhubani/ Mithila. Debaroti Chakraborty is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Performing Arts, Presidency University, India. As a researcher- artist and performance thinker she focuses on making cross-cultural and inter-cultural performances based on lived experiences, narratives, and oral history. Her doctoral work broadly studies narratives of women in India and Latin America through a comparative perspective in the context of borders. Debaroti has been an instructor at the ‘Bodies at the Borders’ collaborative video-conferencing course between Cornell University, U.S.A and Jadavpur University. She has also taught at the under-graduate and post-graduate levels in the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University. She also writes as a performance critic with the Telegraph.

• Introduction Touch 1. My Tango Life Cancelled 2. Poems Nabina Das 3. Refugee Women from Different Continents Dance in a Circle 4. Poems 5. Kartik’s Last Words Home and the World 6. Plethora of Emotions Engulf the Everyday Life 7. Post-Covid-19 Urbanscape: Reimagining Housing as Infrastructure of Care 8. Quarantined for Life 9. Calling on Australians of Conscience 10. Femicide and Violence against Women in Mexico Governance 11. Domestic Violence during the Covid-19 lockdown: Interventions by Special Cell for Women located at Police Stations 12. Re-imagining Governance in Post-Covid-19 Bihar 13. Covid-19 Stories: Artwork & Commentary 14. Surveillance to Sousveillance: Watching the Watchers 15. Untitled Artwork Religion and Godlessness 16. Handling the Pandemic: How Does a Neoliberal State ‘Manage’ the Deeper Malaise? 17. No Idea of God: Epiphanies and Exaltations Amidst a Pandemic Creative Communications 18. Thoughts from the North 19. Just Wafting by… 20. Re-imagining indigenous knowledge and practices in a post COVID-19 Social Work in Uganda 21. The Earth and Covid-19 Questioning the ‘Normal’ and the Normative 22. To Do is To Be? 23. The Myth of Majority: Reimagining Minorities 24. Covid-19 and the intersectional consequences for women with disabilities: Experiences from Sri Lanka Education 25. The Private-Liberal Arts University and the Pandemic: Some Reflections 26. Re-imagining Education in the post-Covid World Of Trauma and Loss 27. Ground Zero After Ground Zero 28. Narrating the Moment of Transmission Creative Re-imaginings 29. Shakespeare and Kafka: Telling Stories in Times of Uncertainty 30. Socialism, Language and Values for a Post-Corona World 31. Covid-19 and Its Impacts: A Dialogue on Intersectional Vulnerabilities and Resistances 32. Beyond Crisis: Building Child-friendly Cities as Bird-friendly Spaces