In March 2017 I was awarded a Fulbright-Nehru research grant for an endeavor titled Women’s Water Narratives: A Digital Storytelling Project. This project explored gendered relationships to water and rivers and women’s water- and land-based literacies (ways of knowing and being developed from connections to water and land; Gabriela Ríos) through forms of digital storytelling ranging from video-editing, soundscaping with ArcGIS StoryMaps, and personal narrative+photography and drawing. I conducted 15 digital storytelling workshops with 5 to 25 participants in each workshops.
All the workshops were foregrounded with place-based personal narrative writing, and supplemented with digital tools, such as a video-editing, soundscaping with ArcGIS Storymaps, and digital photography. I worked with university students in New Delhi, Indigenous water activist women from the Lepcha and Rabha communities in Sikkim, Hindu housewives in Varanasi, and folklorists focused on cultural continuance in Kerala. The digital storytellings range from video-making, photography + written or spoken narrative, to a soundscape that explores and geotags a week in the life of individual women’s water use and interaction.
More information about this project, as well as a soundscape of the Yamuna River in Delhi, is forthcoming. In the mean time, check out the following post I wrote for International Rivers about a workshop that took place with Indigenous women of the Lepcha and Rabha communities in Sikkim and West Bengal: Visualizing Our Water and River Relations Workshop for Women
