Bhavya Chitranshi

Western Sydney University · Institute for Culture and Society (ICS)

Eka Nari Sanghathan (ENS), an Indigenous single women farmer's collective in Odisha, India and Norco Dairy in regional NSW, Australia are cooperatives undertaking collective action to ‘survive well’, securing agrarian livelihoods in the face of climate change. Striking differences in affluence and poverty separate these place‐based cooperatives whi...

The accessibility, availability and consumption of food in food and agriculture systems are key public health and food security concerns. We draw on empirical research from members of the Community Economies Research Network from Australia, New Zealand, India and Finland to reimagine food and agriculture systems as a planetary food commons (PFC). P...

This chapter introduces ‘action research’ undertaken in the Rayagada district of Odisha, India. The work began with the identification of the experience of ‘singleness’ among Kondh adivasi (indigenous tribes) women farmers in a village named Emaliguda. The dialectic of oppression and resistance resulting from the condition of singleness led to the...

Here we, on the one hand, revisit the standard operating procedure in development strategies—“communication (technologies) for development”—and move instead to “development for facilitating communication” through exploring questions such as: Does communication facilitate development? Or does development facilitate communication? Which kind of commu...

After a long day of hard toil, on a hot summer evening in 2013, a group of Kondha adivasi women gathered in a dark and isolated corner of a village named Emaliguda. In the gathering, prevailed a disturbing 'silence'; 'silence' hinting at loss of words/language. This silence was the result of what an aged woman, Tulsi Pulaka, had just shared; an ins...

This paper is on what Spivak calls, "necessary absurdity"; a necessary absurdity that deconstruction brings to the praxis of transformation (namely transformation along the axis of what would provisionally be called the 'subject', the 'social' and the 'political'); "deconstruction can make founded political programs more useful by making their in-b...

This paper builds on an ‘action research’ project that took ‘transformation’ as an object of inquiry in the context of the collective mobilisation of single women and formation of an Eka Nari Sanghathan (Single Womens’ Collective) in a distant tribal village called Emaliguda in the Rayagada district of Odisha. The lived experience of being single,...