Interview by Alyssa Algu
From the beginning of your professional life, you have worked on human rights, gender justice, journalism, and activism. Since 2022, you have taken up a position with Reporters without Borders. How do you understand your work at Reporters Without Borders, an international NGO that defends press freedom and activism, especially with respect to women's rights?
To answer that question means telling you about myself and where I come from. I was born and brought up in India. I had a very different kind of an upbringing, because my mother single-handedly brought me and my brother up as a single parent, and she was negatively judged by society often. So I grew up with seeing an unequal society. It made me angry because as a child, you can't do anything about it.
That's why I took up social work, completing an MA, because I wanted to change the society in which I grew up. My first job position was in rural, remote villages of Jharkhand, in India. I worked with tribal women for about two and a half years on how to collectivize women to fight for their own voice and for social justice.
This was not something I had learned studying social work. In social work, too often, you are trained as a person who's a saviour—you go to the field and you are the one saving everyone. But when I was in the field, I quickly realized that's not true. That's far from the truth! It's the people that you work with who must have the power. You are just a facilitator in a way, so they are the ones actually fighting for their justice or rights—and that's how it should be. For me, that was a very important lesson I learned in my first job.
Since then, I started working with different communities, different groups, mostly women. When I began working in cities, I worked with trans women, intersex people, and other marginalized genders. After having worked with these communities, the ways that women and people of marginalized genders are affected by conflict automatically became a focus of mine. How are these gender identities impacted by conflict?
"In social work, too often, you are trained as a person who's a saviour—you go to the field and you are the one saving everyone. But when I was in the field, I quickly realized that's not true. That's far from the truth! It's the people that you work with who must have the power."
Shataakshi Verma
Because I was concerned about this question, I went to Afghanistan, where I joined the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs to work on building vocational training programs for women and to bring a gender lens to their labour migration policy. After having worked in and on Afghanistan for around three years, I joined Reporters Without Borders (or Reports Sans Frontières, RSF). Despite its name, RSF is not a journalistic enterprise; it's actually a non-governmental organization (NGO) that does capacity-building for journalists working in conflict-affected places or in authoritarian regimes. For me, this was the kind of work that I wanted to do, because you are giving tools and resources to the people who are doing the work in the community.
In my case, as a woman of colour coming from South Asia working in an international organization like RSF is huge step up. It’s a way to see the world and also financially it is important, as a woman, to be in a place where you can make a decent amount of money for the work you are doing. What I realized in India is that social work jobs don't pay you that much, and if you don't come from a well-to-do family or a well-to-do-setup, earning a decent living is critical, because you want to do work that matters, for society, but, at the same time, you need money back home.
Practical considerations like that were also a crucial part of my decision to move to a bigger organization. After Afghanistan, I then began to work in Taiwan. I've been living in Taiwan for a year and, like Afghanistan, Taiwan has been affected by conflict for some time. It's not the same kind of conflict as it was in Afghanistan, but is rather different. I am able to explore that as well—and I am able to work in the whole Asia Pacific region. I am the programme manager of the RSF Asia Pacific Bureau, and I manage all their projects here and it's a much bigger scope.
And then, at the same time, I started my own non-profit organization, Art of Freedom. My experience of having working with big international NGO’s RSF is helping me to learn and answer the question: How do you run a non-profit organization? So I feel like I can take lessons learned and go back to my community and maybe do something for them, as well.
She is also the founder of Art of Freedom Project, a women's collective based in Kabul that advocates for rights for women from ethnic and religious minorities in conflict affected communities around the world through art based mediums. In 2022, she directed a documentary film, named The Lost Fish, mapping the struggles of the fisherwomen community in India’s coastal city Mumbai, on their struggles with displacement and their fight for livelihood. She has also contributed her writings from her human rights work in several journals, with her latest work published in the Journal of Youth, Peace and Security. In 2023, she attended the Harvard Kennedy School's executive program on using public narrative as a tool for storytelling, action and community mobilization
Verma is currently working with Reporters without Borders as their Asia Pacific Bureau Program Manager and is based in Taiwan..
You have an interest in the role of film and the arts as a way of demanding rights for women. Your own film work, The Lost Fish is a documentary about fisher women in Mumbai and their struggles for livelihood. With the Art of Freedom project, you have tried to support women in conflict zones, especially young women in Afghanistan in making their voices heard, in a context where that is now difficult and even dangerous. Why do the arts matter in struggles for women's rights?
Art is important to me. At one point in my life, I was very much into photography. But I gave it up because I began to have ethical concerns. I was working in the community and I felt I was taking away their stories when I went there, simply as a photographer. I've had my tryst with art, both believing and not believing in art.
But in the conflict-affected communities that I have worked in, many people, and women in particular, have less access to many resources. They do not have access to education, for instance, or they do not have access to reliable information. In these contexts, art can be a less intimidating tool for them to communicate. When we were in Afghanistan, if we were showing art—a film or anything else—the women would become much more excited to talk about it. They didn't feel like we'd put them at the centre where you're telling them, “Speak now!” This is part of the story: women and other people who are marginalized should fight for themselves. But how should they fight? What is the process? Sometimes, those of us who were working on the ground forget to ask these questions. We say: “They have to fight for themselves!” But did we give them the right tools to fight?
We didn't. Education was not accessible to them. A lot of tools were not accessible to them. So then how will they ever raise their voice? Of course, anyone can talk. But that can be especially intimidating for women or those who've come from marginalized backgrounds. Having witnessed those difficulties, I saw art being a very important tool for helping women, in particular, to communicate—and I wanted to develop this idea further.
"Art can be a less intimidating tool for women from marginalized backgrounds to use to communicate. When we were in Afghanistan, if we were showing art—a film or anything else—the women would become much more excited to talk about it."
Shataakshi Verma
When I was living in Afghanistan, I met a few very lovely women. Together, we started the collective that we call Art of Freedom. In around 2019 and 2020, we did our first workshop in Kabul. We started engaging with women in spaces where they could come together, and discuss and use creative mediums to let us know how they've been feeling. It was just… simple. We didn't have any idea about the impact of the project, it was just a space for them to share.
At that time, it was important for us to have these dialogues, because there were peace talks in Afghanistan and we realized that in all of these policymaking talks, women's narratives were completely missing. And then the Taliban came back to power, neglecting everything that the women had built up for so many years.
Suddenly, our work became more urgent because women were losing their spaces. They couldn't go to school anymore. It's 2024, and it's now been two years since the Taliban put a ban on young girls going to school. There is no other country that doesn't allow women to go to school. These women are not being able to access their education which is a basic human right that has been taken away from them.
Sometimes, what angers me and drives my work is that the world is not listening, and people don’t do what needs to be done. In today’s context, it is even more urgent for us to keep advocating, and the best tool for advocacy right now is to keep doing these workshops in Afghanistan. We either do them online or we train teachers and they do them on the ground, in Afghanistan. Whatever comes out—the narratives—we put together and then we exhibit them and we put them in important places relevant for advocacy: in symposiums and in United Nations conferences or the European Parliament. We participate in recommending policies targeting young women and peacebuilding to the UN, where we bring these women to be part of those spaces.
We're trying… we're trying! We're such a small collective right now. But that's why we think art is important, it becomes like a tool, a way for sharing these women’s voices at a time when we urgently need to hear them.
"When we started Art of Freedom, it was important for us to have these dialogues, because there were peace talks in Afghanistan and we realized that in all of these policymaking talks, women's narratives were completely missing."
Shataakshi Verma
You have worked in many difficult contexts, like rural India and in Afghanistan, where women face incredible hardships and, often, violence. What have you learned from these women?
One very important thing that I have learned is that women are full of resilience. This is something that we have been brought up with as women. We've always been told, for instance, to “Buck up and fight!” Of course, this affects our mental health and that is another important discussion we need to have. But all the women that I have worked with, I have seen them resisting—and resisting everything that's wrong in society.
It won't necessarily be a protest, standing out there in the road, but their own hidden ways of resisting. A very small example of this is one woman I was working with in Jharkhand. Her husband was physically abusive towards her and he would usually be violent late at night after coming home. Her response was that she would mix something in his food at times that would make him sleep faster. I'm not saying this is correct. I'm just saying I'm learning that women are fighting in small ways and they are protecting themselves however they can.
They're using what I call weapons of resistance, developing whatever solutions they have, in their own situation. Imagine if you give women the power to actually come together to find solutions to our problems: how amazing can that be? Because they're already inventing many solutions in their lives to fight these societal norms they must go through. We just don’t hear them or we never actually make use of all that knowledge that's already there. What I'm learning is that even in very difficult circumstances, women are finding solutions.
"And it is definitely very difficult to think of hope in times like today. But when you meet people who have fought all their lives, that somehow gives me hope."
Shataakshi Verma
A lot of people ask me: “Where do you get your hope from, given everything that's happening in the world?” And it is definitely very difficult to think of hope in times like today. But when you meet people who have fought all their lives, that somehow gives me hope. How can we document those struggles? How can we bring those voices out? How can we let women know that there are women who have survived and changed the world for the better, and that they can too?
And what role is there for feminists in the Global North who seek to act in solidarity with these women?
Recently, it was International Women's Day and something important I realized with a lot of the posts that were coming out is that the majority of feminist organizations I am seeing are in the Global North. It is their responsibility to start thinking more intersectionally and from a more grounded perspective—and to drive resources towards where they are needed. For too long, even within feminism, some people have more power and others do not have much power. There needs to be intersectionality within policymaking and in international decision-making, where they’re considering people who might be living in Sri Lanka, women who are living in Bangladesh, women who are living in Afghanistan—and making space for them to come and speak, and then making it less intimidating for them to do so.
Is there anything else you think people should know that we have not yet spoken about?
One important thing is something that I'm learning right now: collaboration across people, across individuals, across organizations can go a long way. We're not competing with each other. We're working towards the same goal. You might be working towards mental health, I might be working towards a sense of agency for women, and somebody else might be working on climate change, but all of these struggles are connected.
The Art of Freedom initiative is new—and we do have funding from a feminist collective—but we do not have too many resources available to us. And I’ve realized in the past year that collaboration can take you such a long way. We are working with organizations in Afghanistan but also in Sri Lanka and in Bangladesh. Collaboration allows the focus to be on the goal, as opposed to visibility. Instead of fighting to have our logos and names somewhere, when we collaborate together, we can raise everyone’s voices.
To learn more about Shataakshi Verma and her work, please visit her LinkedIn Page here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shataakshi-verma-79a1b1b3/; the Art of Freedom project here: https://artoffreedomproject.org/; The Lost Fish documentary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uekhXOE3NU and her latest published work here: https://unoy.org/downloads/journal-of-youth-peace-security-issue-2/
Alyssa Algu is a student in the Concurrent Bachelor of Education program at York University’s Glendon Campus, double majoring in Sociology and French Studies.