In this week's episode, guest expert Padmini Ray Murray, founder of Design Beku, a feminist collective in India, joins us to talk about the intersection of feminism and digital humanities and the gendering of physical and virtual spaces We wrap up with our best tips and advice for thinking differently about the ways in which space is gendered.and at the end we'll have an assignment for our listeners- we'll ask you to pay close attention to how a space is designed and who the space is really created for. Share your story with us on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook and tag us @university_of_venus on IG and @UVenus on Twitter or post it on our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/UVenus/ and we will share, retweet, and amplify! Find University of Venus on Instagram @university_of_venus , Twitter @UVenus , and Facebook http://www.facebook.com/UVenus/
Topics Discussed in this Episode:
Resources Discussed in this Episode:
Music Credits: Magic by Six Umbrellas
Sound Engineer: Ernesto Valencia
View from Venus, Season 2, Episode 7
[00:00:00] Mary Churchill: Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of the View from Venus. My name is Mary Churchill, and on today's episode, I am joined by co-hosts Meg Palladino and Lee Skallerup Bessette and guest expert, Padmini Ray Murray, founder of Design Beku, a feminist collective in India, focused on technology and design.
In today's episode, we'll be talking with Padmini about her reasons for leaving academia and starting her own nonprofit, the intersection of feminism and digital humanities, and the gendering of physical and virtual spaces. You will walk away with our best tips and advice for thinking differently about the ways in which space is gendered.
And as always, at the end of the episode, we'll have a recommended assignment for you. Padmini Ray Murray is the founder of Design Beku. Padmini established the first degree level digital humanities program in India at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design, and Technology where she was Course Director from [00:01:00] 2016 to 2018. She is currently co-investigator on Gendering the Smart City and she served as a trustee for Wikimedia UK from 2013 to 2014.
We asked Padmini to join us on View from Venus because we wanted to hear more about her work on gender and space.
Thank you so much for joining us. I'm really excited about this conversation.
Padmini Ray Murray: Thank you. It's lovely to be here.
Meg Palladino: So, today's question is an easy one. I would like to know, what is your favorite breakfast food? Mine is definitely pancakes with maple syrup and I don't like them with chocolate chips or blueberries, just like plain old pancakes with maple syrup. I think it's really the maple syrup I like.
Mary Churchill: Big fluffy pancakes?
Meg Palladino: Yeah. They're just a vehicle for the maple syrup. But I always say, if I could be in a pancake eating contest, I would totally win.
Mary Churchill: Mine is seasonal, so, and we're right now ending winter and entering spring. So, I'm [00:02:00] changing day to day. But my typical winter is oatmeal with bananas and cinnamon, sometimes some walnuts. But in the summer, I really, or the warmer months, I really like things like cheese and fruit and just really light food.
So, I really change with the seasons. What about you, Lee?
Lee Skallerup Bessette: So, if we're talking about my all-time favorite, we're going to go with like the traditional "traditional Quebecois breakfast, "which is like all the protein and fatty meats.
It is the eggs and the bacon and the sausage, and not pancakes, but crepes. Like there's that French side to it. and then there's this really great, and it's more of a winter thing, but I mean, it's Quebec, it's Canada, so winter is like 90% of the time. There's this really great thing that we, spread on toast and it's called cretons and it's basically just like pork fat with a, salted pork fat with a little bit of pork in it. That it's like, it's country [00:03:00] pate, right? Like, that's basically what it is.
Mary Churchill: Padmini, what about you?
Padmini Ray Murray: Wow. That sounds amazing, Lee, and the next time I'm in Canada, I need to, I need to get me some of that. So, I feel relatively boring because I really like muesli. So, muesli and a big cup of coffee.
I mean, I do definitely have cravings for the big bang up breakfast every now and then. But yeah, I would say that's pretty much my staple, which I enjoy. I also quite enjoy, I don't know what they're called in America, but soldiers and half-boiled eggs. Are soldiers familiar? No.
Meg Palladino: I've heard of that
Padmini Ray Murray: So, soldiers are basically when you have hot buttered toast and you slice them up into like lengthwise and you dip it in the soft-boiled egg. Ooh. It's very British.
Mary Churchill: So, Lee's going to get us started with our heavy content questions.
Lee Skallerup Bessette: Yeah. so, you decided to leave [00:04:00] academia in 2018 and then you found a Design Beku am I pronouncing that right? Beku? What motivated you to do this? And, what have you learned in this process?
Padmini Ray Murray: Oh gosh. Okay. So, what motivated me to do it? So, I think a lot of it was motivated by coming back to India. So, I was in the UK for, I don't know, 13 years, which is the time during which I did my PhD, and then I was teaching, and then I came back to India. Came back to join a design school, which is very interdisciplinary. It's called the Srishti Institute for Art, Design, and Technology. And, so as a consequence, you know, I think just being at Srishti really kind of widened my perspectives and digital humanities was not really an established discipline here.
So, that's kind of, I set up a master's program actually doing that. But then just realized that working in India, what was much more crucial was a public humanities, [00:05:00] and needed to kind of move outside the Academy to ensure that that kind of public humanities kind of had, was embedded.
And so, yeah. So, I think, you know, myself and a couple of colleagues at Sristhi felt that there was a great need for this. we also kind of came across some small organizations and not for profits that needed something like it. So yes, that's how we came into being.
Mary Churchill: So that's interesting. I'm always interested in the fact that these kinds of things can't be done within academia or while maintaining an academic tie.
It's very interesting that there seems to be a need to do this separate from academia. Could you speak to that just a little bit? Because I think that as an administrator in higher ed, I want to learn how we can better support these types of projects from within higher ed.
Padmini Ray Murray: Sure. I think, so. I mean, India has a vast public education system, and, you know, of course, while it has [00:06:00] its troubles, it's pretty effective.
So, I wouldn't say that we couldn't have established what we're doing within the Academy, but I do think, the kind of, interdisciplinary. embedding of this kind of work. So, moving from theory to practice, it's harder to do in the Academy, than it is to do in the outside world, so to speak just because the infrastructure is still pretty nascent. I think just the concept of working in the digital humanities or even the concept of public humanities, it's still quite new. And I think we did want to be in a space where we could push that, to kind of demonstrate that it doesn't have to be only within the Academy, that these learnings can happen.
Because, you know, we live in a profoundly unequal society in terms of income, in terms of cost, in terms of an agenda and so not everyone makes it to education, to formal education. And so therefore we kind of felt like we would probably be reaching more myriad kinds of audiences by doing this.
Mary Churchill: And that's, that's what I thought you were [00:07:00] going to say. Because. So, I'm in a college of education right now and I'm trained as a sociologist, but it is really wonderful to see my colleagues in this college of education so focused on access, right? So, focused on how do we reach the people who don't come to us?
How do we make sure we're more embedded within local communities? So, I think you're right. I think my colleagues, that's unique and that's of course why I'm attracted to them. rather than the traditional sociologists which I, you know, I love that too, but.
So, what have you learned since you launched this?
Padmini Ray Murray: So, I think I've learned that I was never meant to be an academic. I mean, I love...it's funny...I love research. I don't enjoy the kind of. you know, the circuit, you know, like, I love going to [00:08:00] conferences and you make me make friends and all that.
But, you know, the whole, the publishing cycle and all of that. I mean, actually, to be honest, I think after a point, it feels a little irrelevant working in the context that we are. So, I mean, I used to work, I was a trustee for the Wikimedia Foundation when I was in the UK. And, I kind of feel like that kind of work felt a bit more like, I could kind of speak outside to different audiences and this is similar, I think. We do, we still do a lot of kind of research-led work, but it's not about, you know, publishing. It's not about, you know, going to the conferences, et cetera, even though that's still, you know, forms a small part of what we do. I think what I've also learned is that it's very difficult to run a small organization.
I think, you know, I've been protected or sheltered by academia for a very long time, and so I'm just learning how to run an organization, however small, and we have lofty ambitions of this being a feminist collective. So, you know, what does that mean in terms of leadership. [00:09:00] What does that mean in terms of organizational values?
What does that mean in terms of, you know, very prosaic things like money and compensation? How can we ensure everything is fair?
Mary Churchill: And that's a nice segue to my next question, which is about feminism and digital humanities. So, what do the feminist spaces within DH look like and how could they improve?
Padmini Ray Murray: So, I'm going to speak to my, you know, personal context and personal, local context, I guess first. I think, again, you know, it's very unequal in terms of access. I think one of the most exciting things that has happened in the last few years is that, as the internet has become more ubiquitous as connectivity has become more ubiquitous. We have a lot of young and also not so young feminist scholars, non-dominant caste scholars moving into the space. you know, being very vocal, being very visible, which, you know, traditional, apparatus's of scholarship and educational infrastructures didn't support because they were often not in formalized institutions or not [00:10:00] working in English and that has definitely shifted, which has made it really exciting and it also means that it has become, it is a challenge to feminists, dominant caste feminists in this country, because I think we are now truly having to grapple with what it means to be intersectional and I think that's great.
I think it was long overdue. So that's kind of one conversation that's really unfolding I would say in DH because most of these conversations are happening on spaces like Twitter, it's happening on spaces like blogs. It's happening on spaces like Facebook, Instagram as well, now, increasingly. These are all, you know, being harnessed as activist spaces.
So, yeah, so it's really, but it's also on the flip side, wonderful flip side of that is to see feminist solidarity growing as well. So, I think, given the recent events in this country with, you know, a lot of leadership being shown by Muslim women. A lot of those solidarities are being made more visible and it's more possible to interact with those because of things like social media.
So, you know, those digital spaces have allowed for those conversations to [00:11:00] unfold. It's also allowed for testimony to exist, in a way that we haven't before, haven't had before. which is like a counterpoint to a national narrative. So, I think that's what's happening for us locally.
And, you know, personally, and I think in the larger context, I think, you know, I mean, DH, feminist DH is doing kind of wonderful and important things, and I think it's the most crucial move the digital humanities has seen and necessarily so, and of course, you know, again, it's kind of about intersectionality. It's about histories. It's about surfacing narratives that we didn't hear before. And, yeah, it's just great to see that that's getting pride of space. And also, something really interesting that I was telling somebody else about the other day that they were surprised about was peer review and how feminist peer review can be very different in terms of open, you know, non blind peer review. You know, kind of this spirit of generosity that a lot of digital humanities, feminist work demonstrates, [00:12:00] which makes the Academy a kinder place and I think that's a very necessary and a great thing to see as well.
Meg Palladino: So, Padmini, you're working on a project called Gendering the Smart City. We'd like to know more about this and how you got started.
Padmini Ray Murray: Yes. Yeah. okay. So, this is a project, that came to me via a professor of urban geography called Ayona Datta. She was at King's College, London when we got it and now she's moved to University College, London and it was a network grant to, basically just address the very simple question that, in conceptions of the smart city, which is, you know, obviously a kind of an international phenomenon to which India is not immune, that gender is not usually considered as a vector. So, you know, the smart city policy framework kind of assumes that everybody experiences the city in the same way, which is of course, incredibly far from the truth.
So, Gendering the Smart City was basically a way to kind of intervene and to demonstrate ways in which gender characterizes our [00:13:00] relationship to the city. So, it's a two-phase project. We've had the first phase, which has been completed in Delhi, where we were working with a group of young women between the ages of 18 and 25 who live in a resettlement colony.
So, it's quite marginal. They've been moved from, you know, where they were originally living. And that happened because they are from quite disadvantaged communities and, we were working with them through an NGO called Jagori who has been, they've been embedded in that area for quite a few years now.
So, the young women we've been working with were incredibly dynamic. They all had their own mobile phones, which they had desperately like, you know, that was one thing that they really wanted to earn money to own. So, they kind of mediated the city and everything they see through their phones and so they were a great group of young women to work with. And while we worked with them, we did three things. One was we asked them to keep what we called a WhatsApp diary, so they were using WhatsApp, the messaging service as a way to just talk about their [00:14:00] experiences in the city. And it was you know, it could be very mundane and, you know, the streets are flooded and, you know, we can't, you know, we can't make it to the Metro station or something like that to the very, you know, kind of dramatic. Like there was a boy who was murdered in their neighborhood and, you know, so, and the documentation of that and the messages, you know, kind of, being exchanged to and fro.
So, it was kind of like a kind of a thick, you know, auto ethnography, I guess. The way they encountered the city. The second thing that we did was, as I said, I've worked with, Wikipedia in the past and we did an editathon with them about their neighborhood. So, the neighborhood is called Madanpur Khadar. Because it's a resettlement colony, it has no visibility in the larger idea of what Delhi is.
So, if you look at Wikipedia and you look up Delhi, you find, you know posh neighborhoods, or you know, where all the government buildings are, etc. But their neighborhood has no, so, so we basically wrote a Wikipedia article about their neighborhood and, we did it in Hindi because that's the language they [00:15:00] speak.
So, we kind of did it both in Hindi and in English and also just, you know, mapping the neighborhood with them was really interesting because the names that they have for spaces are very colloquial and we put those in the Wikipedia article. We haven't kind of, you know, gone to Google maps and you know, said, okay, this is the correct name because we feel like the lived experience of a neighborhood is far more important than, you know, what the Google map says, for example, about your neighborhood. So, I think it was a small gesture towards pushing back against the Googlization of everything, because there is definitely, I mean, we know that Google with Sidewalk, for example, is, you know, really pushing this kind of agenda elsewhere and here as well.
So, that was the second thing we did. And the last thing that we did was, the girls did a hip-hop song about, you know, life in the city and you know, how tough it is. And that went kind of vaguely viral. They've been asked to perform it on several occasions now. So that was great and you know, that they really enjoyed that we had a proper choreographer and a proper [00:16:00] music director.
And so, they really, really enjoyed doing that. So, so that was the Delhi phase and now, we are coming to Bangalore. In Bangalore, because I'm here, I wanted to kind of extend the meaning of what we meant by gender because the Delhi phase was very female-centric. So, we're opening it up a lot more to, you know, accommodate or think about how queer bodies and trans bodies negotiate space. How caste, how bodies defined by caste negotiate space. And so, we're trying to make it more about, you know, how does the marginalized, kind of engage with the city and what we want to do as an output is to create a kind of traveling installation that demystifies automated decision making. And to think about how can communities, how can community decisions be translated into automated machine decisions? And is that even possible?
Meg Palladino: So interesting. I want to rethink how I live in my city. How my gender sort of sees it differently from men.
Padmini Ray Murray: Yes. [00:17:00] Yeah.
Mary Churchill: Well, and that's, that's a, that's like we're wrapping up and that's it, right? It's kind of gender and space and, our takeaways. Meg, do you want to start, because you just started,
Meg Palladino: Well, yeah, I mean. You know, when I had, this is sort of a different way of negotiating space, but you know, when I had a kid in a stroller, I saw the city really differently.
And so, it made me think about being able bodied. And now I'm thinking about, you know, how do I see things differently from men?
Lee Skallerup Bessette: I think that it's really, I've always tried to think of it in terms of, thinking through the physical space that we inhabit, as well as the online spaces that we sort of embody and how those two things intersect with one another in a lot of ways. Obviously, especially when we talk about the internet of things, and how we can move and how we move through spaces online versus how we're allowed to move through spaces. As we were talking about how online has opened up spaces for a lot of these conversations to take place that weren't allowed [00:18:00] to take place in physical spaces, typically. And so, the, so raising those voices, amplifying those voices and finding those connections and how that carries over into the physical space and then vice versa.
So, I don't know if that's a takeaway or just something that I'm thinking more deeply about or reminded me about it through this conversation.
Mary Churchill: And you've just reminded me that, you know, it's kind of like you can never stop thinking critically. Like the minute you just are like, okay, this is, this is means like white, upper middle patriarchy, right? Because that's the fallback. And so, the minute you stop thinking about the way your room is set up, or the way you construct space, or the way you navigate through a city, that means the default is those that are in power. And so, it just, it kind of reminds me, I, you always have to be thinking about how is this space gendered [00:19:00] and how does it prioritize men in this space? When we let the default happen, we are letting those in power define the space. So Padmini, any takeaways for you before we wrap up?
Padmini Ray Murray: Yes. well I think, I mean, it' really great to hear the perspectives of people elsewhere because I think, as you were saying, it's really, it's really difficult when you live in environments like this to stop thinking critically and sometimes I wish we had the luxury of doing that, and because it can be tiring and I think, you know, that's where self-care and solidarity can play a huge role and so I think that's something that we are learning to pay really close attention to right now. but it's also wonderful to have that feeling from, you know, from international friends and colleagues as well.
So, thanks very much.
Mary Churchill: Oh, thank you.
Okay, listeners, here's this week's assignment. Take a designed space, any space, a conference room, your office, a space in a city or an online [00:20:00] space. Pay close attention to how this space is designed and who the space is really created for and share your story with us on IG, Twitter, or Facebook and tag us at @UVenus and we'll retweet, share in our story and post on Facebook.
As always, thanks for joining us and we'll be back next week with more on The View from Venus.