Rama Watamull Collaborative Lecture Series

October 18, 3:00pm - 4:30pm
Mānoa Campus, Kuykendall Hall 410

The Child’s Voice: Co-creating with Children and the Challenges of Collaboration In the workshop, I will be focusing on my methodology and collaborative process for creating media and narratives for children. I believe it is critical to include children in our conversations about the world, and that by enabling children to tell their stories, we create opportunities to learn from their lived experiences as well as supporting their developing sense of self and of the world. I will be culling examples from two of my projects—the “Hum Hindustani Poetry Podcast” and the “Incredible Child”—to discuss the ethics and challenges of the collaborative process. While the institutional ethics guidelines often require interviews and other data to be anonymized, and families to sign consent forms, this process has the effect of a subjective loss in terms of leaving out the individual child’s voice for a voice that tends to be always pluralized. I will share details from these various projects to showcase how I negotiate around these difficulties of representing the child's voice as children's voices. The Hum Hindustani Poetry Podcast is a curated selection of poems written by children on the ideas of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity—principles enshrined in the Constitution of India—for the Hum Hindustani education research project. The Incredible Child is an ongoing art project at the Simurgh Centre, Delhi that involves engaging with the children of Khirkee village, mainly Afghan refugees, using films, poetry and visual art. Speaker Bio:Samina Mishra is a documentary filmmaker, writer, and teacher based in New Delhi, with a special interest in media for and about children. Her work uses the lens of childhood, identity, and education to reflect the experiences of growing up in India.


Event Sponsor
English and the Center for South Asian Studies, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Nandini Chandra, 8087790875, nc8@hawaii.edu, workshopsamina3 (PDF)

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