Trembling: The winds and I

This is a text based on a keynote address that I gave at the IDIERI, 2022 conference in Warwick. The theme of IDIERI, 2022 was “Navigating mess and complexity in uncertain times.” It is particularly relevant to this issue because the project described in this keynote emerges from, and is embedded in, our on-going work at Study Hall Educational Foundation (SHEF) and addresses Sustainable Development Goals 1, 4, 5, 10 and 13. The project is about teenage girls in Lucknow, India. It includes critical dialogues, poetry and drama, and culminates in a collectively curated script and performance. As girls in India, it reveals their fears and concerns about their current lives and their view of their future . Their embodied voices and poems show us what their lives are like and how they feel about the uncertainties shaped by their experience. Strict patriarchal social norms leave them feeling insecure, unsafe and unfree at home and in their immediate environment. It emerged that while they have a caring, connected relationship with nature, the climate crisis seems too distant. Their concerns about securing their present lives are more immediate.