[act-ma] 6/4: Panel discussion: Access to Justice, Cambridge Public Library

Mona Mandal mona.aidboston at gmail.com
Thu Jun 2 20:32:05 PDT 2022


Hello everyone!

Join AID Boston for an afternoon with eminent activist and scholars Prita
Jha and Urmitapa Dutta to discuss the critical work they do on building
communities of resistance, and access to justice.

*Talk title:  *Access to Justice for Communities on the Margins in India
*When:* Saturday, June 4 at 2 PM (doors open at 1:30 PM)
*Where:* Cambridge Public Library Lecture Hall, 449 Broadway, Cambridge, MA
02138
*Parking:* Underground parking with access from Broadway; Also accessible
by mass transit
*Facebook event: *https://fb.me/e/1KphHK8W2

This event is open and free for all.

Please wear masks to the event for covid considerations.

*Speaker Profile: Prita Jha*
Prita Jha is a legal activist, researcher and trainer who has been engaging
with issues of access to justice for survivors of “unconstitutional
violence “in various capacities in India over the last fifteen years. She
is the founder and President of the Peace and Equality cell (PEC). Peace
and Equality Cell provides free legal representation to survivors of child
sexual abuse. PEC has made very effective intervention on the issue of poor
state of women’s shelters in Gujarat by filing a Public Interest Litigation
(PIL). This has led to a new set of rules being notified for all Shelters
in Gujarat.

Most recently PEC has started building its team and collective capacity on
the Rights of Persons with Disability Act 2016. Additionally, in
collaboration with two NGOs Samvet and Samegra Seva, PEC provided covid
relief measures and promoted vaccination in five districts of Bihar. Last
but by no means least, Prita’s dream to work on access to justice for
survivors of child sexual abuse in Bihar, where she originates from, is
slowly taking shape.
Website: www.peaceandequalitycell.org

*Speaker Profile: Urmitapa Dutta*
Urmitapa Dutta is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of
Massachusetts Lowell. Grounded in Global South feminist decolonial praxis,
her work seeks to understand and disrupt normalized everyday violence
(direct, structural, and symbolic) across the spaces she is rooted in, and
those that she transgresses. Working transnationally, she uses critical
qualitative methodologies to interrogate the linkages between epistemic
violence and myriad forms of domination codified by (settler) colonial
modes of knowledge production. Urmitapa approaches decolonial praxis as a
powerful mode of centering lived realities and voices of communities at the
margins of national and global imaginaries. Her community-engaged activist
scholarship (re)centers Global South and the majority world peoples as
epistemic subjects or knowledge producers. She engages in collaborative
research, teaching, community action, and multivocal writing from
relationally rooted places that contend with complex relationships to
hegemonic power. Through this work, she seeks to denaturalize oppressive
conditions and articulate experiences and knowledge silenced by officially
sanctioned narratives.

Websites:
www.urmitapadutta.com
www.miyacommunityresearchcollective.org

Regards,
AID Boston volunteers


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