#16daysblogathon – Page 14 – 16 Days Blogathon

DAY TWELVE: City Lights for Social Change

To mark 2020 16 Days of Activism theme ‘Orange the World: Fund, Respond, Prevent, Collect!’ Australian academics worked with local authorities to turn their City orange.

Picture above: Civic Park in Newcastle, New South Wales being lit orange to mark 16 Days of Activism. Photo by Eddie O’Reilly, UON Marketing and Communications. Reproduced with permission.

Effie Karageorgos and Kcasey McLoughlin

In 1991 the Center for Women’s Global Leadership instituted the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, which has now spread to over 187 countries. It begins on 25 November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, and ends on 10 December, Human Rights Day. In 2020, the University of Newcastle’s Gender Research Network has responded to the 2020 16 Days of Activism theme ‘Orange the World: Fund, Respond, Prevent, Collect!’ by turning Newcastle orange.

The Gender Research Network, established and led by Associate Professor Trisha Pender, has embarked on a Program in Gender-Based Violence research and activism in 2020, aided by a $70,000 University of Newcastle Faculty of Education and Arts Pilot Grant. Spanning sociology, history, law, literary, gender and cultural studies, the Gender Research Network aims to collaborate with local frontline services to tackle the urgent issue of gender-based violence.

The academic research funded by the project will cover legal conceptualisations of family violence, male clergy perpetration of sexual violence, media presentations of gendered and sexual violence in mainstream television and French and Australian media, the #MeToo movement and the relationship between historical Australian archetypes of masculinity and media representations of male violence.

Associate Professor Trisha Pender at the launch of the Newcastle 16 Days of Activism campaign to end violence against women, held in Civic Park, Wednesday 25 November 2020. Photo by Eddie O’Reilly. *Reproduced with permission.*

The impetus for this program has emerged from the alarming scale of gendered violence in Australia, with one woman murdered each week by an intimate partner. Gender-based violence is a pressing social and human rights issue that causes long-term physical and psychological effects and costs the Federal Government billions of dollars every year.

It is also a contentious issue in Australian society, with proposed legal reforms such as Victoria’s move to ban the public disclosure of names of sexual violence victims and New South Wales Labor’s push to criminalise coercive control causing widespread and impassioned debate from victims, victim advocates and researchers. The Program in Gender-Based Violence will not only address male perpetrators of violence against women, but also violence affecting LGBTIQ communities and children. It seeks to define how gender-based violence is reported and conceptualised within society.

A central facet of the Gender Research Network’s program in gender-based violence is the 16 Days of Activism to End Violence Against Women campaign. The Network was awarded a Newcastle City Council SBR (Special Business Rates) grant for ‘City Lights for Social Change’, which has created a permanent lighting infrastructure for Civic Park. This turned the park orange for the 16 Days in 2020, but will also create a safer public space at night for Newcastle residents and will be available for use by other social change campaigns in the future. In 2020, the University of Newcastle also committed to turning the NUspace building on its city campus orange, and the Newcastle City Hall’s Clock Tower will also turn orange for the 16 Days of Activism from 25 November to 10 December.

NUspace at University of Newcastle being lit orange to mark 16 Days of Activism, a campaign focusing on preventing violence against women. Photo by Eddie O’Reilly. *Reproduced with permission.*

The launch and vigil of 25 November took place at 8-9pm, featuring Associate Professor Trisha Pender, with the support of the New South Wales Police Force. Pender was joined by a range of speakers from community organisations, including ACON Health and Warlga Ngurra Women and Children’s Refuge, as well as Federal Member for Newcastle Sharon Claydon and City of Newcastle Councillor Carol Duncan. During the vigil, the names of the 45 women killed by violence in Australia in 2020 was read out by a group of domestic violence researchers and activists.

Image from the Newcastle launch of 16 Days of Activism campaign to end violence against women, held in Civic Park, Wednesday 25 November 2020. Photo by Eddie O’Reilly. Reproduced with permission.

The Gender Research Network’s contribution to the 16 Days campaign also included a webinar on the current push to criminalise coercive control in New South Wales. The session was facilitated by Dr Kcasey McLoughlin, Senior Lecturer in Law, and featured Laura Richards, prominent activist and behavioural analyst from the United Kingdom, Hayley Foster, Chief Executive of Women’s Safety NSW, and State Member for Shellharbour Anna Watson, who was responsible for introducing the bill to criminalise coercive control to the New South Wales Parliament.

The recording of the Coercive Control seminar of 30 November 2020 is available online.

Effie Karageorgos is a historian and member of the Gender Research Network at the University of Newcastle. Her research is in the social history of war, and specifically histories of masculinity and trauma. Her monograph Australian Soldiers in South Africa and Vietnam: Words from the Battlefield was published in March 2016.

Kcasey McLoughlin is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Newcastle Law School and a member of Gender Research Network at the University of Newcastle. She is currently a visiting Scholar at the Australian Human Rights Institute (UNSW). Her research, broadly defined, concerns the gendered values that shape political and legal institutions and the extent to which law can be used as a tool for achieving equality.

DAY TWELVE: Violence Unseen Reimagined – arts activism in the time of COVID-19

When the pandemic curtailed the travelling exhibition Violence Unseen, the organisers had to reassess. And they re-imagined and ‘digitally painted’ the images onto cityscapes.

Jo Zawadzka

Violence Unseen Re-Imagined is an online photography exhibition that aims to put unacknowledged and often unseen forms of violence against women on the map.

The images used in this exhibition were originally created by the photographer Alicia Bruce, then re-imagined and ‘digitally painted’ onto the city landscapes by the visual artist Szymon Felkel.

Before the pandemic curtailed the Violence Unseen exhibition’s travels, it was displayed in around 40 locations across Scotland, and seen by around 2000 people.

However, with COVID-19 measures forcing a mass shift to online campaigning in recent months, our travelling Violence Unseen exhibition has taken on new significance and moved online. The Re-imagined exhibition features the Violence Unseen images in public spaces to convey the message that, whilst often hidden, violence against women hasn’t disappeared. In fact, it has been exacerbated by the pandemic.

The forms of violence against women featured in the exhibition are not new, but some groups of women are more vulnerable to certain types of violence. This is especially true for women who face other forms of discrimination, such as women with learning disabilities, women who sell sex, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans women, and minority ethnic women. Moreover, we know that lockdown has acted as an enabler for perpetrators and made violence against women even less visible to the public eye, making getting this campaign seen by the public, even more important.

Alongside the re-imagined images, we will be sharing links to research, articles and projects to help to broaden understanding of the impact of COVID-19 on violence against women. I would therefore like to spotlight three of our images here, as examples of our informative campaign.

Picture above: Diane by Alicia Bruce/Szymon Felkel. Reproduced by permission of Zero Tolerance

Our first image features Diane Abbott with the backdrop of the houses of Parliament. This image is a significant representation of Violence Against Women in Politics and Elections (VAWIE). VAWIE was extremely prevalent during the run up to the 2017 snap election in which 45.14% of all abusive tweets were directed at Abbott, largely focussed on her gender and her race, largely in the form of threats of sexual violence.

Understanding intersectional discrimination is essential to understanding Violence Against Women and Girls, the different ways violence is enacted, and the varied impacts it can have on people who are multiply marginalised.

Picture above: Margaret by Alicia Bruce/Szymon Felkel. Reproduced by permission of Zero Tolerance

The second image I want to focus on is of Margaret, very powerfully superimposed onto a Princes Street bus stop. This image discusses disabled women and carer abuse. Disabled women are twice as likely to experience men’s violence as non-disabled women, and 73% of disabled women have experienced domestic abuse. This image is captioned “How are you supposed to get anyone to believe you if everyone thinks he is a ‘Saint’ because of how he helps you?”, emphasising how much abuse towards disabled women goes unseen, diminished, and un-prosecuted.

Picture above: Mridul by Alicia Bruce/Szymon Felkel. Reproduced by permission of Zero Tolerance

Mridul Wadhwa’s image has been ‘digitally painted’ onto the side of the Scottish Parliament building, thus placing a trans, migrant woman who describes how she is seen by the world as “outsider everywhere”, straight into the political sphere. 83% of trans women have experienced a hate crime, whilst migrant women’s experience of ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’ can leave them more vulnerable to violence. This demonstrates another way multiple marginalisation can lead to increased exposure to violence.

Visit virtual exhibition here

An accessible version can be found here

DAY TEN: Picturing Violence Unseen

Image above: FGM Campaigner Fatou Baldeh (Scotland-Gambia)by Alicia Bruce. Reproduced by permission of Zero Tolerance

Alicia Bruce with Fatou Baldeh

I was the photographer for Zero Tolerance ‘Violence Unseen’ campaign: a photography exhibition to put unacknowledged and often unseen forms of violence against women on the map. It was launched in 2018, 25 years after the original iconic Zero Tolerance campaign^[1], shot by the late Franki Raffles.

The original Zero Tolerance campaign was a ground breaking Scottish public awareness initiative in the 1990s which challenged social attitudes, stereotypes and myths using powerful images and slogans. The campaign had a far-reaching impact across the rest of the UK and internationally.

Taking on this commission was important personally and professionally for me as a working-class Scottish woman, as the mother of a young daughter, as a photographer and as a campaigner. Violence against women and girls is not a private domestic matter, it’s a human rights issue. Women are attacked verbally, physically, professionally at all levels, in person and online, both directly and indirectly. Ending violence against women should be everyone’s priority. Complacency on this issue is an endorsement.

Over the past decades there have been dramatic changes to public attitudes around some aspects of men’s violence against women. Yet domestic abuse, sexual violence and other forms of violence against women are still prevalent in Scotland today, especially for groups of women who face other forms of discrimination; women with learning disabilities, women who sell sex, lesbian, bisexual and trans (LBT) and black and minority ethnic women. In response to this, Zero Tolerance has created a new photography exhibition, Violence Unseen, to explore these types of violence against women that remain unseen and unacknowledged by mainstream society. The exhibition was launched at Stills in September 2018 and has since been exhibited across Scotland in colleges, bus stations, an airport, government buildings and more.

The Violence Unseen Travelling Exhibition: Image reproduced by permission of Zero Tolerance and Alicia Bruce

Before making any images I worked closely in dialogue, research and collaboration with multiple partner organisations including the amazing Shakti Women’s Aid who put me in contact with Fatou Baldeh, a survivor and campaigner to end Female Genital Mutilation. I attended Shakti’s excellent and harrowing training on ‘Honour-based’ abuse.

Violence Unseen Reimagined: Image of Fatou Baldeh by Alicia Bruce reproduced by permission of Zero Tolerance

My portrait with Fatou was made collaboratively in her flat in Edinburgh in 2017 where she lived at the time with her two young sons. The youngest was only three months old. Having met for coffee a few weeks before and spoken on the phone I was already in awe of her. In the spirit of photographs made in the early 90s by feminist photographer Franki Raffles, my own personal remit for the new Zero Tolerance campaign was to show women’s strength, dignity and power. In my role as photographer I’m a conduit for the images I make with others. So instead of projecting too much of my own feelings or research I’ve reflected on the photograph of Fatou and would prefer to share her words reflecting back on the image we made together.

AB: In my photograph with you I see a grounded and strong mother, activist and professional who takes pride in herself and her boys. I see a deep and loving connection between you and your baby, a warm, loving home and someone comfortable in her own skin. What do you see symbolically in the photograph?

FB: “That year was one of the most difficult years in my life. But that picture for me shows; I see a defiant woman who refuses to give up, who refuses to be defined by her experience. Holding my son up was me showing pride as a single mother with a career who faces challenges that so many other women are facing as well but refuses to give up.”

AB: The ‘She Believed She Could So She Did’ picture within our image was so personal to you but also universal. Can you tell me more about that framed text and what it means to you?

FB: “Those words where inspirational and motivating for me. They reminded me that no matter how difficult things get, if I believe that I can do them or get through them then I will.”

AB: How has the Covid-19 pandemic affected your campaigning?

FB: Due to the pandemic it has been impossible to engage as many women and girls in realising their sexual and reproductive health and rights as I would have wanted to this year. A lot of our work is face to face with communities and the provision of safe spaces for women and girls. This has been severely affected due to Covid restrictions despite the fact that we saw a rise in incidents of SGBV.

AB: Your education in women’s health and in psychology empowered you to make social change, especially for Women’s Sexual Health and particularly for preventing FGM in Gambia. What has been the impact of this in Scotland, in Gambia and internationally?

FB: “I come from a society where many girls still do not have access to basic education. I also come from a family and society that practices FGM. Through education I became aware of the impact of harmful traditional practices and other forms of SGBV. This knowledge and understanding has motivated me to use my voice and platform to raise awareness of FGM and all forms of violence against women and girls. Through this I have the direct impact on protecting girls from harm but also inspiring other young women to join the fight against VAWG. I believe my work in Scotland contributed in putting a limelight on the fight against FGM and the provision of services tailored to survivors of FGM. In recognition of my work and support for migrant women in Scotland I was recently awarded an MBE by her Majesty the Queen.”

AB: If you could have a chat with seven year old Fatou now, what words of wisdom would you share with her?

FB “If I could advise Fatou at seven I would say: have big dreams, think big and go make the world a better and safer place for women and girls.”

AB: Since we met in 2017 you’ve achieved so much returning to Gambia. You have become a CEO of your own charity and received an MBE. You are a legend! What’s next?

FB: “I will continue to work for the safety and protection of the rights of women and girls and supporting young girls to realise their full sexual and reproductive health and rights.”

AB: If people reading this could do one thing to raise awareness on the prevention of FGM what should it be?

FB: “Continue breaking the silence around violence against women and girls. Make people aware that violations such as FGM continue to affect girls and hinder their full potential. Only if we continue challenging and fighting shall this harmful practice be abolished.”

Visit virtual exhibition here

An accessible version of the exhibition can be found here

Fatou Baldeh MBE is a Gambian-born activist involved in the campaign to end FGM. She has an MSc. in Sexual and Reproductive Health and was the FGM mapping and network coordinator at Waverley Care in Scotland and a Trustee for Dignity Alert & Research Forum (DARF). She experienced female genital mutilation at the age of seven.

Shakti Women’s Aid is a Scottish charity that helps black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) women, children, and young people experiencing, or who have experienced, domestic abuse from a partner, ex-partner, and/or other members of the household. Shakti provides training and consultancy for agencies working with BAME women, children, and young people.

Zero Tolerance is a Scottish charity working to end men’s violence against women by promoting gender equality and challenging attitudes that normalise violence and abuse. We work to end violence against women through tackling the root cause of this violence – gender inequality. Tweet @ZTScotland

Alicia Bruce is an award-winning, working class Scottish photographer and educator. Human rights, community collaboration and social justice are at the core of her artistic practice. Alicia’s photographs have been exhibited and published internationally and are held in collections including the National Galleries of Scotland, St Andrews University and UK Parliament. Her series ‘Menie: TRUMPED’ documents a resilient Scottish community who stood up to Donald Trump. Her commissioned portfolio features campaigns for Project Ability, Zero Tolerance and Crisis. Awards include RSA Morton Award. Bruce is a Teaching Fellow and Photography Tutor at University of Edinburgh and eca.

Tweet @picturemaking

Instagram @aliciabrucephoto

^[1] For background on the original campaign and its impact see Katie Cosgrove (2001) No Man Has the Right and Fiona Mackay (2001) The Case of Zero Tolerance: Women’s Politics in Action? in E. Breitenbach and F. Mackay eds. Women and Contemporary Scottish Politics: An Anthology Polygon at Edinburgh.

DAY TEN: ‘My pain became my beautiful testimony’: breaking the silence on the sexual abuse of girls

“There is great power in our voice.”
Nigerian author and activist Fatima Ishiaku turned her traumatic past into a memoir – and a beacon of hope for young girls like her.

Fatima Ishiaku

In our society, a lot of youthful and defenseless adolescents are victims of malicious rape.

These streaks of sexual brutality affect them substantially, physically, psychologically and otherwise.

Such acts of violence and sexual harm turns into a route that contributes to so many other social vices and often a path to the self-destruction of these unprotected young girls if they don’t find help.

If these acts of brutality don’t get nipped in the bud, it will shatter the fabric of our society and the world at large.

Often, victims are forced and intimidated to stay mute in the face of a vicious series of violent rape.

These threats and coercion makes it a struggle for victims to open up to anyone about such issues. And when victims finally open up, they get bullied by the people they confide in to tell their stories, an act that renders them psychologically and emotionally traumatized.

These adolescents end up getting impregnated by their rapists, a condition they find themselves unprepared for, bearing a child at an early age. Some opt for abortion and often die in the process.

For those that survive, it becomes a psychological disorder that makes these youthful and defenseless girls find comfort in alcohol, drugs, and other social vices. Some of them even end up as school dropouts due the effect of rape and the consequences become endless.

Victims most times are very vulnerable, rude, disrespectful, and aggressive. Because of what they’ve been through their lives becomes miserable. They live in fear, hardly trusting anyone and often becoming wild.

Look around you today – there are so many vulnerable children on our streets, many of them are drug addicts and a substantial number of them are victims of sexual abuse. As humans, we need to understand that the abused child is fighting a battle caused by a terrible experience.

Therefore, I believe “they need love not hate, help not bully and a confidant they can trust.” We need to help them discover their inner strength and God-given talent, because the event of rape makes them regard themselves as weak, useless and vulnerable. These helpless girls need the inner strength to help them fight their fears and weaknesses.

My story is a precedent of what defenseless young girls go through.

As a victim of sexual abuse, I was molested from the age of seven till I was fourteen. This is the most awful experience of my life.

I grew up with a man I thought was my dad, not knowing he wasn’t. And he took advantage of my innocence at a very tender age.

He made my mum despise me so much that we became enemies. To him, that was the only way to make my mum not to listen to me whenever I tried telling her what I was going through.

My mum hated me so much that she had broken my head with a rod so many times, cut my vagina, and put hot chili pepper on the cuts.

She didn’t find out why a calm child like me became so stubborn or why I started running away from home from the age of 10. Whenever I returned home, she would beat me and put hot chili pepper in my eyes and on my private parts.

She only believed what her husband told her.

When I turned 14 years old, she found out that I had been sexually assaulted by her husband. Around this time, I found out that her husband wasn’t my dad. Two years after my mum discovered her husband molested me, she couldn’t deal with it. She died, and the rape continued.

I remember trying to commit suicide so many times.

I dropped out of school and most of the men that got to know my story called off our engagement. Whenever these men find out about my story, they say they “can’t be with a lady like me”, that I’m a “cursed child.”

This is a cross I still carry till today.

In the year 2016, in the United States of America, an American Professor heard my story and advised me to write a book about my life.

It wasn’t a straightforward thing to do, but finally I had the courage to publish my book, which I entitled “I Called Him Dad” by Fatima Ishiaku – a book that was published in the United States.

I had to tell my painful story in my book so that society will see what abused girls go through in our society, mostly In Nigeria.

My book is about saving the girl child and breaking the silence. It’s a very educational book based on my true-life story. “I Called Him Dad” is my painful story.

The best part is me using my painful story to help victims like myself.

There’s light at the end of the dark tunnel.

My pain became my beautiful testimony.

Today I run a registered non-governmental organization “House of Fatima for Abused Girls Foundation”. This foundation caters to the needs of sexually abuse girls and boys in our society. I finally went back to school and now I am a graduate of Sociology from one of the best Universities in Nigeria.

I’m using my story to help victims, to educate mothers on how they can protect their children from sexual abuse and help parents identify the signs to look out for. I emphasise the need for parents to listen to their children whenever they want to talk to them. To read the complete version of my story you can pick up my book on Amazon. Use this link: https://amzn.to/3mz5JeW

As I conclude, everyone, both old and young needs to understand that there is power in their voice and that they should never allow anybody to silence them. Speaking out will make a difference. It will expose the intent of rapists and bring to justice those that are into these acts.

“We say No to any kind of abuse.”
“We stand against gender-based violence.”
“We stand against child marriage.”

Every girl child deserves an education and it is her fundamental right to be happy.

There is great power in our voice.

You can visit our social media for more information:

Website: houseoffatima.org

Instagram: @houseoffatima_ng

Twitter: @houseoffatimang

Facebook: House of Fatima for Sexually Abused Girls

DAY NINE: Unmasking the Issues of Cows, Women, and Safety in India.

Today’s post focuses on the creative provocation -The Cow Mask Project- which highlights that, in India, women are seemingly less safe and less protected than cows.

Picture above: “The holy Cow personified as World Mother”, Wellcome Collection. Reproduced by permission.

Anisha Palat

Imagine taking a walk to an iconic landmark of India. Perhaps you are in Kolkata, staring at Howrah Bridge. Or you’re strolling past India Gate in New Delhi. Maybe you’re at the ghats of Varanasi, wistfully staring at the Ganges River. Suddenly, a man walks past you holding what looks like a black and white spotted mask. You look closer- is it an animal? Perhaps a cow? A woman accompanies him. She dons the mask (you now realise it is indeed a cow!) and poses in front of the landmark. He takes a picture. End scene.

What I have described above is a simple overview of India artist-activist Sujatro Ghosh’s Cow Mask project (2017-present). The essence of this project is an exploration of the safety of women in India.

“Do women need to be cows in order to feel safe in this country?”
Sujatra Ghosh, artist-activist of the Cow Mask project

PIcture above: Collage taken from Sujatra Ghosh’s website on ‘The Cow Mask Project’ (https://sujatroghosh.com/works)

The artist is making a bold statement in the land of the Holy Cow: in India, women seem less safe and less protected than cows. Sujatro’s concept is rooted in an extremely simple yet powerful aesthetic, where a cow mask donned by a woman provides a layer of protection to the said woman; the woman is safer now, on account of having a cow’s face, than she will ever be in India.

Cow protectionism in India is, without a doubt, at the forefront of the nation. Reports of lynching and violence in the name of this innocuous animal are a daily feature in the news. An official government body, the Rashtriya Kamdhenu Aayog, also exists, cementing the cow’s status as being the most revered, respected and protected amongst living animals in India. The bull does not afford the same kind of respect and status that the cow does.

The roots of this nationalism and protection for the cow lies in late 19^th and early 20^th century calendar art images. The figure of the cow in these early images was characteristic of Kamadhenu or the divine cow and Gaumata or the mother cow; these were spread through India to help underscore the message of cow protectionism (see featured image). These images cemented the cow as symbolic of the nation itself, highlighted by the presence of 84 gods within the body of the cow: a Hindu rashtra (a Hindu country), a space that literally embodied the Hindu ideologies of the time. The cow became representative of a spatial phenomenon in terms of her material body. The protection of the cow then lay in protecting India as a space, the motherland, and the cow, all intertwined yet separated in a complex web of identity, pride and nationalism.

An important distinction to make at this point would be that cow protection lies in protecting the cow from those that are not Hindu (Muslims) and those that are lower-caste (like Dalits). Upper-caste Hindus are of the opinion that these communities are polluted for they deal with the dead cow in terms of meat and leather work. Therefore, the lynching that takes place in the name of the cow is primarily against men from these communities, and largely the perpetrators of this violence are also men.

So how do women come into the picture if cow protectionism is not typically against them? As mentioned earlier, the cow in India has been established as Gaumata and Kamadhenu, especially through the spread of calendar art images.

These representations are female tropes of motherhood, goddesses and divinity, thereby placing the cow above the realm of human. This placement, while seemingly positive, has actually enabled negativity for women and cultivated a culture where mother cow as goddess divine should be protected by men for men of the nation, but at the same time, mother, wife, sister and daughter do not deserve the same kind of reverence (and in turn protection).

Video: ‘Holy Cow’, A documentary about ‘The Cow Mask Project’ by Al Jazeera (Trailer)

As Sujatro Ghosh points out through his photographs, the only way a woman can potentially be safer is by wearing a cow mask. The materiality of the mask, interestingly the face of a Jersey cow (which is foreign) and not the native so-called holy cow, provides protection to the female population. The hybrid creature that emerges in Sujatro’s photograph, standing with her masked head held high in recognisable spaces in India, speaks of a way of the cow and woman coming together to represent the women of India as a strong voice against horrific crimes against the female.

The Jersey cow mask stands out for its associations with the ‘foreign’: is protection for the woman in India an unknown, strange phenomenon? Will it never be a part and parcel of our society?

The cow and its entrenchment in holiness and motherhood is demonstrative of the gendered trope of the cow and her protection by the men of India. This article has just presented an overview of the cow image and the strength of its iconography. Scope lies in detailing these ideas along with examining aspects of the male gaze and the cow as well as the cow in relation to caste-specific gender crimes.

What is important to take away is that while women in no way need to be protected by men, if the same kind of respect and reverence given to the cow is extended to women, India might become a nation with fewer gender-based violent crimes. The coming together of cow and woman might illustrate a coming together of animal and human, as well as nation and individual. Currently masked as a single hybrid, cow and women appear safer together like in Sujatro’s photographs. In the future, will the possibility of unmasking cow as woman and woman as cow offer solace or spread more fear? Or will the cow forever remain the single most important being protected and fought for in India?

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A post shared by Sujatro Ghosh (@sujatroghosh)

Anisha Palat is a second year PhD History of Art student at the Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the cow image in Indian visual culture. She is exploring the visual vocabulary pertaining to the cow’s history as a symbol of mainstream cultural nationalism and looking at ways to decentre the current hegemonic and casteist links that the cow has come to represent. Anisha previously completed her Masters in Art Business from Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London. She has researched the South Asian gallery sector as well as art and philanthropy in India for Art Tactic, London. She was also an art consultant and writer for Ashvita’s, an Indian online auction and gallery platform.

You can find Anisha on Twitter and Instagram through her handle, @anishapalat

Sujatro Ghosh is an Indian photographer artist-activist and feminist scholar from Calcutta, currently based in Berlin. Sujatro works on women’s rights, LGBTQI issues and environmental concerns. Website: https://sujatroghosh.com Instagram: @sujatroghosh