S01 Ep 02: Karishma

In this episode Carla Vitantonio interviews Karishma Shafi (she/her)Karishma is a program manager at One future collective. She is an activist and researcher in the field of gender, media and culture. She aims to understand and address gender-based oppression along the axes of power and privilege. Her work at OFC focuses on shifting public narrative and policy with a social justice orientation. One Future Collective is a feminist social purpose organisation with a vision of a world built on social justice, led by communities of care. We exist to nurture people’s feminist and rights-based leadership and influence their micro-communities and ecosystems to achieve social justice: through an alt school, advocacy lab and feminist justice project. Starting from a definition of coloniality, Karishma shares her lived experience as a woman grown up in India, and brings us to reflect on coloniality in several realms, insisting on coloniality of knowledge. She explains how projects are often built on knowledge and practices that are not related to the knowledge and practices of the community that participates into the project. When asked about her decolonial practices, she especially focuses on community work, and challenges concepts as “service provision”, proposing alternatives through examples from OFC’s work. Resources:One future collectiveFairshare of women leaders, on Feminist LeadershipNokuthula Hlabangane, The underside of modern knowledge: an epistemic break from western scienceNazanin Zadeh-Cummings, Through the looking glass: Coloniality and mirroring in localisation Srilatha Batliwala, All about powerHow was it recorded? whatsapp messages for Karishma, and improvised studio for Carla’s voice