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The Third Space: |
Bandana Pattanaik |
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| EXTRACT |
Biography |
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This morning there was a message on my desk from RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. RAWA is the only feminist organisation of Afghanistan which is fighting for the human rights of Afghan women. They have requested us to send them a message of solidarity which will be read at their International Women's Day celebration. I look at the long list of signatures below the message. There are about hundred women and men practically from all over the world who have signed to show their solidarity with RAWA. As I sit in front of my computer in Thailand and try to compose an email message, I have no doubt that it will reach the RAWA office in Islamabad in time for the celebration even though there is only a day left for the International Women's Day. So much of my professional communication is now done via email that I am beginning to take such immediacy for granted. In the women's NGO I work for in Thailand now, we receive approximately fifty emails everyday and send just as many, or even more. We network with women's groups from practically every corner of the world. We exchange information; initiate signature campaigns and send letters of petition. We also visit each other's website and often make new contacts through such visits. It is difficult to think back to a time when there were no such things like emails and websites. And yet I have started using the Internet only three years ago. Coincidentally, over the last three years I have also done some travelling. While Australia was my temporary residence for nearly three years, a large part of my professional and personal life during that time depended on news from Asia. Not surprisingly, India remained the main point of reference, a place which more than ever before, sharply defined itself as home. Perhaps because I had a sense that I would be away from there for some years. But my work also made it imperative that I establish new contacts in other locations in Asia and look for hitherto undocumented information. Going against the grain of established patterns of research has not been easy for anyone. The Internet, however, proved to be an invaluable tool in my attempt at charting an alternative circuit of knowledge production. Long periods of frustration and anxiety were compensated for by moments of unexpected joy. Bandana Pattanaik developed the Feminist Publishing in Asia site for Spinifex Press. |
Bandana Pattanaik has taught English language and literature at the tertiary level in India for several years. She did an MA in Women's Studies at Deakin University, Melbourne in 1996-97, and now works in the research unit of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW), Bangkok. "My interest in Feminism in general and women's writing in particular had brought me to Spinifex Press. I met Renate Klein and Susan Hawthorne in a conference on the politics of radical feminism in Melbourne. That conference made me aware of some new areas of concern involving feminists at this moment in this part of the globe. I was deeply upset to know about the pimping that is going on in cyberspace for example. Most of the specific issues discussed on that day were different from what one would talk about in a similar meeting in India. But we speak the same language and we share the same political agenda. In fact there is an urgent need today for feminists of the world to keep in touch with each other. The urgency arises because of the information explosion on the superhighway. It is important for all of us whether we are in the north or in the south to fight the new patriarchy emerging through technology. And of course we would do it using technology. In fact, Spinifex had already decided to take the much needed first step in this direction. I considered myself privileged to be part of an electronic project which aimed to network with women from Asia and Australia." |
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