This workshop is part of the Vagina Museum's South Asian Heritage Month Programme. The event is open to people of all backgrounds and of all genders, but is run by and primarily for folks of South Asian descent.

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South Asian Sites of Struggle Panel discussion

Join us for an intimate and intentional conversation on what bodily autonomy, resistance and community building mean within South Asian sites of struggle. We will discuss how community is built and sustained in the face of displacement, gendered violence, casteism, anti-Muslim violence and state control - both on the subcontinent and in the diaspora. We will reflect on how South Asian people have rebuilt and continue to build liberatory futures rooted in care, solidarity, and resistance.

Intentions

🔻 To share and discuss aspects of South Asian history, including the struggles against caste, genocide, partition and colonialism.
🔻 To ground ‘bodily autonomy’ for South Asian people within the history and context of our struggles.
🔻 To challenge the ‘depoliticisation’ of South Asian people and shine a light on the work that has and is being done to build community in the UK and back home. 

Panellist Biographies

Chair - AZ (she/they) - AZ is an abortion and miscarriage doula of Afro-Mauritian and Ilankai Moor and Malay descent. She is the founder of the Ad’iyah Collective (@adiyahcollective) and a community researcher and organiser.

Hamza Rana (he/him) -  Hamza is a community organiser, facilitator and cultural worker who explores capacity building through anti-racist, decolonial and community-centred practice. His work spans political education, archival storytelling and community power building, with a focus on creating infrastructure for care, accountability and transformative change.

He is the Senior Volunteering and Community Officer at the National Trust’s Castlefield Viaduct, its flagship urban heritage site, where he leads on community strategy and embeds imaginative, co-created community programming as a core offer. He is also the Founding Director of the Muslim Social Justice Initiative (MSJI), a grassroots community project supporting radical solidarity and peer-based organising.

Rumi Dahar (he/they) - Rumi is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate in the School of history, Religions and Philosophies at SOAS. His research titled, “Seeking, Being, Becoming: The Spiritual Life Journeys of LGBTQIA+ and Feminist Muslims”, explores the spiritual, political, and philosophical project of becoming queer/trans Muslim. In oral history interviews, primarily LGBTQIA+ Muslims wove together their life histories and relationships with Islam, Islamic feminism, and (inclusive) Muslim spaces. They reveal the development of liberatory hermeneutics and spiritual-political praxis of queer, trans, and Islamic feminist bearings. He has publications forthcoming, is an alumni of the Holstein Dissertation Fellowship, sits as a trustee of the Oral History Society, and is a Graduate Teaching Assistant at SOAS. Aside from these labours of love, Rumi enjoys slowness and loves frogs

Dr Fatima Rajina - Dr Fatima Rajina is a sociologist who researches the British Bangladeshi Muslim community and is one of the co-founders of Nijjor Manush.

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South Asian Heritage Month at the Vagina Museum

Since 2022 the Vagina Museum has been in Bethnal Green in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, a vibrant and largely South Asian borough. Bangladeshis, and people from other parts of South Asia, have been a part of this community since the 1950’s, when the government encouraged Commonwealth citizens to move to the UK to help rebuild the country after World War Two.

Although we have South Asian volunteers and approximately 9% of our visitors identify as South Asian, there are currently no people of South Asian descent working for the Vagina Museum. We're a small team, but it is precisely this lack of representation that can lead to the kind of universalising narratives of which we are so critical. It is our responsibility, then, to put in the effort to bridge that gap. 

This isn’t about putting on one seminar or one exhibition, having one diversity hire or making one statement of solidarity. It has to be intentional and ongoing. With that in mind, we’re prioritising South Asian artists, poets, healthcare workers, and other organisers during South Asian Heritage Month with the aim of building our connections and networks within the community such that those relationships might continue to flourish after South Asian Heritage Month.

As this year’s theme suggests, we’re looking to put down some roots and see where those take us.

Find the whole programme on our website.

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