The buzz on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Wikipedia, includes few voices of persons with disabilities. In India, not only are disabled voices inadequately represented in digital spaces, women with disabilities are rarely visible as either leaders breaking new ground on disability rights, or as survivors testifying to abuse and violence amidst the growing #MeToo movement.
Addressing this lacuna we work / will commence work with persons with disabilities to make their mark in digital spaces. Our strategies include:
- Wikipedia edit-a-thons: where we amplify the work and lives of women with disabilities by engaging with disabled youth in edit-a-thons to create pages of disabled women and their work.
- Short films and videos: where we amplify voices of people with disabilities particularly women through short films and videos.
You can follow our work on Youtube.
Wikipedia Edit-A-Thons
Edit-A-Thon, February 2019
We launched our wikipedia Edit-A-Thon in February 2019 in Mumbai in partnership with Point of View, Mumbai. The participants of the Edit-a-thon were four people with disabilities and four non disabled people.
Through our partnership we were able to diversify the editors on Wikipedia while emphasising our motto of disabled people as content creators as well as subjects on the internet.
As part of our efforts to claim digital spaces, we began creating a page of disabled feminist and activist Anita Ghai. The creation of the page of a disabled feminist and activist like Anita Ghai increases the visibility of the work of disabled Indian women to an international audience.
Edit-A-Thon, August 2019
Our second edition of the Edit-A-Thon was conducted on the 25th of August, 2019 at ADAPT, Bandra . Participants included both disabled and non-disabled persons. We created page of deaf woman chess player from Punjab called Malika Handa.
Following the Edit-A-Thon, the participants had some very important conversations around disability, identity and language. We spoke about how a publicly contributed and publicly present platform such as wikipedia could play a significant role in creating space for people in the margins and what it means to be digitally present for someone in the margins.
