Meenal Viz will tell you that she is in medical school, training to be a doctor, when you ask her what she does. It’s only when you speak to her for some time that you realize that she’s much more than that: she runs the AltCricket Foundation, which is working towards building an orphanage in Kenya, while supporting the well-being and needs of twelve children in the country; she plays table tennis for Gibraltar, she volunteers her time as a teacher in a school every Wednesday in Prague and nurses the ambition of working in the domain of social medicine some day. Here’s a chat with the young woman herself.

We are happy to share the launch of our new resource- The Rainbow Map. We built this as a crowdmap exclusively to carry reports of violence faced by LGBTQIA (inclusive of trans and non-binary) people. Online bystanders are also invited to report instances of online violence, hate and abuse of LGBTQIA people and to submit media-based reports / narratives of instances of violence. Please do engage with the map and do feel free to share widely.

https://therainbowmap.crowdmap.com

We've had a very interesting week - three of our volunteers, Kirthi, Raakhee and Vandita, spoke at two conferences. Kirthi represented REF (speaking about drawing lessons learned from the MDGs into the SDGs for an engendered approach) and Vandita represented Safecity (speaking about their work around using crowdmapping to address the issue of violence against women). They were at the International Conference on Developmental Challenges in India at Stella Maris College, Chennai, and Raakhee was a speaker and a panelist at Think Tanks Matter. Here's a glimpse!

Happy News! We are now voting members of CIVICUS.

Intersectional Musings is an online reading series that brings together women from different parts of the world to share their stories in their voices. Today, we feature author Kiran Manral.

Stories and tales play a significant role in shaping our mindset and the way we see the world around us. And stereotypical representations in the media only reinforce harmful prejudices. Vaishnavi Pallapothu in this blog writes on why representation matters and the need to have portrayals that break the mold, step outside the box and shatter glass ceilings.

https://medium.com/…/why-representation-matters-26ced1615e2d

The author of The House of Discord, Sadiqa Peerbhoy discusses some difficult questions. Portraying the personal is the political is the personal, Sadiqa’s narrative explores conflict as a spectrum ranging from micro to macro, and makes a compelling case for the truth that peace from within is the starting point for any peace beyond. Here is Sadiqa’s own story.

Our work with #PeaceEducation to end bullying made it to #YouthWagingPeace: Youth-led Guide on Prevention of Violent Extremism through Education, published by UNESCO-MGIEP. Take a look right here :)
https://t.co/mXBOGLMKKZ

🙂🙂🙂

If you had a rule of intersectional construction to interpret the law, what could that possibly look like? Read Kirthi Jayakumar's blog post to find out more.

Our friend from Postcards For Peace, the founder himself - Martin Rowsell, visited Chennai. We had a great time with children from Classes 3 to 9, who got down to sharing their thoughts on peace, breaking stereotypes and shaking out unconscious bias through art and writing. Here's what that looked like!

There's much more to sex and gender than we've all been led to believe: they're both more than just the binary, to start with! In a primer to help ease you into getting familiar with the concepts of sex and gender, our volunteer, Siddharth Shiva has offered up an easy-to-understand explanation.

The law clearly refers to only intercourse, involving penetration, which is “against the order of nature” (will get to that in a bit) and does not essentially criminalize the sexual identity or the relationship. So as per Indian laws, an individual cannot be arrested for either identifying as a member of the LGBT community or for having a relationship with anyone of their own gender.

Sourya Banerjee writes on Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code in this blog post- The Crime from Colonial Hangover.

"In Class X, I sat in the last row of my Computer Science classroom, barely able to understand a word that my teacher spoke. At some point in the class, I was dazed, and made a quiet observation that would come back fifteen years later, to haunt me. This was a classroom of about twenty-five of us. About eighteen were boys. All of them were in the front row, while the girls sat at the back row. The teacher talked to the boys — talked, not even taught — and so the lessons were tied to the first row, and were filtered into whispers caught in the wind by the time it reached the last row. Just your regular patriarchy saying hello."

Girls can Science too and Women in Tech must persist, writes Kirthi Jayakumar in this post.

Prof. Amena Mohsin graduated from Dhaka University’s International Relations department got her MA and PhD from the University of Hawaii and Cambridge University respectively. The recipient of several national and international fellowships (East-West Center Graduate Fellowship, CIDA International Fellowship, Commonwealth Staff Fellowship, SSRC Fellowship and Freedom Foundation Fellowship) she writes on Human Rights, State, Democracy, Civil-Military relations and human security.

Raakhee Suryaprakash in conversation with Prof. Amena Mohsin where she speaks about her interest in Gender and Women studies and her experiences.

http://www.redelephantfoundation.org/…/an-academic-insight.…

Call for volunteers! We're looking for four people to join our legal research team in voluntary capacities. We're looking for someone who either recently graduated or is still in law school with about 4-6 hours to spare each week to work on the legal team, focusing on two research projects for this year.

Write to us with a copy of your CV to info@redelephantfoundation.org before 21 January!