Our Voices, Ourselves

Sehba Sarwar is a writer, multidisplinary artist, and activist, currently based in Houston, USA. She moves between the city of her birth, Karachi, Pakistan, where she spent the first half of her life in a home filled with artists, activists and educators, and her adopted city, Houston, where she has recreated a community similar to the one in which she was raised. Her writings have appeared in anthologies, newspapers, and magazines in India, Pakistan, and the US, and her work (writings, installations and videos) explore displacement and women’s issues, moving between South Asia and the USA.

 http://www.sehbasarwar.com

Voices Breaking Boundaries (VBB) is a grassroots nonprofit arts organization open to artists, individuals and organizations from a multitude of perspectives, backgrounds and countries. From a humble start in 2000, as a grassroots literary collective organized by Sehba Sarwar and five diverse women poets and writers hosting readings at a local bookstore, VBB now produces more than 10 performance events annually at local venues and offers educational residencies and performances to local youth and adults.

http://www.vbbarts.org

Our guest is Kathleen O'Reilly.  A professor in the Geography Dept. at A&M, Kathleen O'Reilly conducts extended ethnographic research in the areas of critical development geography and political ecology. Since 1997 she has studied development projects operating in northern Rajasthan, India. She is interested in the ways that development interventions restructure social, environmental and spatial relations in communities and implementing organizations. Her research specifically focuses on the community and women's participation components of a drinking water supply project.
In this fascinating interview with Vandy, Kathleen discusses her work and her experiences in India.

Our guest is Shannon May who is the program director at Just Detention International in Washington DC. In this interview, she talks to us about the state of abuse and violence in prisons and about the work of JDI.

Here is the organization's mission:
Since 1980, JDI has worked to end the sexual abuse of detainees, in the U.S. and around the world. At the heart of JDI’s mission lies a conviction that when the government removes someone’s freedom, it takes on the absolute responsibility to protect that person’s safety. JDI works with policymakers, corrections leaders, advocates, and prisoner rape survivors to end this form of violence, once and for all. No matter what crime someone might have committed, rape is not part of the penalty.