The two-day international conference on Breaking the Silence: Interdisciplinary Perspective on Gender Exploitation and Resistance organised under the auspices of SRM University-AP comes to a conclusion.
The international conference drew diverse audiences of academicians, academic experts, research scholars and students from across the country and outside, and featured talks by eminent academicians as Prof. Anita Singh, Department of English, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi; Prof. Rajinder Dudrah, Professor of Cultural Studies and Creative Industries, Birmingham City University; Prof. Geetanjali Gangoli, Department of Sociology, Durham University; Prof. Nalini Iyer, Department of English, Seattle University; Prof. Priyanka Tripathi , Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Patna.
The sessions explored themes of gender and resistance, intersectionality, trauma and survival and so on. With 5 guest speakers, over 70 research paper presentations and over 140 participants the conference offered multifaceted perspectives on Gender Exploitation and Resistance.
Prof. Vishnupad, Dean-Easwari School of Liberal Arts in his address stated, “Notwithstanding 60 odd years of feminist movements and scholarship, gender asymmetry and violence, is one of those archives that needs to be continually visited and revisited, because patriarchal forms and gender violence remains as rampant as it always was.” Further, while elaborating on violence, he questioned the easy equation of education with progress and conjectured on the relation of education and violence. The manic obsession in Indian society for engineering and medical degrees and its resulting impact on young school going students, for him, consisted of one such perverse instance; the annual student suicides number in places such as Kota amply instantiate that violence.
Dr Sayantan Thakur, Assistant Professor and Head – Department of Literature and Languages, remarked “Conferences such as these are both inspiring and daunting; while they convene bright minds capable of addressing critical issues, they also depict to us that challenges such as gender exploitation continue to be.”
Prof. Anita Singh from Banaras Hindu University in her keynote address cited several compelling instances wherein women were denied justice, reflecting thereby a troubled pattern of societal indifference.
The discourses in the conference addressed the multifaceted barriers that are posed within the system, compelling one to discuss, debate and deliberate and “break the silence” that surrounds gender exploitation.
