The Communication commission and Youth commission of Jesuit Chennai Province jointly organised a three-day (Feb 24th-26th) workshop on “Creating Counter Narratives” for young students, animators and teachers in Loyola College campus, Chennai. There were 30 participants who came from different social work centres, schools and colleges. Basically, they were introduced to what is counter culture, counter narratives opposing the dominant and oppressive ideology. The resource persons are only facilitators inspiring and triggering the minds of the participants to write the counter narratives that they have come across right from their childhood days.
Having the Indian Constitution as the base, the participants were trained to trace the lived experiences of subaltern people creating counter narratives against oppressive cultures and they effectively wrote them in different literary forms like short stories, poems, songs, ballads, proverbs, etc. At the end, they expressed their enlightenment on various themes on counter narratives, and became aware of the rich tradition of secularism and religious pluralism in our country. They also said that they would never lose the sparks that they got from the workshop. Fr. A. Irudayaraj took care of the content of the workshop and Fr. Sarathy made all the physical arrangements required for the workshop.
A. Irudayaraj, SJ
Chennai
