Bhawna is an anti-caste librarian, community organizer, mobilizer, social justice movement activist, and researcher. Her work is informed by the critical pedagogy of educator and philosopher Paulo Freire and by an ethical stance on doing justice work. She advises on building frameworks of accountability, practicing anti-caste approaches in community libraries, fostering solidarity, addressing power, sustaining collectives, and critically engaging with the language used between and among community workers and communities.

 

She believes in and develops theories and approaches of anti-caste, Dalit feminist, and anti-oppression practices, rooted in her communities’ everyday life experiences, cultures, languages, and know-how. Her quest to build a society with a knowledge of self—amid complex power dynamics and intersections of caste, gender, ability, class, ethnicity, language, religion, and more—shapes her way of making sense of people’s stories.

 

She is a firm believer and practitioner of aligning and integrating ideas (fluid and evolving), speech, and practice, seeing this as the key to sustaining change in society as well as in her own life.

 

Bhawna did her M.Phil. in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. She holds a Master’s in Political Science and a Postgraduate Diploma in Child Rights from Jamia Millia Islamia, and she graduated with a South Asian Diploma in Narrative Practices. She is a former director at the community library project and currently working with Nirantar, a center for gender and education on a national level research study titled "Mapping Gender based practices in government schools in India, as a researcher.  

 

Her interests include taking daytime naps, enjoying tea—both in company and solitude—reading children’s picture books, telling and listening to community stories, and engaging in collective community-building.