What does mental health mean in our Darjeeling and Sikkim Himalaya? What is the language we use and how do we express it in our social geographies, class, caste, privilege, and power?
The Mental Health Act of India 2017 promises- “to provide for mental healthcare and services for persons with mental illness”and goes on to state that "Every person shall have a right to access mental healthcare and treatment…” What does this mean in our resource starved region that is socio-ecologically fragile and marginalised?
These questions will be explored in a discussion-based manner in “The Promise of Mental Health Care and Support in the Darjeeling and Sikkim Himalaya”workshop. The conversations will be built on the lived experiences of the participants, which will contextualise mental health, care and support beyond a clinical understanding and narrative. They will expand the understanding and narrative of mental health and contextualise it in the landscape and lived experience of the participants. It will critically analyse gaps to evolve key research questions for the region that will inform policy and practise.
The workshop will be facilitated by Priscilla Giri, Mental Health Team Lead, DLR Prerna, along with her team.
We are living through a waste crisis, yet our everyday narrative is not reflective of the importance, urgency and complexity of the crisis. Waste is still looked at as a material, visual, aesthetic, and an end-of-life management issue, with emphasis largely on citizen behaviour. We fail to recognise the complexities of waste, especially plastic, that threaten our health and planetary well-being.
Mountains, with the terrain and dispersed populations, further challenge waste management systems. Tourism and defence infrastructure spreads waste to remote borderlands with no clear inclusion in policy and practice.
The “Waste Crisis in the Darjeeling and Sikkim Himalaya” will address waste from a complete lifecycle perspective asking who bears responsibility. Production and existing systems along with manufactured consent and demand, consumerism and the role of media will be critically examined. Notions of “clean” and “swachh”will be discussed to understand why the crisis continues with existing policies and practices. .
While a global perspective will be drawn upon, conversations will be grounded in the local experiences that will enable participants to critically analyse the politics and intersectionalities of waste enabling pathways for critical research to generate solutions that are real, sustainable and zero waste.
The workshop will be facilitated by Priyadarshinee Shrestha (Zero Waste Himalaya) and Roshan Rai (Zero Waste Himalaya) and DLR Prerna.
This workshop investigates filmmaking as a speculative and critical methodology for reimagining the social, cultural, and ecological futures of the Eastern Himalayas. Participants will be guided through a process of inquiry that begins with identifying contemporary issues and extends toward constructing visual propositions that challenge established ways of seeing and narrating.
By engaging with the idea of “visual negatives ,” participants will explore how absence, erasure, and contrast can serve as conceptual tools for generating new perspectives on the future. The workshop combines reflective discussion with hands-on experimentation in film, positioning moving images as both a form of critical thought and a mode of creative projection. Future Frames workshop allows participants to confront the conditions of the present while provoking the viewers to imagine alternative futures grounded in local knowledge and collective imagination.
The workshop will be facilitated by Dishant Pradhan, FLAME University, Pune and Dr. Nirvan Pradhan, Narasinha Dutt College, University of Calcutta.
