Public History serves as a significant bridge connecting academia to society. By bridging people and communities with a sense of their own history, there is a path of relevance forged for a contemporary exchange of ideas, values and cultural forms that exceeds the boundaries of known academic confines. While several projects exist to create meaningful sites of public memory in India, representatives of India’s indigenous people and marginalised epistemologies and knowledge have yet to be added into school and university pedagogy.
With the digital turn, what is deemed culturally significant has had a greater chance to be defined by community representatives themselves. 

The Public Ownership of History in India project punctures conventional historical practice by relying on multilingual and multi-ethnic sources and centering on community traditions, orality and experiential knowledge for active engagement by all. In its conception, design and dissemination, the project seeks to bring to the forefront community researchers from marginalised communities to engage with formal education to bring their voices to educational spaces. This re-assessment of knowledge resources will alter the narrow way in which academia admits only certain sets of evidence to narrowly construct valid knowledge systems. Present-day scholarships cannot rely solely on archival materials or primary sources that are only admitted institutionally. Encouraging the display,  study and engagement of the un-documented, the workshop seeks to move the needle beyond the institutionally established historical record. By complicating the idea of what constitutes historical evidence, it will also enable different audiences to develop a new understanding of collective public history.

FLAME University invites you to a two-day workshop to explore alternatives to mainstream curricula in telling new stories.

In 2020, we received a grant from the British Academy and in light of this project, we are hosting community researchers from across western and southern India for this two day event. The idea is to present a showcase, create some new lesson plans and then celebrate with food! The workshop will see the participation of organizations such as, HALLU HALLU, KEYSTONE FOUNDATION, THE LOCAVORE, PARI EDUCATION, ON EATING, HAKARA, KHIDKI COLLECTIVE and more.

The below event flow captures all that entails in the two-day workshop: