Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women SPARROW

SPARROW is an archive for women that collects oral history and visual material connected with the lives and experience of women as important material for future research on women. Our intention is to make such material more visible and accessible to people interested in the history of women. , The scope of our work includes the whole of India and the South Asian continent, It is conceived as a national archives of women and collecting material from all over India on all issues that affect women like domestic violence, environment, political activism, feminism, human rights, minority rights, Dalit issues, literature, art and scholarship. , Throughout its existence in the last twenty years SPARROW has functioned as an archiving body which in addition to collecting material on the history and lives of women, has also generated its own archival material through oral history recordings, digital video recordings, publications, exhibitions and workshops with students in schools and colleges as well as reaching out to media and communication groups and groups formed by women. , One of our major achievements is that we have brought the history of women to the public sphere. We have brought out more than 33 publications, several reports and held 17 workshops two of which have been summer workshops for American students. We have conducted one Film Festival called Lives of Women and Words of Women, a Cultural Festival with films, paintings and handicrafts from the North East regions of India called One River, Many Streams, held a Camp for Writers and made 25 oral history digital documentaries ten of them under the title Global Feminisms in collaboration with the University of Michigan. Currently we are working on five volumes of the writings of women with 67 writers from 23 languages. Along with all this we have also been cataloging and digitizing our material. We now have a permanent building.