Explore indigenous gender diversity, colonial legacies, and advocacy through The Looking Glass docuseries and a decolonial pedagogy lens.

The Looking Glass is a multimedia ethnographic pedagogical resource for teaching and learning about gender and power. Commissioned by the Education, Justice, and Memory Network (EdJAM), the project is based on a two-year ethnography of gender-diverse communities of Pakistan. Using a critical peace education and decolonial lens, it explores the history, heritage, and lived experiences of different minoritised and marginalised gender communities to understand the use and abuse of power.

In this session, we will talk about the research underlying the project and how it connects with discourses of indigenous knowledge, power, and social justice. Beginning with a limited premiere of the docuseries, we will explore the imposition of foreign moral systems onto native cultures in the context of colonial rule in the Subcontinent and how it forms gender governance in post-colonial Pakistan. These connections will help us explore the different types of violence, including the violence of erasure and omission, faced by gender minority communities. We will highlight the visible manifestations of these legacies in the everyday lives of indigenous communities in the present day. With these ethnographic case studies, we will understand how power functions in the spaces of law, family, economy, and education to create oppressive systems of gender governance.

Building on this, we will discuss the extent to which we were able to pursue a decolonial intent in the research and production of these resources, interrogating the methodological choices we made to reflect on our own power and positionality. We will also showcase other pedagogical resources produced under the ambit of the project, including a curricular resource to accompany teaching and learning through the docuseries and a short story anthology.

Lastly, we will explore the affordances of participatory research methods and multimodal research outputs to facilitate community knowledge, advocacy, and an intersectional understanding of gendered lived experiences.