The Sri Lanka Series, commencing in the fall of 2017, featured artists, activists, and scholars based in or around the island, live-streaming into Toronto, Canada for moderated discussions about the social justice movements currently unfolding in Sri Lanka.
Lecture topics covered a wide range of progressive and leftist issues, including but not limited to Sri Lanka’s changing terror laws, ongoing women-led mass protests against forced disappearances, the potentials and limits of transitional justice, art’s role in archiving and challenging displacement, and the history and impact of the island’s various union mobilizations.
The first event was held on September 19, 2017. Titled “From Sri Lanka to Palestine: Art, Archive, and Law,” this session featured a reading by author Rohini Mohan from her book, The Seasons of Trouble Life: Amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka’s Civil War, followed by an interview with May El-Abdallah.
The second session was held on October, 2017, featuring T Shanaathanan of the Sri Lanka Archive of Contemporary Art, Architecture & Design.
The third session was held on November 14, 2017, featuring Dharsha Jegatheeswaran of the Adayaalam Centre for Policy Research.
Each talk was live-streamed into Toronto through common video-call programs/apps (like Whatsapp, Skype, FaceTime, etc). The use of these popular online technologies will hopefully help bridge the public policy and research gaps often posed by the difficulty of travel to and even within the island. To the best of our knowledge, no similar initiative currently exists in Canada.
Each lecture will be archived in video and (Tamil and English) transcript format on http://srilankaseries.com. In this way, the Series will provide multilingual and easily-accessible resources that students, advocates, and researchers across the world can rely on for their own research or advocacy projects.
Click here to watch footage from the Reflections and Reportbacks Roundtable.