Shaping Dominant Narratives | Prarthana Lumba | TEDxStrawberry Fields High School

Prarthana Lumba's talk, "Stories That Shape History: Whose Voice Counts?", examines how dominant narratives are shaped by covert power dynamics that reinforce gender binaries and present a single "official" reality, silencing marginalized voices — particularly women in the Global South — through what Gayatri Spivak calls "epistemic violence." Drawing on the metaphor of the Panopticon, she shows how surveillance breeds self-censorship, illustrating this with field quotes from rural women in Karauli, Tikamgarh, Chitrakoot, Patalkot, and Chhattisgarh who describe feeling voiceless, linguistically excluded from formal spaces, and conditioned into subservience. She argues that researchers must practice positionality and reflexivity, using tools like Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) to bridge the gap between researcher and community rather than extract from it, closing with a call — echoing Mao Zedong — to learn from and build alongside the people whose stories are so often left untold. Prarthana Lumba
Research Associate, SRIJAN
Prarthana Lumba works in the research vertical at SRIJAN, a non-profit organisation based in New Delhi. She holds a Bachelor's degree in History from the University of Delhi and a Master's degree in Women's Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad. Over the past four years, she has conducted qualitative, action-based research with rural women from Dalit, Tribal, and landless communities across Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan. Her work focuses on gender, local governance, livelihood security, sexual and reproductive health, and the intersections of power and social change. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx