IMS Online Learning Center

Thenmozhi Soundararajan is a Dalit American artist, community organizer, technologist, and theorist. Currently, Thenmozhi is the Executive Director of Equality Labs, which she co-founded. Equality Labs is the largest Dalit civil rights organization working to empower caste-oppressed people in the US and globally. Through her work at Equality Labs, Thenmozhi has mobilized South Asian Americans towards dismantling eons-long systems of oppression, with the goal of ending caste apartheid, gender-based violence, white supremacy, and religious intolerance. Thenmozhi previously co-founded Third World Majority, an international media training organization and collective that supported people from disenfranchised groups in telling their own stories, in their own way.

Her intersectional, cross-pollinating work—research, education, art, activism, and digital security—helps to create a more generous, global, expansive, and inclusive definition of South Asian identity, along with safe spaces from which to honor the stories of these communities. Thenmozhi’s work has been recognized by the U.S. Congress, The Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, The Producers Guild of America Diversity Program, The Museum of Contemporary Art, The Sorbonne, Source Magazine, Utne Reader, The National Center for the Humanities, The National Science Foundation, The Ford Foundation, and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She is a frequent contributor on issues related to South Asia, caste, gender, and racial Equity, as well interfaith issues and peace building, and has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, Guardian, ABC, and NBC news.  She was also an inaugural fellow of the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist,  Atlantic Foundation for Racial Equity, and is a current fellow at Stanford Center for South Asian Studies.  You can order her new book The Trauma of Caste from North Atlantic Books to learn more about her work around caste equity, abolition, and healing.

Interviewer

Aishah Shahidah Simmons (she/her) is a survivor-healer, a Theravadin Buddhist, and a trauma-informed Mindfulness meditation teacher. She’s been studying and practicing vipassana meditation since 2002. Aishah studied and practiced exclusively for 17 years in the S.N. Goenka lineage, including sitting and serving 40 residential vipassana meditation retreats ranging from 10-30 days in the U.S. and in India. In the fall of 2019, she began studying and practicing in the Insight lineage. Her primary teachers are Tuere Sala and DaRa Williams. Aishah is also an award-winning Black feminist lesbian filmmaker and author whose work, NO! The Rape Documentary, and love WITH accountability, breaks silences around childhood and adult sexual violence, offer healing paths for trauma, and provide distinct visions for humanely disrupting the inhumane epidemic of sexual violence. She wrote the Epilogue to Thenmozhi's The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation On Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition.