ABSTRACT
The majority of students come from the slums of Gomtinagar, with some traveling from other more distant slums. Prerna has created a space rich in creative learning and critical analysis of the ever-present threats of unbridled patriarchy and the day-to-day abuses of class and caste structures. Throughout the chapter, feminist philosophers, social and affect theorists, and performance studies will be called upon to make sense of gender and lived experience, differently inflected by the creative processes of performance. Lorraine Code's turn to "ecological thinking" and its effects on a social imaginary, as laden with images, meanings, metaphors and interlocking explanations in specific time periods and geographic-cultural climates, is also particularly instructive. This assertion brings particular interpretive strength to the research experiences, these encounters being complex interactions shaped by histories of contact and colonizing ethnographic practices. Emotions, according to Sara Ahmed, are not housed inside people but are produced as effects of circulation that occur in social and cultural practice.
