COVID-19 has pushed the world into a virtual reality at an unprecedented speed. We are working online, maintaining friendships and relationships online; even building new ones online! The world is changing, but the pivot of human exchange remains the same – consent. Our current ‘virtual existence’ calls for taking a greater stock of how we operationalise a concept this basic.
Kusumika Ghosh is a Master degree holder in Peace and Conflict Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and from the Catalyst Class of 2016.
Kusumika’s interest in issues around gender, and specifically women, underlines all her work – from her BA thesis on the Participation and Victimhood of women in anti-state outfits like the LTTE, the Islamic State and the Maoists in India; to her most recent research on the documentation of oral histories of the Partition of 1947 on behalf of The Partition Museum, Amritsar. She has worked as a Research Associate on a project called Conflict Transformation and Peace-building in Northeast India with the North Eastern Social Research Centre, Guwahati, and has travelled extensively across the states of Assam, Manipur, Nagaland and Tripura for the same. She has convened a National Seminar on the Role of Women in Peace Processes on behalf of NESRC and has had the chance to host human-rights stalwarts and gender economists like Teesta Setalvad and Ritu Dewan. She plans to stretch her research experiences in a doctoral study on gender and migration across South Asian borders.