By Kanika Joshi
My name and language
My family knows me as an independent and ambitious person who is hardworking and follows her passions in life. My parents named me Kanika without much thought; it is a very common name in India and they simply liked it. Over time, being a lover of storytelling and personal branding — I have read a lot about the meaning of my name in Hindi and figured out what I want it to mean. Kanika fundamentally means tiny essentials of the larger creation, like — an atom, wheat, and gold. Sometimes we just need to roll the red carpet backwards — and I have always been an intrapreneur wherever I have worked — so the meaning felt right.
Language is a tricky concept as it has been a tool for colonisation and even in contemporary times plays a major role in power dynamics, which it should not. English is my second language. We were always told to be fluent in it to land a good job. However, my real thought process is actually in my native language — Hindi — to date. I won’t hide it — I have felt uncomfortable in a few meetings in the beginning of my career where I spoke to native English speakers, but that discomfort went away with owning who I am and that the content of the speech is what matters, not the accent or the language. Language is a powerful tool to really share ideas and understand another’s perspective. The power of language is enormous and we, feminists, must use our language to raise awareness of how language is misused and to take the power by raising our voices- both reactively and proactively.
Dance to Development
As a 27-year-old, who has danced for most of her life, I am someone who loves planning and passion. I wanted to pursue dance as a career until my left hip socket had an episodical injury and I started having neural shocks. I have had the privilege of studying in some great institutions like the best school in Delhi and a premier sustainability institute during my post graduation. Honestly — until my undergraduate degree, I had no interest in academics whatsoever. However, when I read about the course on Sustainable Development in my post graduation, it struck a chord. My family are from Uttarakhand, the land of Chipko Movement — where people hugged trees to ensure forest conservation back in 1973.
Visiting my hometown has always been a breath of fresh air, quite literally. The foothills of Himalaya, the hospitality of the locals, the lush green hills, the enchanting drives, and the slow-paced life. My grandfather often told with pride about the revolutionary forest conservation movement where the villagers, mostly women, hugged the trees in order to save them from deforestation and industrial use. In spite of this, in 2013, the floods in my hometown caused large scale devastation of life, infrastructure and a lot more. Questions like ‘Why do people who least create the problem face the worst repercussions?’ started popping up. This led me to be interested in domains of ecological debt, environmental justice and so on.
I would not say the shift from Dance to Development was planned, it surely wasn’t, but starting my postgraduate studies at an early age of 19 somehow felt like a natural progression — and I gained a lot of interest in everything SDGs and Gender Equality. I have worked with multiple organisations on gender-related aspects since then. Colleagues consider me a multitasker: I am someone who can compartmentalise a lot of information and very easily make order out of seeming disorder using design thinking. The journey of dedicating my career to the development sector officially began seven years ago and it is here to stay. I still dance, and believe in multi-potentiality — that one person can be several things at once!
Inspiration and feminism
It would be an injustice to my story if I do not narrate my first encounters of inspiration which date back to my childhood. It would be safe to say that I had a happy childhood, full of colours, dancing the way seasons flow by with an ambitious grandfather, hard-working parents, an inspirational sister, a close extended family, several friends, and two lovely dogs. My sister always encouraged me to shoot for the moon. She just inspires me every day.
There have been many moments that have changed the course of my action. Significantly, after reading “Annihilation of Caste” by Dr Ambedkar, a lot of my perspective has now changed for good. I have experienced hypocrisy very recently with my fellow caste people. I am from the dominant/upper/oppressor caste in India. Casteism in India is rampant and while I knew it, I somehow never saw everything through that lens — but now I do. Very recently reading and knowing more about it has made me aware of the intentional and unintentional harm we cause and the caste blindness of so many in India. I am hopeful that young people from DBA (Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi) communities and minorities will come forward now and claim what is rightly theirs. And I follow their lead in the journey by being an ally and via mentoring and encouraging women to be better professionals and helping them tap the network I have created in these 7 years.
And unknowingly dance has helped me to be confident by owning my moves quite literally — even in life. Once a dance mentor asked me before a competition “Why do teams win?” and I responded with all technical things like — synchronisation, choreography, dance, etc, but he said, “No — they win because they believe they will!” — WOW — with that pep talk — we won that day! I must have been 17 then and yet those words have stayed with me till now.
My favourite quote is by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez which says “Justice is about making sure that being polite is not the same thing as being quiet. In fact, oftentimes, the most righteous thing you can do is shake the table.” I hope we as feminists keep shaking tables!
Kanika Joshi is the Head of Partnerships and Communications at Includovate. She is a development practitioner with a multi-sectoral understanding of working with changemakers across the global south, she is deeply passionate about youth building solutions for sustainable development.
She is building thought partnerships and conversations around social inclusion and gender equality at the moment. Prior to this, she worked as a Research Manager with LEAD at Krea University in India on women entrepreneurship and financial inclusion for the last mile and in Kenya as a Fellow Consultant with TechnoServe on food security issues.
She also contributes as a Global Senior Advisor to the Youth Solutions Program at UN SDSN Youth, where she has been key in setting up the Youth Solutions Report with a diverse team of passionate individuals. Connect through LinkedIn profile and Instagram profile. She also honestly appreciates art, being a contemporary dancer and loves undertaking qualitative research.
Includovate is a feminist research incubator that “walks the talk”. Includovate is an Australian social enterprise consisting of a consulting firm and research incubator that designs solutions for gender equality and social inclusion. Its mission is to incubate transformative and inclusive solutions for measuring, studying, and changing discriminatory norms that lead to poverty, inequality, and injustice. To know more about us at Includovate, follow our social media: @includovate, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram.