About
Hum Sab Ek is an immersive exhibit inspired by the actions of members of the Self-Employed Women’s Association comprising 3 million women working in the informal sector in India.
What began as a traditional impact assessment of the pandemic on the lives of the working poor evolved into a multimedia exhibition created by an interdisciplinary team of graduate students from public health, design, education, engineering and government studies. The exhibition includes installations that combine videos, photographs, artifacts from the lives of the workers, a specially commissioned 16 feet long textile, and a dazzling 80-phone-unit digital display. It is based on 30 hours of oral histories and a survey of over 1000 rural and urban households in Gujarat, in western India. Our multilayered approach, at the confluence of science, policy and the arts, includes a publicly accessible online archive donated to Harvard Countway Library’s History of Medicine Archives; a traveling exhibition hosted at research institutions, philanthropic organizations, multilateral organizations and the streets; policy roundtables; and invitations to artists to collaborate and reinterpret all.
The inaugural exhibit at Harvard has welcomed visitors from across the US, including from art institutions including the Smithsonian, from philanthropic organizations like the Ford and MacArthur Foundations, from civil society organizations from around the world, and scholars across the US.
SEWA’s members, through five decades of organization and mutual cooperation, have sought to build what they call “an economy of nurturance”. Unencumbered by the luxury of confirmation, their five decades of organization enabled them to deploy material, behavioral and financial interventions in response to the pandemic that were practical, expedient and mutually beneficial.
Hum Sab Ek captures important lessons from these disadvantaged but highly empowered women, who through the power of their collective action, navigated the greatest public health emergency of our times, when dominant political, economic and social structures failed to protect them. The exhibit also seeks to represent alternative forms of knowledge generation and science dissemination, when ascendant quantitative sciences have saturated academic discourse. The story of SEWA is important because it elucidates alternative approaches to preparing us for our rapidly changing climate.