8 - Enabling spaces for and with marginalised young people: the case of the Disha peer support and speak out group

Summary

This chapter foregrounds the ways that a community education approach engages with the challenges that are faced by first- and second-generation-learners in Indian higher education campuses by sharing the insights gained through the work of Disha (which means ‘direction’), a speak out and peer support group that has been functioning for the last 29 years. The group was established in 1992 by the author Dr Sadhana Natu, a feminist teacher (Natu, 2015; Natu, 2020). This chapter takes the form of a reflective essay concerning one of the key aspects of Disha as a practice of community building, community development and community education, inside and outside the university. A key aspect is the building of friendship and the consequent unlearning of privilege by those who inherit high caste status. Practices of destigmatising and ‘turning the stigma back’ or ‘shaming the shamers’ are considered central to the possibility of cross-caste community development work. Disha is an attempt to create a safe space for all students and to enable the lives of privileged and non-privileged students to intersect. It is both a speak out group and a peer support group, run and managed for the last 29 years by the students in Modern College, Ganeshkhind Savitribai Phule Pune University.

The intricacies of the caste system are indeed complex, and they need to be unpacked and understood (Deshpande, 2014). Disha plays a dual role of creating a community of care in terms of offering peer support as well as establishing a dialogical platform to discuss, validate and perhaps find closure for several issues that young adults are overwhelmed by, not just in India, but the world over. Some of these concerns include academic pressure, familial conflicts, issues related to sexuality and love, lack of inclusion, discrimination faced by marginalised students and social alienation. Thus, this case study speaks to the experience of many marginalised, as well as privileged, young people elsewhere, even where they are not subject to a caste system but to other forms of oppressive social hierarchies. Disha is a community-building project based in a psychology department; the chapter also shows how thinking from critical psychology can inform community education processes, and how community development work can in turn inform a democratic politics of mental health.