JGU's Women's Convention 2026: Give to Gain for Gender Justice

Anchored in the International Women's Day 2026 theme "Give to Gain", JGU's Second edition of the Women's Convention will foreground the idea that investing in women's knowledge, creativity, leadership, and labour generates long-term collective social, cultural, and democratic gains.

While decades of advocacy and reform have brought important gains to women's lives in India, gender-based discrimination persists and impacts women across regions and cultural contexts and in homes, workplaces, creative endeavours, and educational institutions. The Convention brings together academics, scholars, practitioners, advocates, policy makers, institution builders, diplomats, civil servants, and grassroots workers to create a shared space for reflection, dialogue, and collective imagination. The Convention is committed to identifying concrete pathways for meaningful social, institutional, and structural transformation and to esponding to emerging forms of inequality in a rapidly changing social and economic landscape.

This year, the Convention is further enriched by the inaugural Jindal Interdisciplinary Art and Literature Festival 2026. The Festival seeks to broaden and deepen the engagement envisaged by the Convention and brings feminist visions into dialogue with literature, art, cinema, performance, and other cultural expressions. The Festival recognises that the pursuit of gender justice is not confined to policy frameworks or institutional reform alone; it is equally shaped by stories told, images created, and worlds imagined. Creative practices have long served as sites of resistance, critique, healing, and re-imagination, spaces where silences are broken, alternative futures are sketched, and lived experiences find language.

The Founding Vice Chancellor of O.P. Jindal Global University, Prof (Dr) C. Raj Kumar, said, "Women are the cornerstone of the academic and institutional ethos of JGU. The empowerment of women, choices, opportunities and participation in academic and administrative duties stand at the heart of our culture. With more than 55 per cent women comprising the workforce at JGU, we are proud to be a women-centric organisation, and we will continue to strengthen their presence and participation across all our activities. This commitment finds further expression in the inaugural Jindal Interdisciplinary Arts and Literature Festival, bringing feminist visions into dialogue with literature and arts, affirming that inclusive cultural spaces are central to how equality is imagined, articulated, and advanced."

Prof (Dr) Upasana Mahanta, Dean, Admissions and Outreach and member of the organising committee of the Women's Convention, said: "The Convention gathers us in shared purpose; it catalyses ideas and inspires resolve. Its true significance, however, and the real measure of our commitment, lie in the steps we take each day -- through sustained institutional commitments, thoughtful pedagogical practices, mentorship, everyday solidarities, and the spaces we consciously cultivate to shape our lived realities."

The multiple panels across three days of deliberations will open with an Inaugural session, and the keynote address will focus on feminist legacies in India. Several other panel discussions will be on multiple themes like Women's way: seeing, feeling, knowing; Women and/in translation: who speaks for women? Translation, gender, and literary circulation in India and beyond; Feminization of aging Gender diversity and public health justice; Pathways to better economic and social outcomes; Female voices in humanities and the preservation of truth; Women at work: understanding barriers, advancing equality; Media and publishing ecologies; Women building the digital future; Women's power in policy making: from agenda to inclusive action; Women in leadership roles in the media and many more.

By placing artistic and literary conversations alongside scholarly and policy deliberations, the Festival affirms that struggles for equality and emancipation must be imagined, articulated, and sustained across disciplines and forms. It invites writers, artists, filmmakers, poets, performers, and thinkers to engage with themes of identity, labour, care, embodiment, memory, and power, and to illuminate how cultural production both reflects and reshapes social realities. In doing so, the Festival complements the Convention's deliberative focus with a creative and reflective dimension, encouraging participants to see feminist engagement not only as a matter of reform, but as an ongoing intellectual and cultural project.

"The Office of Student Life and Cultural Engagement (SLCE) envisions the Jindal Interdisciplinary Arts and Literature Festival (JIALF) as a flagship cultural-academic platform for stirring up meaningful and substantial conversations on the arts from the vantage point of an interdisciplinary university. The festival seeks to engage a dynamic student populace by showcasing a polyphonic multiplicity of genres, voices and ideas that animate contemporary cultural and literary discourse," said Prof Dr Gargi Bharadwaj, Director, Office of Student Life and cultural engagement and Associate Professor (theatre, performance and cultural studies).

- IANS