Panel Discussion Globalizing of Ideas
The opening panel discussion will include the following speakers and will be moderated by Nazes Afroz.
Participants’ details
Joya Mitra: A writer, columnist and the author of many books including ‘Hanyamaan’, a first-person account of the Naxalite movement in Kolkata in which she was a participant. Currently she is a leading environmental activist.
Timir Basu: A student activist from the 1950s. He became a journalist and was in the editorial team of the journal Frontier, launched by Kolkata’s famous poet and Left thinker Samar Sen in 1968. He has been involved with the journal since its inception and became its editor after the death of Samar Sen in 1983.
Asoke Kumar Mukhopadhyay: A teacher of journalism and public relations professional. Researcher and author of several books on the Naxalite movement. Noteworthy books are, Naxalite in the Eyes of the Police and a Bengali novel ‘Aatta Notar Surjo.’
Ashim Chattopadhyay: Leading student activist from 1960s in Kolkata and later an important youth leader of the Naxalite movement. Currently he is an political commentator and writer.
Christina von Braun: A writer, filmmaker, and a professor of cultural theory and history. She was nominated full professor at Humboldt-University in 1994. Before, she worked as a free lance writer and film maker in New York, Paris, and Bonn, authoring more than fifty films and many books. One of her central issues has always been the relation between gender and history. She was for many years director of the Dept. of Gender Studies at Humboldt University and is now the Co-Director of The Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg. She was visiting professor at many US- and European Universities, her fields of research comprise: gender, the history of writing, religion and modernity, the history of anti-Semitism. In 2013 she was awarded the Sigmund Freud Prize of the German Psychoanalytical Association. Prof. von Braun is also the Vice president of the Goethe-Institute.
Dr. Tilo Held: A Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst who was born in Germany in 1938, spent his growing years until 1950 in Flensburg. In 1950, he travelled to Brazil for his schooling followed by studying medicine in Munich. He was trained as a psychiatrist in Paris from where he returned to Bonn as medical director of the local psychiatric-neurological state clinic. From 1999, Dr. Held was appointed as the professor of Psychiatry at the University of Bonn. He founded the Fliedner Klinik Berlin in 2000. Since then he has been very active as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist in Berlin. His areas of research include social psychiatry, especially ‘Family Therapy of Schizophrenia’, cultural aspects of psychiatric diagnosis, therapy, trauma research and Holocaust survivors.
Moderated By:
Nazes Afroz: A journalist, author and photographer and was a former senior editor of the BBC World Service. He has been writing about the Naxalite movement and Left politics in India for more than three decades.