Jaspreet Kaur
Community Fellow, December 2023 - November 2024
Jaspreet Kaur, also known by her online handle ‘Behind the Netra’ is an award-winning spoken word artist, history teacher and writer from London. She is passionate about gender issues, taboo subjects and encourages positive social change in both the Asian community and wider society. Her work tackles issues related to gender discrimination, mental health stigma, the postcolonial immigrant experience, and more.
Jaspreet is a regular on the BBC, Sunday Morning Live, Radio 4 and worked with the UN on the HeforShe campaign. She is the author of #1 Amazon bestseller, Brown Girl Like Me. One of the first books to speak directly to the experiences of South Asian women in Britain since 1978, delving into some of the most complex conversations brown women are tackling today. This book is essential reading for anyone wanting to build a fuller picture of women’s lives in Britain today across a wide variety of backgrounds and perspectives. Her first children’s book The Spaces in Between, an illustrated children’s mindfulness poetry book, released in April 2023 in the UK, USA, Canada and South Korea.
Since sharing her story of how poetry saved her life on a TED stage in 2017, Jaspreet has performed her poetry on stages across the country, including for the royal family at the Royal Albert Hall, Westminster Abbey, Trafalgar Square, Wembley Stadium, the Houses of Parliament, as well as commissions, collaborations and appearances on the BBC, Sky News, The Metro and Stylist Magazine. She has been sharing the power of creative expression with schools and universities across the country and is also a judge for the annual Queen's Commonwealth Essay Competition and the prestigious Roundhouse Poetry Slam.
Projects:
Quiet Feminism
Quiet Feminism will analyse the diverse and complex ways that groups and individuals deploy their own forms of feminism to find economic, social, political and cultural power. From the outset of the feminist movement to the modern era, Jaspreet will be in search of these quieter voices to make sure no woman, man, or gender-non-conforming person is left as a footnote or, worse, forgotten entirely. From African concepts of Ubuntu to the power of Pietist women in Egypt or quiet women like Jaspreet's widowed grandmother, for the first time in feminist discourse, we'll see how this nuanced, grounded approach to gender equality and feminist activism offers new insights into the many ways gender relations are understood and lived around the world, and how crucial the quiet feminist is in this ever-changing political landscape.
How Poetry Saved My Life
Jaspreet Kaur’s much-anticipated debut poetry collection will comprise the poetry she has penned over the last fifteen years to support her mental well-being and that ultimately saved her life.The collection will invite readers to the vulnerable and honest journey of how Jaspreet used creative self-expression to develop resilience, empowerment, strength and self-love whilst traversing difficult social, cultural and emotional terrains. For the first time, readers will see the words that served Jaspreet in her darkest times, sharing poems of anxiety, depression, recovery, love, relationships and female empowerment, but ultimately healing and hope.