This episode features a conversation with noted Bangladeshi photojournalist, activist and writer Shahidul Alam. Recorded and edited by Subhashish Panigrahi during the National Geographic Storytellers Summit 2023 in Washington, D.C. in January and published in March 2023, highlighting Alam’s journey as a photojournalist who documented the post-liber…

This episode of "O Foundation Conversations" is an intimate conversation with Zubair Torwali who is a prominent language-activist from North Pakistan. Mr. Torwali has been working for the last 15 years for the protection and growth of his own language Torwali and 30 other languages of his region. Did you know that 9th of August is the “Internationa…

Would you consider the language and culture of a community of 7.6 million people in danger, especially when the language is recognized as one of the 22 provincial official languages in the world's largest democracy? It is, and it is much more than that, when you look at it from the geopolitical, socioeconomic and technical standpoints. In this epis…

The colonization era was complicated for Indonesia, a country with 700 languages, as it is hard to tell if it was helpful or not for the Sundanese language. But Ilham Nurwansah is now on a mission to digitize old text, and share encyclopedic information through Wikipedia. What is known very little about Nurwansah is that he also makes his own music…

Adivasis are the indigenous communities in India. There are 104 million Adivasis that speak a few hundred languages but only a handful of them have a access to media of their own. In this episode of O Foundation Conversations, our host Subhashish Panigrahi talks to Ankush Vengurlekar and Ashish Birulee of Adivasi Lives Matter, a platform dedicated …

How can the speakers of indigenous languages be educated during a pandemic like coronavirus? In this episode of O Foundation Conversations, Subhashish Panigrahi speaks to Dr. Mandana Seyfeddinipur who is a linguist and heads the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme at the SOAS University of London. Dr. Seyfeddinipur shares how indigenous an…