I work with Oxfam India on designing and delivering popular mobilisation and campaign programmes fundamentally to engage with public and influence decision makers or publics. Based out of Oxfam India’s head office, New Delhi, my role requires me to coordinate with a diverse set of team across national and regional offices to develop and implement creative campaign concepts and activities.

My other key focus areas are to increase popular impact of the campaign and work with the team for production of campaign materials, tools and online resources.

I have an overall experience of more than 8 years in the media and development sector. In my professional tenure, I have studied International Political Economy from University of London – King’s College London’s India summer school; and also done a course on Sustainability from University of Nottingham, UK through distance mode. As part of my education earlier, I had graduated and completed my masters degree on journalism and mass communication from University of Calcutta.

The education on journalism with a specialization on international affairs and human rights gave me the impetus to pursue my career on development sector as a clarion call. Journalism came as an entry point while I started searching jobs in this sector.

Even when I joined Oxfam India as a communications officer, my background in journalism and mass communication was immensely useful in carving out a niche for me in my professional role. Currently, my work in Oxfam India needs me to lead on specific projects or streams of work within our campaigns and policy-research programme. As one of the main mandate of my work, I collaborate with a diverse set of campaign allies, facilitate issue-based networking with civil society organisations, donors and international agencies on campaign issues within the country.

I also strongly believe in the power of technology and social media platforms such as twitter, facebook, youtube, community media; and using new media as a larger narrative to engage and influence public and policy makers. At a personal level, I am quite active on twitter and engage on such diverse issues through tweets. The course on Community Journalism offered by Cardiff University was a natural progression and looked immensely useful to gather a global perspective on this subject.

Vital modules such as hyper-local news coverage, digital platforms such as power of blogs which were taught through this course helped me in a better understanding of their use and relevance. I could relate it to my professional work while I continue to embed and try to integrate digital platforms to build on campaigns and connect with publics. For instance, on the occasion of the global Blog Action Day 2014, I could write my blog ‘Tackling extreme inequality is within our reach’ with conviction. I could draw in my previous experience of participating in the Plus Social Good Summit in India and writing a blog published by United Nations Foundation website Climasphere, based out of Washington, USA. Frequent interactions with fellow participants on this course gave a sense of how others were finding this course so engaging.

Image accompanying this post is copyright Amit Sengupta.