Since 2001, TWM has worked on a national level to facilitate media production and training for grassroots activists
involved in social change and global justice campaigns. The WSF2004 will be an opportunity for the small but ambitious
collective of women of color filmmakers and organizers to bring their training curricula to an international arena.
In Mumbai, the organization will set up a computer lab and schedule of photography, video production and Web training
workshops for GGJ organizations to document and publicize their work and experiences at the forum back home to the US.
TWM will host the GGJ documentation work on their Web site at http://www.cultureisaweapon.org. In addition, TWM will be
leading and participating in various WSF panels and workshops to discuss the emerging media and technology justice movement
growing in communities of color in the United States. In the same year that TWM formed, the WSF began as an annual
international gathering in Porto Alegre, Brasil for global activists seeking to build alternative models
to corporate globalization in direct response to the World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland-the
annual closed-door "summit" for top business executives, world political leaders and multinational institutions
like the IMF, World Bank and WTO. The WSF will be convening in Mumbai for the first time this year, since it began
in Brasil.
TWM Executive Director Thenmozhi Soundararajan sees the organization's work in Mumbai as part of the collective's
ongoing work in supporting self-determined media representation, "In the previous forums in Porto Alegre, there was
such scant media coverage in American news outlets. With the GGJ delegation, our media lab will give agency to these
US activists in telling the news of social political movements at home and abroad in their own words and images. This
is what we call 'Media Justice.'"
Through their panel presentations and support of news and media production by US delegates, Soundararajan said TWM hopes
to form alliances with similar media and communications organizations from around the world, which are working towards a
just media system in their communities. Several hundred US activists will be joining TWM in Mumbai this year. US representation
at the World Social Forum grew from under 100 in 2001 to nearly 500 in 2002 and over 1000 in 2003. Many of those attending come
from community-level grassroots organizing efforts. Likewise, attendance to the WSF has grown since 2001 from 15,000 attendees to
the expected 75,000 attendees for the fourth annual gathering in Mumbai.
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