Dr Kris Ram­per­sad, in­de­pen­dent schol­ar and mul­ti­me­dia ed­u­ca­tor, con­tent cre­ator and pro­duc­er will pre­miere and pi­o­neer a new lit­er­ary genre on Com­mon­wealth Day, to­mor­row, which is al­so In­ter­na­tion­al Women’s Day.

Dr Ram­per­sad has named the genre the ‘mul­ti­me­dia mi­cro epic’. It is rep­re­sent­ed in her in­de­pen­dent short film, One Night To Bloom, a biopic of her jour­ney from vil­lage through jour­nal­ism, ed­u­ca­tion and civic em­pow­er­ment. The film is be­ing screened at her ses­sion ‘Glob­al­i­sa­tion in Re­verse’ at In­ter­change21, an on­line fo­rum of Com­mon­wealth schol­ars host­ed by the British Coun­cil for the Com­mon­wealth Schol­ar­ship Com­mis­sion. The film fea­tures the mu­sic of Oliv­er Chap­man and Ran­dolph Kara­math.

“This new­ly de­fined genre in­te­grates new mul­ti­me­dia forms, tools and tech­niques in­to the clas­si­cal epic genre, which has been at­trib­uted in west­ern dis­course as orig­i­nat­ing in Greece,” she ex­plains on her web­site, Glo­Cal Knowl­edge Pot (www.kris­ram­per­sad.com).

“With Ma as my muse, it cham­pi­ons oth­er in­vis­i­ble, mar­gin­alised women, peo­ples, cul­tures and her­itage of our times which sci­en­tists have brand­ed as the An­thro­pocene, the epoch of hu­man dom­i­nance.”

It spot­lights Dr Ram­per­sad’s en­gage­ment with per­ni­cious prob­lems of girls’ ed­u­ca­tion, ter­ror­ism, vi­o­lence, cen­sor­ship, glob­al trav­el, me­dia, di­ver­si­ty, health, en­vi­ron­ment, gov­er­nance, in­ter­cul­tur­al and in­ter­na­tion­al re­la­tions and small is­land states with­in the con­text of the evo­lu­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Dr Ram­per­sad, who be­gan her jour­nal­ism ca­reer at Guardian Me­dia, is a na­tion­al gold award re­cip­i­ent for the de­vel­op­ment of women and jour­nal­ism, holds a PhD and BA First Class Ho­n­ours in Lit­er­a­ture from the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies and fel­low­ships and schol­ar­ships to Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty, the As­so­ci­a­tion of Com­mon­wealth Uni­ver­si­ty and In­di­an In­sti­tute of Mass Com­mu­ni­ca­tion among oth­er recog­ni­tions “The ’One Night to Bloom’ biopic rep­re­sents one of the many forms in which I will lay out the new mul­ti­me­dia mi­cro epic genre - through fic­tion and non-fic­tion, rhymes, chil­dren’s fa­bles, short sto­ries, doc­u­men­tary, mu­si­cals. It snap­shots my sto­ry and jour­ney aligned to glob­al is­sues.

“The pan­dem­ic might have sent the world in­to pan­ic, but in break­ing down old and ar­cha­ic struc­tures and mech­a­nisms, many of which have out­grown their use­ful­ness to con­tem­po­rary chal­lenges, it is al­so test­ing us to in­no­vate, in­vent and adapt."