TEDxTeen | In Our Own Backyards

Rebecca is a 21-year-old artist and activist, born and raised in Oakland, California. Her work is primarily focused around the issue of Commercially Sexually Exploited Children in her city. Rebecca exposed this issue in her first film, "International Boulevard a Documentary."

Oxford University | Storytelling for Social Impact

Bonavero Institute for Human Rights

A panel discussion co-hosted by the Bonavero Institute, Oxford Creative Hub and Oxford University Media Society on how storytelling can be used as an instrument for social change.

Speakers include filmmaker and activist Rebecca Dharmapalan, Rocco Rorandelli, documentary photographer for Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal, Lila Igram, founder of Connecther.org and Oxford students Ameena Malek and Saadia Gardezi who started the university-backed virtual reality project, Project Dastaan .

Young Scholars Research Symposium 2017

A discussion at the Institute of South Asian Studies on her film Tune Your Ears

In this film thesis I am looking at the themes of immigration, migration, civil war, genocide and freedom's effects on self-identity. In the process of filming my four South Asian grandparents, I hope to understand their lives better, and thorough their stories grow to understand the complexities of my own identity. From Tanzania, to Goa, to Ceylon, to Vermont, and Los Angeles, their intersectional stories of struggle helped them assimilate, define themselves, hold onto their culture, and create a new home. Through the lens of understanding, this project is teaching me how to look beyond academia's promotion of scholarly evidence, and instead valuing oral histories and encouraging inter-generational conversations of self, of struggle, and of strength.

Young Scholars Research Symposium 2018

Unrecognized Genocide: The Case of Sri Lanka

Intergenerational Trauma, Legitimate Violence, and Selective Memory

My research will be investigating the case of Sri Lanka to explore the theory of genocide, critically analyzing scholarship surrounding mass atrocities and mass violence. It is my contention that when genocide goes unrecognized, it incites anomic conditions. Residual war trauma is externalized within the affected diaspora through intergenerational trauma, abuse, and selective memory. The goal of this article is to clarify and provide specific cases of post war trauma manifesting in Sri Lankan Tamil youth refugees living in California. By mapping the colonial history of Sri Lanka that led to the conditions of civil war, and speaking on the forced migration of civilians both internally and abroad, I will provide context for narrating my observational research with three Sri Lankan asylum seekers that attend high school in California. This investigation poses several questions: How does the definition of genocide function to scale war crimes, violence, and trauma and reproduce inequities of classification? More specifically, in what ways does its definition confirm historically identified genocides while overlooking and condemning other episodes of mass violence? How does selective memory prevail within a post-war, post-genocide diaspora? How is trauma from Sri Lanka intergenerational?