STUDENT MEDIA GRANT PROGRAM
SMGP 2024-2025 Grantee: Taahira Ayoob
Taahira Ayoob was a Toursim Management Masters student at the University of Girona in Spain when she was awarded a Student Media Grant. She traveled to Sri Lanka in 2024 to work on her project.
Project description:
Taahira's work for CONDEV aimed to understand and raise awareness about the connection between food and war in the Northern Territories of Sri Lanka using the themes of resilience, heritage and culture. She sought to investigate through multimedia journalism, how home-cooking experiences could be a form of tourism regeneration for Sri Lankans families after close to 30 years of conflict.
With the assistance of the SMGP grant, Taahira delivered different multimedia outputs that help raise awareness of Sri Lanka’s culinary potential and history in relation, and provide digital support to the home-cooking Jaffna Tamil communities. Her photographs and accompanying essay delved into the intricacies of post-conflict tourism regeneration through the lens of Jaffna’s culinary legacy and the richness of the women in the community who are guardians of these recipes.
Taahira also created an intercative, illustrated story of kitchen tools that was published online by Kontinentalist. See: https://kontinentalist.com/stories/natures-utensils-sri-lanka
Photo credits: Taahira Ayoob
Project Deliverables: