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A kaleidoscope for your toolbox

In the warm spring of 2021, amidst the heart of a pandemic, UNHCR’s Innovation Service explored the dimly lit edges of imagination and speculative storytelling. The Innovation Service refreshing dew also gathered hums of collaborating fireflies. These edges, defining what would become Project Unsung, reframed and reassessed so much of what was predefined and rarely questioned., As a representative firefly, I got to lead some of the visual language that interlocked fingers with some of the wonderful articles that sprouted from Unsung. 

When I was first introduced to the collective, I was taken for what could only be described as an exploratory sailing adventure between these tiny islands that were created and overseen by the fireflies. Thus, the only logical way my heart could illustrate this journey was to draw a map (page 2) marked by lakes, isles, forests and mountain peaks, sprinkled with portals (as depicted by the crystals) to the different worlds created by Unsung’s fireflies. This map marked the central theme for the rest of the visuals. Reminiscent of the stories we read in our childhood and representative of our unapologetic imagination, the artwork that you’ll find in the nooks of this collective touches the fabrics of worldbuilding, belonging, loss, but also justice and hope. 

The art direction of the publication however did not always touch upon some of the fantasy and science fiction imagery that dresses the final version. In the beginning, we assumed Unsung would be a little seedling, a small zine by a small group of creatives bringing their stories to perhaps a smaller audience. The design desire seemed to resonate with diary-keeping and scrapbooking, very personal and rich in individual depth. But just as marigolds bloom swiftly when given space and protection, so did Unsung bloom, rewilding the edges faster than the golden flowers could a mountain. And so, the imagery evolved. Within the lines that define some of the illustrations, you will see fleeting themes of magical nature, of spaces between humans beings and within human beings, of interdimensional relationships and sometimes simply of clouds and birds (what better way to illustrate hope than to draw the things we see when we keep our eyes on the horizon). But there are two sides to every coin, and when we flip this one, you will also find vulnerability, grief and rupture. As fault lines are to our planet, so is deconstruction to growth, and the art is meant to reflect just that. 

From fiction to nonfiction, from poetry to 3D provocations of unraveling, from collages to meditative drawings, imagination reveals itself in a multitude of forms, and the visuals for Unsung only scratch the surface on all of the contributing fireflies’ visions. My own vision for this edition is to invite you to see Unsung as a kaleidoscope that accesses multiple dimensions of discontinuity, histories and futures. To see and unsee, and to not just reimagine bridges but to reimagine staying put. Rupture, maintenance and repairing are required in the act of speculation, and art allows us to manifest these imagined paths. I hope you take the work curated here as a primer into the possibilities we believe can be tapped into if you’ll take inspiration from the lit pathways our fireflies drew on the edge of the present world.

This page is part of UNHCR’s Project Unsung collection and portfolio. Project Unsung is a speculative storytelling project that brings together creative collaborators from around the world to help reimagine the humanitarian sector. To discover move about the initiative and other contributions in the collection, you can go to the project website here.

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Imagination is about articulating a desire for a better world, picturing a life beyond what you know, and understanding how we can use creative practices as part of building a better future. In the pursuit of building new worlds, others must be laid to rest, whilst constantly gesturing towards the interconnectedness of our pasts, presents, and futures.

Our seed of imagination at the UN Refugee Agency’s Innovation Service has manifested in Project Unsung. Project Unsung is an initiative to nurture the narratives, the stories, the relationships, and the values that we believe are required for the future of humanitarian work. Project Unsung is also our compost pile, it is where we layer different ways of being, different creative forms and mediums, different ways of seeing the world, and discovering where we can find connections among them to inform our work. 

Within Project Unsung, we have used storytelling, design, and speculation to help us map a constellation of how our work might shift in the face of more complex and overlapping crises whilst intentionally working towards more just futures.

In the first iteration of this project, we focused on the theme of renewal, locating the initial ideas for possible and renewed understandings of our work in the ashes of a global pandemic, accelerating ecological loss and displacement, grasping for narratives to help us make meaning of the world we were encountering. We understood deeply that stories were one lens for sensemaking across this novel landscape and that they could help us better investigate patterns, cohere ideas, transform our worldviews and imagine something different.

“Displacement is a memory of violence that makes the future history to come.”

As you wind your way through the memories, histories, and futures in Project Unsung, the threads of analysis and imagination unveil new narratives for humanitarian action. The narrative visions supplant the myths of the benevolent saviour and the rational hero, to call for solidaristic relationships rooted in belonging and justice. 

For this much is true: the stories we tell of humanitarian work have the imprint of history’s unravelling since the Second World War. Histories of colonialism and oppression, environmental exploitation and technological development manifest in subtle but irrefutable ways. The act of imagination presents a rupture with these realities, where tomorrow is conjured out of the speculation of today.   

In Project Unsung, the stories of humanitarianism seek new origins. Through reconciliation with nature, through principles of plurality, renewal, and intergenerational responsibility, innovation opens into a fresh expanse. Poetry poses questions to whiteness. Science fiction elevates indigenous technologies. Essays account for our interdependence. The art and the artefacts have the unsung visions start to sing.

In navigating the work of this project, the reader should expect more questions than commands, more possibilities than policies. The collaborators demonstrate that our world is constantly in the making, and, as you return to your own place of action, we hope that you take this spirit of renewal with you. We hope you find the story of the world you wish to be. 

Project Unsung is a beginning, a seed that will constantly need to be revisited, revalued, deconstructed, and challenged to understand if the assumptions and narratives it operates within make sense. Situated at this point, we know it has brought a precise compass to themes we need to continue to navigate in relation to futures we’re working towards, specifically: the role of power, belonging and the ecological crisis in the context of our work.

Ultimately, we believe that a new way of seeing the world can help us find a new way of valuing it. More than ever, we’re called to build something better, and this will require not only imagination but manifesting our desired futures into present practices. We welcome you to this invitation of possibility and imagining otherwise.

This page is part of UNHCR’s Project Unsung collection and portfolio. Project Unsung is a speculative storytelling project that brings together creative collaborators from around the world to help reimagine the humanitarian sector. To discover move about the initiative and other contributions in the collection, you can go to the project website here.

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Barbara Adams is a sociologist whose interdisciplinary research looks at how knowledge is produced and political action is initiated through art and design projects. Barbara co-edited the book Design as Future-Making and is co-editor in chief of the journal Design and Culture. She is Assistant Professor of Design and Social Justice at Parsons School of Design and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Wesleyan University.

Jane Pirone is an Associate Professor of Design Ecologies at Parsons School of Design where they served as Dean of the School of Design Strategies from 2015-2019 and as Director of the Communication Design program from 2006-2011. Jane’s creative and transdisciplinary practice engages with living systems, storytelling, participatory futures, and new technologies from critical, queer and post-human perspectives.

An illustrative ode to Audre Lorde accompanied by her words on difference, power and possibility.

How is difference a force for change?

Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters. Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged. As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. 

Excerpts From: Sister Outsider (Audre Lorde, 1984).

Download the PDF to colour the illustration and reflect on difference and creativity.

This page is part of UNHCR’s Project Unsung collection and portfolio. Project Unsung is a speculative storytelling project that brings together creative collaborators from around the world to help reimagine the humanitarian sector. To discover move about the initiative and other contributions in the collection, you can go to the project website here.

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A visioning exercise you can do alone or together on letting go, power and liberating futures.

This page is part of UNHCR’s Project Unsung collection and portfolio. Project Unsung is a speculative storytelling project that brings together creative collaborators from around the world to help reimagine the humanitarian sector. To discover move about the initiative and other contributions in the collection, you can go to the project website here.

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By Marion Atieno

2020 was a great awakening for me. The pandemic, the collective response to the murder of George Floyd and the disproportionate impacts of the pandemic on communities of colour, including my community,  was complex for me to process and experience.

Last year posed a question for me that I believe is the creative calling of the Anthropocene: What does it mean to be human to another and to all life on Earth?

My creative collaboration with Project Unsung has been an invitation for me to explore this question through the creative medium. Project Unsung is a collaboration between UNHCR Innovation Service and six creative collaborators to create products that explore dominant narratives and assumptions in the innovation and humanitarian space, and inspire strategic thinking on prominent or emerging global issues.

One of the main insights for me has been to explore what creative imagination means in my practice as an environmentalist. These are some insights I’m becoming aware of.

On creative imagination

People and natural ecosystems, that strive to live in the face of oppressive societies, express a level of creative ingenuity that can go unnoticed because the end goal is survival.

Creativity is putting food on your children’s plate with no means of income. It’s surviving one more day without deportation. It’s playing a podcast out loud as you walk home at night, to give an unwelcome stranger the illusion that you are not alone ( i.e. protected). It’s adapting to life in an acidic ocean when members of your species continue to die. Creative survival is how one attempts to thrive within a system fundamentally designed to oppress or harm you.

 People and natural ecosystems are not lacking ingenuity, they are lacking opportunity – essentially the opportunity to be and to live. I believe the Anthropocene calls for another space of creativity, beyond creative survival, what I call creative imagination.

Creative imagination in the face of oppressive systems is refusing to give up your hope and actively nourishing your capacity to be hopeful. It is what Desmond Tutu calls to be a ‘prisoner of hope’ and Toni Morrison refers to it as the ‘cultivation of goodness.’

There is a stubbornness to hope that eventually bends reality to its will. Even if I cannot perceive it, I know that society is capable of nurturing community, wellness, and equality within ourselves and all life on Earth. My work is nourishing that capacity to be hopeful in myself and cultivating expressions of hope in my work, relationships, and communities. 

Creativity and grieving

My creative practices as part of Project Unsung and in creating my new podcast, Black Earth, has allowed me the time to grieve. In 2021, I am launching Black Earth which is an interview podcast celebrating nature and inspiring Black women environmentalists around the world. 

Working in sustainable development policy, I had acquired the collective practice of numbing myself from the data, the projected trends of collapse, extinction, and violence in our relationship with the earth.

This project and Black Earth podcast has given me space to grieve the ongoing experiences of communities around the world and the histories of my ancestors in the transatlantic slave trade. What some people speculate as future scenarios of the apocalypse are the histories and ongoing realities of other people and ecosystems.

To create these two projects, I had to allow myself to feel it, to really process these complex emotions, and to create spaces (listening circles) with other ecologists, where we could grieve what is happening and express gratitude for what is still possible.

It’s possible to develop technical solutions to the symptoms of the ecological crisis while still numbing yourself, but I don’t think it’s possible to truly create new futures while numbing yourself to the realities and futures unfolding. If we want to create futures, we need collective practices for grieving what we might encounter in the creation process. The Anthropocene does not need more technical solutions, it needs our liberation. 

On creativity and time

There is a culture of ‘running out of time’ in both the conservation and humanitarian sectors. This is different from the urgent attention required of us to attend to the events we face in our work. The ‘running out of time’ culture, I’m referring to, necessitates that we have the answers before we go to work and I wonder how this affects our ability to create. 

Creation needs time to attend to others, to the present moment, to explore alternative paths with openness, humility, and determination. It requires time to reflect with others, question our assumptions, expectations, and conclusions. Creation needs time for us to ‘not know’. It requires time to suspend judgments, and renege on conclusions that you cling to for order, security, esteem. The facilitators of Project Unsung gave me space to ‘not know’ and I think through the artefacts created, I had time to explore questions that I may not have otherwise explored because I didn’t give myself the time to not know.

When we act from a place of ‘running out of time’, we relinquish the possibility of not knowing. We have to reclaim this time back. We have to reclaim our time of not knowing so we can leave our own ideological islands in search of real answers.

On renewal

My initial response to the question of imagining the futures of displacement and ecological change, was one of fatalistic doom. I tried to imagine ways out of the projected trends of sea level-rise, droughts, and water scarcity. I tried to imagine solutions to get us out of the sixth mass extinction. This effort limited me because there are infinite ways our futures could unfold as a result of interactions we choose and events that happen.

So, I decided to remain committed to the project theme of renewal and through these articles, and explore what renewal might mean for us in the Anthropocene. Rather than explore the infinite pathways to avert the ongoing ecological changes, I started to ask a new question, which I referred to earlier; What does it mean to be human to another and to all life on Earth?

Even if the current projected drivers of ecological loss had no remarkable impact on life on Earth, would it make it ok for us to be and live the human experience this way? Would infinite economic growth, and a throwaway culture be the most life-giving ways to be human?

Through this question, this is where I found the most creative potential. To be human in the Anthropocene is to create new narratives of humanity’s relationship with all life on Earth that goes beyond treating this living planet as an inanimate place that exists to serve our survival and self-actualisation needs. It is to amplify stories which affirm our relationship with the natural environment as an essential component of all expressions of human dignity – safety, belonging, identity, agency, solidarity, justice, and, of course, creativity. We cannot be fully human while nature is degraded and violated and nature cannot thrive if human beings continue to be degraded and violated. It is to live daily with the awareness that we are one percent of all life on Earth and to allow that awareness to inspire us to greater humility and reverence for the planet.

This page is part of UNHCR’s Project Unsung collection and portfolio. Project Unsung is a speculative storytelling project that brings together creative collaborators from around the world to help reimagine the humanitarian sector. To discover move about the initiative and other contributions in the collection, you can go to the project website here.

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Shanice is an artist and training environmental scientist. Having Indian heritage, being an immigrant in both UAE and Germany, she has a deep appreciation for multicultural belonging (and multicultural cuisine). Professionally, she has an interest in intersectional climate justice and ecological art, and how the two are being addressed in climate change communication. She has been supporting the Innovation service on both design and environmental conversations since December 2020.

This page is part of UNHCR’s Project Unsung collection and portfolio. Project Unsung is a speculative storytelling project that brings together creative collaborators from around the world to help reimagine the humanitarian sector. To discover move about the initiative and other contributions in the collection, you can go to the project website here.

The post Harmony, a dancing God appeared first on UNHCR Innovation.

Barbara Adams is a sociologist whose interdisciplinary research looks at how knowledge is produced and political action is initiated through art and design projects. Barbara co-edited the book Design as Future-Making and is co-editor in chief of the journal Design and Culture. She is Assistant Professor of Design and Social Justice at Parsons School of Design and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Wesleyan University.

Generating Futures of Belonging

Empathy, helping, care, and resilience have been championed as strategies to repair our world and to renew and strengthen our relations with one another and with other living things. Yet, these approaches are less likely to transform alliances than they are to maintain existing conditions. The ideology of practice that guides humanitarian aid embraces these compassionate forms of helping along with an ethos of neutrality and impartiality, adopting an apolitical position that conceals how crises develop out of imperial and colonial legacies.

Moving from the inequity embedded in aid to the reciprocity and mutuality of solidarity would require disentangling a web of deep-set and seemingly immutable policies and practices. Storytelling, as a potent discursive force in shaping our perception of the world, can play a vital role in destabilising these views and the power asymmetries that characterise these orientations. Whereas some stories and myths establish and entrench dominant perspectives—maintaining and validating the way things are—others imagine alternative possibilities that reach beyond the given. In moving beyond the stories of damage, resilience, and heroism that characterise humanitarian aid, how might speculative storytelling based in solidarity play a role in initiating change and generating futures based in justice and belonging?

Haegue Yang’s Coordinates of Speculative Solidarity, from which this essay takes its title, understands extreme climate events not only as forces that fracture, but also as those that bind. This large-scale, digital collage, comprised of satellite photos, storm-tracking symbols, and palm leaves, maps the chaos of severe weather activity and explores how this, in necessitating alliances and interdependence, can prompt unusual forms of belonging and community. Crisis situations often create estuaries of concentrated and diverse stranger-based accumulations of people, and this heterogeneity along with the temporariness of emergencies, can both challenge and foster the formation of solidaristic relationships. In Greek, the term krisis (or κρίσις) marks the turning point in a disease resulting in either recovery or death. This inflection point provides the occasion for change where possibilities previously overlooked or occluded, might emerge. In upending taken-for-granted systems, crises rupture temporal continuity and our ideas of what is possible. These situations ask for something to be done. Responses aiming to alleviate the effects of crises range from help to mutual aid, and although these varying responses seem to have shared goals, they mark the difference between stasis and change, between triage and transformation. Crisis, as anthropologist Janet Roitman notes, is a narrative device that allows us to ask some questions while it forecloses others.

We are much more inclined to link crises to suffering than to solidarity. When witnessing suffering, we feel impelled to act swiftly to quickly alleviate distress. As the political theorist Hannah Arendt argues, this response, driven by compassion, addresses the immediacy of the situation but does nothing to alter the underlying forces.^[1] Compassion, she points out, is a sentiment, while solidarity is grounded in reason. Whereas solidaristic relationships have sights set on an imaginative horizon of creating a different future, relations built on compassion obscure a view of transformation. With compassion, people exercise care, but they do not engage the wearisome processes of persuasion, negotiation, and compromise which are essential processes of political change. Hierarchies remain and divides deepen. Framed as ‘misfortune,’ we avoid reckoning with root causes. Those who suffer are seen as unlucky while those not affected feel compassion (or its perversion, pity) for those who are. Pity deprives people of their public, political identity. It is only out of solidarity, that communities of interest can be deliberately and dispassionately established so they can meet as equals. Helping, in contrast to solidarity, does little to alter the status quo or to make significant changes to the ways in which power and agency are distributed on a structural level. As social scientist, physician, and former Vice President of Doctors without Borders Didier Fassin succinctly puts it: “the politics of compassion is a politics of inequality” where “domination is transformed into misfortune, injustice is articulated as suffering, violence is expressed in terms of trauma.”^[2]

Beyond Empathy                                                                                                          

Western culture commonly invites the ‘lucky’ to imagine and experience the suffering of ‘others’ through the use of empathetic technologies. That participation, in itself, can lead to action and social change is a widely held notion in design, humanitarian aid, and broader cultural platforms and there has been a proliferation of participatory activities that simulate crises. In Davos at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting, Refugee Run: A Day in the Life of a Refugee, one of the most popular events at the summit, simulates the experience of living in a refugee camp. Organised by the Crossroads Foundation, this exercise provides an embodied and immersive “x-perience” of daily life in a camp for displaced persons. The foundation’s website promotes the activity as a way for world and industry leaders to develop empathy (ignoring the ways in which they may be potentially  complicit in creating crises): “Participants face simulated attacks, mine fields…hunger, illness, lack of education, corruption and uncertain shelter or safety. Participants may also be marched under guard, subjected to ambush and, ultimately, offered a chance of re-settlement where they must re-build their lives.” Actors in military costumes storm the room while elite CEOs and executives cower on the floor, reacting to an experience they are unlikely to ever encounter in their daily lives.

These simulations leverage role play as a tactic in understanding the plight of the misfortunate, asking participants to occupy the status of the other. Simulating the experience of a refugee camp, the journeys and arrivals of displaced people, and militarised challenges to citizenship and belonging is a surprisingly common motif. Although well-intentioned efforts that aim to generate empathy, it is absurd to think that the persistent uncertainty, loss, and fear that accompany displacement could be captured or conveyed through these activities. Even if these efforts succeed in generating feelings of empathy, what sorts of relations emerge from this emotion? Can empathy move us from caring about, as a sentiment, to caring for, as action? Can it move us to a position of caring with, where we act together to address the ways in which we are all implicated in the complex issues that more deeply entrench systemic inequities?

In these cultural projects, the lives of actual people are typically flattened and assigned a generalised profile that cannot provide the basis for solidarity or meaningful association.The rhetoric that aid and protection help rebuild lives shattered by unfortunate circumstances fails to acknowledge how this form of support also reduces the unique complexities of people’s lives. This might be dismissed as unimportant in emergency relief contexts, yet it is in these settings where people most need to be seen and heard and recognised. The erasure of complex personhood is a byproduct of humanitarian aid—something that holds true for both those who provide and those who receive aid. While beneficiaries are often reduced to their suffering, stripped of their public and political identity, and positioned as noble sufferers, the humanitarian, as a delegate, is elevated to the position of an oracle or hero. This dynamic involves a transfer of power, establishing a relationship of reliance. As sociologist Pierre Bourdieu notes, “the more people are dispossessed…the more they are constrained and inclined to put themselves into the hands of representatives in order to have a political voice.”^[3] A delegate or representative is often necessary for a group to articulate its position—yet speaking in place of someone always involves symbolic violence, no matter how elegantly this is exercised. Speaking on behalf of others is a flawed theory of change that maintains the status quo and acts as a barrier to transforming underlying conditions.

Complexities of Care

Recent calls to put care at the centre of life ask us to “acknowledge the challenges of our shared dependence as human beings—as well as our vulnerability and irreducible differences.”^[4] Care, depending on how it is understood and enacted, operates on a spectrum and can be an expression of compassion, an act of solidarity, or something in between. For example, the anthropologist Miriam Ticktin shows how regimes of care demand that migrants and displaced people foreground their suffering in order to be heard, becoming “casualties of care,”^[5] subject to paternalistic forms of protection. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, unpacks the varying dimensions of care as moral obligation, as maintenance work, as a tool of oppression, and as vital politics, noting: “To care can feel good; it can also feel awful. It can do good; it can oppress. Its essential character to humans and countless living beings makes it all the more susceptible to convey control.”^[6] Feminist thinkers Joan Tronto and Bernice Fisher, characterise caring “as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’…[as] a complex, life sustaining web.” In this understanding, our inevitable interdependency, as a condition of living together, is simply a fact—something that cannot be quantified or denied. It would be impossible to evaluate (although surely people have tried) how much we need other beings, whether human or nonhuman. This notion of care departs from compassionate forms of caring about and from aid-based models of caring for, in favour of the mutuality of caring with.

Barriers to Change in a Shifting Landscape

In actionable terms, this shift in prepositions from caring for to caring with, is not easily accomplished. In the context of humanitarian aid, the barriers to change are formidable. Meaningful and deep transformation jeopardises the very existence of humanitarian organizations since aid is contingent on a relationship of inequity. Hierarchical power permeates all scales of aid organizations and the labour of socially reproducing this unequal structure is embedded in aid work itself. This is evidenced, for example, when aid organizations celebrate their longevity. The perversity of this is only recently being recognised–notably in an op ed from UNHCR’s High Commissioner, Filippo Grandi where at the close of 2020, on the 70th anniversary of the organization, he challenged the international community to put him out of a job: “Make it your goal to build a world in which there is truly no need for a UN refugee agency because nobody is compelled to flee.” In another example, the World Humanitarian Summit called on aid organizations to: “recognise that affected people are the central actors in their own survival and recovery, and put them at the heart of humanitarian action. This requires a fundamental change in the humanitarian enterprise, from one driven by the impulses of charity to one driven by the imperative of solidarity.”

Yet, in spite of these recent outliers, shifting the existing culture and power asymmetries appears insurmountable. With an organizational culture that is resistant to change), efforts for transformation are met with incrementalism at best. Although the humanitarian sector may easily embrace new technologies and tools, these forms of innovation leave the underlying infrastructure intact, and avoid challenging the entrenched structures and assumptions upon which aid operates. Perhaps the most innovative path would be to address these structural issues and commit to their repair.

Imagining and Forging Solidarity

In Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown positions the imagination as one of the spoils of colonialism where the few imagine futures for all. This results from exclusionary practices and reflects broader social inequities where some groups are not afforded the autonomy, time, or agency to contribute to collective imaginaries. In avoiding difficult but rewarding negotiations across difference—those that address deep seated and taken-for-granted hierarchies—we miss opportunities to connect around shared interests, not just in struggle but also in ways that are joyous.

We imagine that connection across differences is more difficult than relating to those we perceive as similar to ourselves, seeing the world through the lenses of “here” and “there,” “us” and “them.” Our inability to imagine a common horizon of action also involves a question of scale. Two dominant tendencies, according to Jodi Dean, obscure our capacity to engage in struggle for a common project: survivors and systems. In the first, individuals struggle to survive, fighting unassisted against the odds. Based on the values of resilience and self-reliance, people become mired in the pain and trauma of their struggles. Fighting for their individual survival, they are unable to grasp or transform the conditions in which they find themselves. In the second, the vast and complex nature of systems leaves people overwhelmed and unable to act as they lose sight of the local and the specific. Dean poses solidarity as a middle ground enabling us to recognise the necessity of interdependence in responding to situations that would seem daunting if faced alone.

To what degree are humanitarian aid workers able to create solidarity with the groups with whom they collaborate? Professional humanitarians define their work in terms of service to “beneficiaries”, while solidarians are guided by egalitarian and anti-hierarchical principles. In contrast to bureaucratic frameworks, those invested in solidarity emphasise (and importantly, practice) modes of collective association and recognition based in reciprocity. Whereas one model uses the language of suffering, the other uses that of liberation. On the one hand, practising solidarity—given its incompatibility—would necessitate the very demise of aid organizations. While on the other hand, power-sharing, collaboration, and distributed forms of collective agency are already active in these spaces as small-scale, sporadic, and disobedient alternatives to hierarchical social relations and Western styled humanism. These situations might be understood as what cultural theorist Raymond Williams calls “structures of feeling”—those rhythms and sentiments that hover at the edge of semantic availability. Having not yet realised their social character, they are positioned at junctures where society experiences changes in presence.

Solidarity has a speculative character and is fundamentally a horizontal activity with its focus on liberation, justice, and the creative processes of world- and future-building—projects that are never complete. The horizon is always present in the landscape, reminding us that there are things beyond what is visible from a particular location. As a coordinate central to perspective and orientation, the horizon is vital to successful navigation. As we move toward the horizon it remains “over there,” showing us that there are limits to what we can know in advance. However, rather than frustrating our efforts, horizons represent possibilities.

Speculative, Solidarian Storytelling

We speak very casually and confidently about humanitarianism, borders, nations, and so on as if they have always existed, and we imagine these structures will endure. This is a story we have been told. We make this durable, mythical even, in its regular retelling. Like any social construction, it takes on a material and enduring quality the more it is accepted as something real and unchangeable. How might we reimagine stories of stasis as those of transformation and metamorphosis by asking what else is possible? What do future stories of mutuality, interdependence, and belonging look like?

Speculative and visionary fiction offer alternatives to stories of dependency and structural vulnerability. In finding that precarious balance between hubris and humility, these modes, according to Walidah Imarisha, “imagine paths to creating more just futures.” In these stories, change is understood as relational, and transformation is led by those who have been marginalised, living at the intersections of identities and oppressions. In posing alternatives to how we live now, these stories, which centre people and are often communally generated, allow us to see, sense, and explore a world beyond that which is given. These articulations collectively practice and propose justice-based futures, and visionary fiction marks a sharp departure from the dominant Western template of the hero’s journey.

Monomythic narratives of the hero show us a path to inner transformation that does not necessarily involve (deep) social change. In this familiar trope, we follow the emotional, psychological, and physical journey of an individual who is called to leave their ordinary life to embark on a high stakes adventure. After some initial resistance and in spite of the risks involved, the hero eventually sets out on the journey, leaving home and the known. Although a relatively solitary endeavour, the hero normally encounters a mentor who assists in acquiring the necessary confidence, knowledge, and skills. Facing a series of tests with no possibility of turning back, the protagonist engages allies and enemies oscillating between failure and success. He (and although this might not be a “he,” it most often is) eventually triumphs and is reborn with a special wisdom and mastery of both the ordinary and special worlds. Upon the return home, he is welcomed as a victorious hero who has transcended to a higher plane.

The hero’s journey is such a common and familiar trope that we rarely question its logic. We identify with the alienation felt by the hero—estrangement from the self, from others, from nature, from the agency needed to change the world. We embrace the notion that suffering leads to redemption and personal resilience marks the path to expertise. The values embedded in this mode of storytelling mesh perfectly with the rhetoric of perseverance and individualism that characterise the bootstrap ideologies of capitalism and the paternalism and saviourism of colonialism. Individual change as a path to salvation confers deservingness. Although touted as universal, the monomythic hero’s journey is culturally specific, deeply rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition. In the hero’s journey, precarity, vulnerability, fragility, and frailty are understood as individual shortcomings—something to remedy independently. Principles derived from the hero’s journey are evident in a range of fields from social work to urban planning to insurance to humanitarianism. In particular, there has been a growing preoccupation with resilience, a ‘virtue’ underscored in the hero’s journey. Resilience models ask individuals to bear the burden in adapting to stress, crisis, and adversity. In addressing the symptoms rather than underlying causes, resilience preserves the conditions that create hardship. In its reverence of personal grit and fortitude, resilience valorises individual achievement, pliability, expertise, and authority rather than collective efforts to institute structural change.

While hero narratives chart the conquest of adversity, damage narratives fixate on harm and injury as a way of achieving reparation. Eve Tuck, in “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” points to the oppression inherent in narratives based in deficit models that only document pain and suffering.^[7] Singularly defining communities based on their distress pathologises and further inflicts injury, and according to Tuck: “Native communities, poor communities, communities of colour, and disenfranchised communities tolerate this…because there is an implicit and sometimes explicit assurance that stories of damage pay off in material, sovereign, and political wins.” In being reduced to victims, the subjects of these stories are diminished and objectified. They bear the burden of testimony with their lives reduced to determinant power relations. Tuck proposes a desire-based framework as an antidote to shift the focus away from damage to acknowledge the “complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives…so that people are seen as more than broken and conquered.” Incomplete stories that underscore only pain and damage are, Tuck asserts, acts of aggression. Desire-based narratives focus on what Gerald Vizenor calls “survivance” which involves “active resistance and repudiation of dominance, obtrusive themes of tragedy, nihilism, and victimry.”^[8] Whereas stories fixed on damage truncate the richness of actual lives and their futures, those based in desire generate agency and the conditions for speculating and dreaming.

By focusing on oppression and dispossession, stories that centre resilience and damage socialise people to act as either victims or as “privileged subjects who can afford to care about what is done to others, thus reproducing the radical difference between them, rather than as cocitizens who care for the common world they share.”^[9] Ariella Aïsha Azoulay highlights the necessity of unlearning imperialism to move beyond helping and aid, “understanding that what was taken by the unstoppable imperial movement, and held as if naturally owned by Western institutions, cannot be parsimoniously redistributed through charity, educational uplift, or humanitarian relief.” Without repairing the profound and lasting effects of imperialism, she argues, there is no possibility of realising futures based in justice.

Like Azoulay, Ursula LeGuin understands the power of stories as forces active in reevaluating the past so we can build worlds and futures based in mutual care. Lived experiences are dense and complicated, with pasts, presents, and futures weaving complex patterns. LeGuin begins with the premise that our first cultural artifacts were containers and she celebrates “the carrier bag theory of fiction,” as an approach that “cannot be characterised either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.” These are stories that are “full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions, full of…missions that fail, and people who don’t understand.” LeGuin offers a mode of storytelling focused on people going about their daily lives rather than those featuring heroes. Stories with heroes might be more gripping than the everyday experiences and negotiations that constitute the bulk of people’s lives, yet small quotidian actions provide the foundation for solidarity. The carrier bag theory has the capacity to encompass multiple worldviews simultaneously and can incorporate both human and nonhuman protagonists as significant actors.

In these stories, relationships are established that extend beyond kith and kin, leaving little room for saviours or victims. Grounded in human culture, people understand the necessity and delight of interdependence—a sort of collective effervescence where we desire to belong and enjoy welcoming others. The alien kinship and xeno-hospitality that characterise LeGuin’s fiction propose convivial futures. In pointing to the likelihood that the first objects humans designed were those for carrying, LeGuin speaks to the affordances of sharing and caring. With the capacity to carry things—from babies to seeds to water to curious and beautiful objects—people develop the ability to create futures that are interdependent and robust. In being able to carry things, we can collect more than we alone need so that we can share with others. Through sharing, we build and strengthen social bonds. Robin Wall Kimmerer extends this notion in her exploration of the ethic of reciprocity where nature teaches us how to share rather than accumulate. As a biologist and chronicler of North American indigenous stories, Kimmerer highlights how the natural world can teach us about mutual aid, recovery, and restoration. Through storytelling, she urges us to confront the dominance of systems that frame our world according to scarcity, instead focusing on abundance and “restorative reciprocity,” understanding that “all flourishing is mutual.”

What other forms of storytelling can guide us in recognising our interdependence, shifting power dynamics and fostering belonging? The discursive and performative power of stories can help in overcoming obstacles to collaboration, cultivating models of action that rearrange the coordinates that frame our understandings of the world—in its past, present, and future forms. Solidarian storytelling prioritises mutuality and justice over empathy and aid. Rather than maintaining existing conditions and their inherent power dynamics, stories of solidarity seek transformation through conviviality. This is something particularly salient in the realm of humanitarian aid where heroic myths, damage narratives, and tales of resilience dominate the discourse.

***

Strivings and failures shape the stories we tell. What we recall has as much to do with the terrible things we hope to avoid as with the good life for which we yearn. But when does one decide to stop looking to the past and instead conceive of a new order? When is it time to dream of another country or to embrace other strangers as allies or to make an opening, an overture, where there is none? When is it clear that the old life is over, a new one has begun, and there is no looking back? From the holding cell was it possible to see beyond the end of the world and to imagine living and breathing again?

Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route

Only when home has vanished and humanity is no longer territorialised, only then, there will be a chance for humanity.  Shahram Khosravi ‘Illegal’ Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders

This is the time to be unrealistic in our demands for change. We are told repeatedly we need to be realistic, but that is just another method of social control. We are told true liberation is an impossible dream by the powers that be, over and over again, because us believing that it is an impossible dream is the only thing between here and the new, just futures we want.  Walidah Imarisha

[1]  Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. 1963. Penguin Random House.

[2]  Fassin, Didier. Humanitarian Reason: A moral history of the present. 2011. University of California Press.

[3]  Bourdieu, Pierre. La délégation et le fétichisme politique. 1984. Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 52-53.

[4] The Care Collective. The Care Manifesto: The politics of interdependence. 2020. Verso Books.

[5] Ticktin, Mariam I. Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France. 2011. University of California Press.

[6] Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. 2017. University of Minnesota Press.

[7]  Tuck, Eve. Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities. 2009.

[8] Vizenor, Gerald. Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance. 2009. University of Nebraska Press.

[9] Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. 2019. Verso Books.

This page is part of UNHCR’s Project Unsung collection and portfolio. Project Unsung is a speculative storytelling project that brings together creative collaborators from around the world to help reimagine the humanitarian sector. To discover move about the initiative and other contributions in the collection, you can go to the project website here.

The post Coordinates of Speculative Solidarity appeared first on UNHCR Innovation.

By Ariana Monteiro

Brazilian cliché, Ariana Monteiro loves samba, soccer, and Carnaval. Her goal is to confuse and deconstruct certainties about emergent technologies, social justice, and human rights through future thinking methodologies. While also showcasing cultures, creativity, and bits of knowledge produced in the Global South.

From my wanderings through the world, I had the opportunity to learn how life, death, and the meaning of existence vary immensely across cultures, borders, and communities. Yet, this is something that I could only understand while enjoying the journey in between, without any preconceived destination or expectations. Above all, I came to this understanding by recognizing and honoring the gift of the stories I was told in the many encounters along the way. But before we proceed, please keep in mind that,  as I have said, many stories explain the world differently. Mine is just another one.  

The perpetual world-ending state

The rhythm of modern life has made us believe that qualities such as abstractness, sensibility, and spontaneity have no place in scientific knowledge. In order to thrive amid crises and emergencies, we are obliged to set ourselves apart from abstractions and any thought process that diverges from the norm. One can either embody the norm or become the ‘Other’^[1] – whose ways of knowing and being are seen as unfit for modern society. As a result, instead of embracing diverse thinking spectrums that might offer a more comfortable and enjoyable journey in life, we’re always searching for ways to survive apocalyptic scenarios and fantasies in which suffering is the standard rather than the exception. Let me explain.

At The End of the Cognitive Empire^[2], Boaventura de Sousa Santos states that the world has been living in a permanent state of crisis. The problem that arises is that while an occasional crisis demands explanations and problem-solving, a permanent crisis explains and justifies the current state of affairs as being the only possible one, even if it means inflicting the most shameful and unjust forms of human suffering. Amid the scenario of permanent crisis, people are led to live and act in despair, but not to think and act critically upon the true root of systemic problems.

The science and the technologies sanctioned by western political thought have monopolized our social imaginary. It turns out that innovations have become constrained by metrics of economic profit as opposed to emancipatory practices for the common good. Somehow, the future has been co-opted by the state of despair that precedes disasters, and innovators from Silicon Valley seek ways to profit from this generalized anticipatory anxiety. For instance, think about the billionaire space race^[3] led by Elon Musk.

For this select group of tech-billionaires, Earth is doomed. Consequently, humanity’s only chance of survival is to colonize the orbit of outer space. This is the perfect example of how empathy and awareness are left out of the development discourse. The choice of perpetuating a term such as colonization that echoes trauma and violence is never an innocent one. Actually, it’s a choice that exposes how the white savior complex^[4] is being reimagined and updated to fit the contemporary world through a techno-colonialist mindset.

Now, more than ever, society is in the midst of an extremely urgent conversation about how we can benefit from better societal outcomes that truly tackle the contemporary turbulences of climate change, and the political, economic, and social crises in the context of globalization. Yet, to succeed, it’s imperative to stop any ongoing attempt to colonize the future through one size fits all solutions. Especially considering that we’re still in the present-day, struggling to solve the disastrous effects of colonization in history, such as: cultural alienation, diminished self-esteem, confusion regarding ethnic and racial identity, inequities, xenophobia, and discrimination. The problem is: how can we push for more desirable futures instead of merely replicating the inequalities of the past?   

What I propose here is to challenge the horizon of possibilities of humanitarian work and the very basis of the eurocentric development discourse by promoting what Shiv Visvanathan calls Cognitive Justice^[5]. Through this lens, knowledge co-exists in different forms and has its place in a larger ecology. Each form of knowledge embodies a form of life, and each form of life has its own wisdom, value, epistemology, and cosmology. Recognizing this diversity implies challenging the interpretation of humanitarian science as universal, exclusive, and able to comprehend all that can be understood, while assuming that no form is superior to another. It also implies that people are not objects to be managed through aid mechanisms.

Insofar as the need and relevance of humanitarian agencies’ work are undeniable, it is urgent to recognize some cultural deficits within aid organizations, such as disaster responses that are “not always informed by local realities.” Instead, operations often elaborate plans “about people experiencing risk, rather than by, with and for them”^[6]. Is it the creation of the othering all over again through practice and discourse?  Just think about how in the current global context of economic and political uncertainty, migrants and refugees are usually portrayed in the media^[7]. On one side lies dominant insider groups such as governments, elite donors and aid organizations^[8]. In opposition, them, the outsiders, strangers trying to cross the borders of the status quo^[9].

In the following sections of this essay, aiming to avoid reproducing the pattern of uneven progress of the past^[10], I invite you to dive into history. Navigate the beautiful plurality of the world. Imagine different development practices^[11] collectively. And maybe, even doubt universalizing principles of our institutions^[12]. Is humanitarian action really impartial, neutral, and independent? Why or why not? How might they do better and creatively reimagine their purpose? There are no easy solutions. Nonetheless, humanitarian organizations have the opportunity to experiment with innovative models of hybrid governance by respecting communities’ agency and right to self-determination ^[13]. While simultaneously addressing questions of stereotypical discourses and the creation of otherness in knowledge production, “this means that we do not need alternatives so much as we need an alternative thinking of alternatives.”[14]

How many times has your world ended?

There is something simply magical about watching the sunset. During one of these moments, while admiring the sun sinking over the Lompoul Desert in Senegal, my friend Abdoulaye explained how Senegalese society has its root in animist traditions. Drawing in the sand, he said, “Senegal is part Muslim, part Christian, but we were all Animists prior to that,” finishing a circle in the sand. Nowadays, only a small percentage of Senegalese consider themselves animists, yet there are still countless animist practices^[15], customs, and symbols (such as talismans for spiritual protection) in everyday life. And he continued “I like to see myself as a Baye Fall, it’s a way of life, a philosophy that comes from Senegal’s Sufi Islam^[16]. We practice a different type of Islam, one that goes beyond the Sharia. We took the most important part of it, and we blend that with ancient animist traditions through acts of devotion for the welfare of our brothers and sisters, humans and non-humans alike.”

For Abdoulaye, all things have a soul, and ancestral gods, guides, and deities can be found anywhere, from our dreams to the soil of our lands. Thus, traditional animist healers^[17] and holy leaders are vital figures to safeguard nature^[18] and to maintain healthy communities. By the time the sun was almost setting, I told him how my great-grandmother was a traditional healer of her community too. I have many memories of visiting her and joining a line in her garden with other children to wait my turn to be treated by the touch of her plants^[19] amid ritualist gestures and recited prayers. These women are known as Benzedeiras and hold an important place in their communities^[20]. This form of healing respects a family tradition passed on from generation to generation, from mouth to memory. When she passed away my mother inherited the responsibility of continuing her grandmother’s legacy.

I was raised in a typical Brazilian household, which means a very religious one. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t the type of religiousness that demanded attention to sacred scriptures. Rather, it was based upon elders’ storytelling, botanical knowledge^[21], superstitions, spells, blackmailing blessings, spiritual surgeries, chit-chat with the dead, and so on. Just like in many others, in my family home, it was possible to find huge crucifixes, Jesus imagery, monstrous figureheads, plant charms against evil, clay pots with coarse salt. On New Year’s Eve, families wear white clothes, chew seven pomegranate seeds at the stroke of midnight, and right after that, head straight to the beach, to jump over seven waves, whilst throwing flowers and floating candles into the sea as offerings to the deity Yemọjá^[22].

Yemọjá is omnipresent in the islands and coastal areas of Cuba, Haiti, and Brazil, brought across the ocean by the Yoruba people^[23] from western Africa who were kidnapped and enslaved during the European colonization of the Americas. On this side of the Atlantic, Europeans imposed their politics and religion on everyone else. For this reason, enforced cultural assimilation became paramount. Gradually enslaved communities, both Amerindian and African ethnic groups were not only familiar with the Catholic context, but deprived of their fundamental rights, they also became closer to each other due to the similarities of their own spiritual traditions. The interlocking oppression produced by slavery, colonialism, caused the formation of new belief systems such as Umbanda, Candomble, Santeria, and Voodoo, and the religious synthesis formed a path to survival, under the guise of Catholic figures.

It was during my conversation with Abdoulaye that I finally understood the religious particularity of my family and the reasons for its uniqueness. Just as his ancestors, my great-grandmother, and those who came before her bonded what made sense to them from the Roman Catholic sensibilities and Yoruba forms of religion to indigenous cosmologies. This created a tripartite expression that keeps their ancestral practices alive in the Americas. The hybridization of different forms of knowledge channeled through spirituality was vital to overcoming what Achile Mbembe^[24] describes as the loss of rights over their bodies, the loss of political status, and above all the end of their worlds. Therefore, religion becomes a practice of resistance to the terrors of colonization and the lack of belonging to a new world imposed on them.

Death, renewal, and the afterlife

“World-endings have happened so many times before, marking the margins of the world like scars, but ‘when you feel the sky is getting too low, all you have to do is to push it back and breathe” Krenak,in Ideas to Postpone the End of the World.

For many communities across the Global South who suffered the ills of colonialism, existence became a form of death-in-life. Therefore, the complete death of the material or physical body also turned into an objective to be not only achieved but celebrated. This is the case in the yearly Festival of the Good Death at the Brazilian town of Cachoeira^[25]. By 1878, the Cachoeira’s population was 7,000, from this total 2,000 were enslaved people. The festival was conceived by a sisterhood for female African slaves and former slaves as a celebration devoted to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. Yet, just beneath the surface of the good death of Mary lies major social and political subtexts. Back then, the role of the confraternity was to offer a slavery-free death to the enslaved community of the town either by helping them escape, by financing the release from slavery, or paying for decent funerals for its members. Nowadays the Festival celebrates ancestrality and the coexistence of the hybridized beliefs of Brazilian culture. Over three days, the women of the sisterhood hold mass and processions enacting Mary’s death. It is a time of mourning as well as a celebration of Mary’s ascension into heaven, upon which she becomes Our Lady of Glory, in an open feast and festivities worshiping Orishás and Deities through ritual dancing and Rodas de Samba^[26].

In order to survive, entire communities had to adapt their worldviews, renewing their beliefs and cosmologies to embody the historical events that crushed their worlds apart and universalized the European lifestyle. And they keep doing this every time their world bears the risk of ending again. According to the Yanomami people, the largest relatively isolated indigenous nation in South America distributed across both sides of the border between Brazil and Venezuela, the sky could fall any time – and it wouldn’t be the first time. In this society, the Shamans occupy a central role in maintaining the web of life’s balance on Earth and safeguarding the health and well-being of all things, thus it’s their duty to protect the sky (that we all share) from falling above us.

As stated before, one of the central aspects of western political thought is the instrumentalization of nature and even human relations in many situations leading to the separation between society-culture and nature as distinct entities.  The anthropocentric view of nature has no place in Yanomami culture.  Instead, humans are just spiritual beings embedded in the social relations of nature. Everything is interdependent and eco-dependent. Until the end of the 19th century, the Yanomami only had contact with other neighboring indigenous groups. In the 20th century, the white people arrived as ghosts coming from their dwelling place on the shores of the sky. They come in the form of missionaries, prospectors, and road workers bringing with them ideas of good and evil, violence, epidemics, and destruction amid loud cracks in the sky’s chest. The white people ignore the shamans’ work to protect the earth, one last time. They eat the forest, throw up merchandise and flee to the city. Nonetheless, the Yanomami shaman and Brazilian Academy of Sciences Fellow, Davi Kopenawa have warned us all with a prophecy “If you destroy the forest all the shamans die, the sky will break apart for good, white people will not be spared any more than we will. That is why, for us, what the white people call ‘future’ is to protect the sky from the xawara epidemic fumes to keep it healthy and strongly fastened above us.” ^[27]

Port-mortem encounters, UNHCR, and the state of emergency response

 I have struggled with my cultural identity for as long as I can remember. It required a long journey to understand the destructive influence of collective trauma and face the supposed universal logic of modernity as an exception. It was only through the encounter with many other dead worlds, that I could see myself clearer and understand that my sense of belonging is ‘settled in the movement’ of death and renewal. In some weird way, UNHCR stands in the same position as I, settled between world-endings and beginnings, but constrained by the limits of the cartesian rationale, labeled worldviews, and prefabricated plans.

It is time now to change the content and the terms of the conversation.  Up to this point and even after centuries of exploitation, in many communities spread across the world, the nature-culture cleavage does not make any sense. By transcending the cosmovision of the human as the center of all that exists, Amerindian cosmologies of Suma Qamaña, Swaraj in India, or even Ubuntu in South Africa are forms of knowledge as logical or rational as European thought but inspired by the ideas of commons, reciprocity, and solidarity. Humanitarian organizations must be attentive to the work being done by these populations and their organizations, to achieve sustainable economies, to learn, and to innovate.

In order to co-create better futures and extend the reach of aid, we must nurture awareness of the past and recognize the transformative capacity of deploying diverse thinking spectrums within action plans. And above all overcome the urge to innovate on behalf of others. Instead of being the saviors, humanitarian agencies can collaborate with civil society actors and act to provide communities with resources and means that allow them to be the agents of their own futures and adapt to systemic challenges on their terms.

Many lands are much more than soil; they can be intrinsically linked to identities, ways of living, values, culture, traditions, and histories. That is the case of the Nova Enseada community in Brazil, located amid the estuary and the sea. After years, the impact of human-related activities alongside the sea’s tidal force changed the coastal landscape and jeopardized this community’s existence by splitting their land in two and forcing a relocation. Due to the nature of the emergency that required an immediate response, fast solutions were found that failed to take the community’s connectedness with their land into consideration. The options were integration with a different society or relocation to the urban area.

Nonetheless, both options meant the elimination of their culture and were rejected by its “beneficiaries”. The community then began to seek ways to pursue a self-managed relocation model,  focusing on finding a place with similar natural conditions and as close as possible to their original territory. During this process, they built their own network connected with different actors and organizations to defend their rights and support their cause. One of the encounters brought by these emergent connections came later with the South American Network for Environmental Migrations (RESAMA)^[28]. This independent organization began to mobilize human and technological resources to grant visibility, support, and effective protection to communities at risk of displacement and/or trapped in vulnerable situations, by connecting the knowledge and expertise of affected communities to inform durable and culturally sensitive plans to cope with the effects of climate change^[29].

The Nova Enseada community case is surely a clear  example of how the adoption of general aid blueprints is not suitable for the local context they are intended to address.  But above all, it’s a case that calls for meaningful local participation in disaster studies. Humanitarian organizations must rely on affected communities’ knowledge to find contextually appropriate responses and co-create multidimensional plans at the local level. Otherwise, such organizations risk seeing their relevance being questioned in the future. This can happen mainly due to the maintenance of outdated structures and procedures that have for a while now been blamed for “disempowering local perspectives by framing local populations’ way of life as the vulnerable exotic other”^[30].

 How do we move forward from here? First, recognizing the flaws of the humanitarian system is not enough. Effective action to fix the system, its everyday habits, and ways of working is what matters most, and this can be achieved by addressing the cultural deficits between international organizations engaged in disaster risk reduction and communities at risk. One major avenue is stimulating awareness within the organization about the value of uncertainty to life’s renewal on Earth. The answer to the current challenges might be shifting the attention to marginalized narratives while seeking alternatives to promote cognitive justice^[31].

What can we learn from others? How can we understand our various realities as part of bigger and interconnected ecology? How can organizations overcome pragmatism in aid and properly ground wellbeing at the very heart of operations? Curiosity has its own raison d’ȇtre  when we are trying to imagine a renewed world. In the years to come, these questions might lead to the new critical concepts and skills to build more inclusive and resilient futures. It’s time to unlock humanitarian innovation as the bridge that connects worlds that, despite their differences, share the same sky and the same hope for better times.

References:

[1] Staszak, JF. in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2018, https://www.unige.ch/sciences-societe/geo/files/3214/4464/7634/OtherOtherness.pdf

[2] Santos, B.S. in The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South, 2018, https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-end-of-the-cognitive-empire

[3] Worrall, S.Three Billionaires Are Racing to Space. Who Will Win? in National Geographic, 2018, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/three-billionaires-are-racing-to-space–who-will-win-

[4] Kiunguyu, K. #NoWhiteSaviours: The white saviour complex in  This is Africa, 2019, https://thisisafrica.me/politics-and-society/white-saviour-complex/

[5] Visvanathan, S. The search for cognitive justice, in Knowledge In Question: a symposium on interrogating knowledge and questioning science, 2009, https://www.india-seminar.com/2009/597/597_shiv_visvanathan.htm

[6] Gaillard et al., Power, Prestige & Forgotten Values: A Disaster Studies Manifesto, 2019, https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/power-prestige-forgotten-values-a-disaster

[7] Resende, F; Agra, F. Refuge and colonization of the future: borders built by words, in Comunicação e sociedade 38, 2020, http://journals.openedition.org/cs/4260

[8] Kramer, M. Are the Elite Hijacking Social Change? in Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2018, https://ssir.org/books/reviews/entry/are_the_elite_hijacking_social_change

[9] Baker, T. The othering of migrants has negative consequences for society at large in London School of Economics and Political Science, 2020, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2020/08/19/the-othering-of-migrants-has-negative-consequences-for-society-at-large/

[10] Crisp, J., ‘Primitive people’: the untold story of UNHCR’s historical engagement with Rohingya refugees, in The Humanitarian Practice Network, 2018, https://odihpn.org/magazine/primitive-people-the-untold-story-of-unhcrs-historical-engagement-with-rohingya-refugees/

[11] The Doing Development Differently manifesto in ODI, 2021, https://odi.org/en/about/our-work/doing-development-differently/

[12] Humanitarian principles, UNHCR, https://emergency.unhcr.org/entry/44765/humanitarian-principles

[13] Quintero, J. Residual Colonialism In The 21St Century in United Nations University, 2012, https://unu.edu/publications/articles/residual-colonialism-in-the-21st-century.html

[14] Santos, B.S. in The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South, 2018, https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-end-of-the-cognitive-empire

[15] Rosen, P. Out of this World: An Ethnographic Study of Mystics, Spirits, and Animist Practices in Senegal, Independent Study Project (ISP), 2013, https://digitalcollections.sit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2536&context=isp_collection

[16] Bobst, C. The Sufi Brotherhoods of Senegal in Photographic Museum of Humanity, 2014, https://phmuseum.com/CBobst/story/the-sufi-brotherhoods-of-senegal-599c33f73f

[17] McKinley, C., Treating the Spirit: An Ethnographic Portrait of Senegalese Animist Mental Health Practices and Practitioners in Dakar and the Surrounding Area, Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection, 2012 https://digitalcollections.sit.edu/isp_collection/1403

[18] Kimmerle, H. The world of spirits and the respect for nature: towards a new appreciation of animism in The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa, 2016, https://td-sa.net/index.php/td/article/view/277

[19] Benzedeira and baby in Youtube, 2018, https://youtu.be/yFjsUYq1dsg

[20] Assunção, Luiza Maria de, Querino, Rosimár Alves, & Rodrigues, Leiner Resende. Healing blessing in territories of the Family Health Strategy: perceptions of workers, users and healers, in Saúde em Debate, 44(126), 762-773. Epub November 16, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1590/0103-1104202012613

[21]Pagnocca, T.S., Zank, S. & Hanazaki, N. “The plants have axé”: investigating the use of plants in Afro-Brazilian religions of Santa Catarina Island. in J Ethnobiology Ethnomedicine 16, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1186/s13002-020-00372-6

[22] film by Vincent Moon & Priscilla Telmon, Petites Planètes produced by Fernanda Abreu, Feever Filmes, FESTA DE IEMANJÁ in Híbridos, the Spirits of Brazil, 2019, https://youtu.be/Kzj7vOxxtRU

[23] Yoruba people in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoruba_people

[24] Mbembe, A. , Necropolitics in Public Culture, Volume 15, Number 1, Winter 2003, https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/2695873/mod_resource/content/1/Mbembe_Necropolitics.pdf

[25]Chatfield-Taylor, J. Dance of Life To Honor Death, in The New York Times, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/22/travel/dance-of-life-to-honor-death.html

[26] Bruney, G.; Nathan, T., Breaking the Circlre: Women in Samba in WEPresent, 2019 https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/story/breaking-the-circle-tobias-nathan/

[27] Kopenawa & Albert, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, 2013, https://letrasindomitas.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/2013-davi-kopenawa-bruce-albert-alison-dundy-the-falling-sky_-words-of-a-yanomami-shaman-the-belknap-press-of-harvard-university-press.pdf

[28] To know more about their work access https://resama.net/  

[29] Giovanna Gini, Tatiana Mendonça Cardoso and Erika Pires Ramos, When the two seas met: preventive and self-managed relocation of the Nova Enseada community in Brazil in Forced Migration Review, 2020, https://www.fmreview.org/issue64/gini-mendoncacardoso-piresramos

[30] van Riet, G. The Nature–Culture Distinction in Disaster Studies: The Recent Petition for Reform as an Opportunity for New Thinking?. Int J Disaster Risk Sci, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1007/s13753-021-00329-7

[31] Jayawickrama, J., Humanitarian aid system is a continuation of the colonial project, in AlJazeera, 2018, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2018/2/24/humanitarian-aid-system-is-a-continuation-of-the-colonial-project

This page is part of UNHCR’s Project Unsung collection and portfolio. Project Unsung is a speculative storytelling project that brings together creative collaborators from around the world to help reimagine the humanitarian sector. To discover move about the initiative and other contributions in the collection, you can go to the project website here.

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