Arts & Culture

An ORA Research Zine By Urmi Dutta, Ireri Bernal, and Alisha Solomon

Art is never simply a depiction of what is.

It is an invitation into what can be.

Art as Infrastructure: What We Learned About Creativity and Social Change

This zine grows out of the work of organizers and ORA Fellows in the Global South who use arts and cultural work to transform conditions on the ground.

Facing climate collapse, authoritarianism, gendered and racialized violence, and everyday precarity — they create radio shows, community theaters, songs, zines, storytelling circles, rituals, kitchens, and classrooms.

Our research process was grounded in Pláticas, a conversational methodology rooted in Chicana feminist thought — honoring the insights, analyses, and wisdom that emerge from lived experiences of struggle and survival.

What appears in these pages is shaped by those dialogic encounters.

— Urmi Dutta, Ireri Bernal, and Alisha Solomon

Spanish version coming soon…

Our findings

Tools for Surviving
& Transforming the Polycrisis

Epistemic Justice

Treating grassroots frontliners — organizers, elders, youth, artists, healers — as holders and producers of critical knowledge. Centering their voices reshapes what counts as truth and what becomes policy and practice.

Political Education

A co-learning process that starts from lived experience, sharpens power analysis, and fosters collective action. It blends story circles, popular education tools, and action–reflection cycles — helping reveal root causes and levers for change.

Radical Joy

Pleasure, play, and celebration as political technologies that sustain people in long fights against injustice. Joy is not a break from struggle — it is how we keep going. The infrastructure for endurance and imagination.