This essay reflects on in-depth conversations with ten ORA fellows from varying regions in Africa, India, and Latin America, who work at the intersection of survivance (survival and resistance) and engage with a range of technologies to address ongoing elements of the polycrisis. We express our gratitude to each fellow for their generosity in taking the time to engage with us and for sharing photographs and artwork to add visual narrative to the project. Thank you to Mwongela Kamencu (Monaja) – Kenya, Agnes Aloo – Kenya, Prince Eze – Nigeria, Chandini Gagana – India, Jacinta Kerketta – India, Evaluna Valdivieso Segura – Chile, Natalia Roca – Argentina, Isapi Rua – Bolivia, Jeferson Panche Chocué – Colombia, and Orlando Huerta Ponce – Mexico.
—Susan James, Jadele McPherson, and Jackel Agboola
The fellows shared their unique multiple approaches to producing technologies and resilience, which include digital and social media, arts-based methods (Monaja), and narrative and journalistic reporting as forms of witnessing social injustice (Agnes Aloo). Fellows also draw on their own cultural epistemes to raise awareness of the polycrisis in relationship to sociopolitical and cultural conditions in each location. These difficult realities required the fellows to actively navigate pervasive violences, produced locally by the political and climate crises occurring at the state level.
Most communities where fellows reside rely on ancestral practices of veneration as living technologies that promote cultural and spiritual continuity and constitute a sentient ecology that encompasses all living beings. In this sense, fellows demonstrated the importance of techniques that synthesize Westernized and local land-based cultural paradigms.
Cross Regional Threads
The ORA fellows in the India region reveal two distinct yet resonant Indigenous responses to polycrisis, each rooted in community-grounded epistemologies that refuse extraction, hierarchy, and epistemic erasure. Both worldviews articulate “technology” as relational infrastructure: kinship systems, place-based memory, poetic narration, ritual governance, and grassroots organizational networks that aid in stabilizing life under pressure.
Both fellows come from marginal positionalities that contest dominant national narratives, via Dalit trans organizing in Karnataka and Adivasi land defense in Jharkhand. Yet, each insists on community knowledge as primary rather than derivative. Their work reframes resilience outside of neoliberal adaptation and strives towards collective continuity. For Dalit trans leader, writer, and performer, Chandini, sacred technologies are embodied in garana structures, ritual transition protocols, and theater as an epistemic insurgency. For poet, writer, journalist, and community builder, Jacinta Kerketta, technologies of continuity manifest in night schools, revived democratic Parha systems, poetic testimony, and forest-based cosmologies that resist extractivist logics of modernity. In both cases, relational systems of being precede the conditions produced through the state.
We have a gharana system in India… in each gharana we have a leader… like our mother… she going to decide any problem and give solution.” Before activist, I am also part of community. I believe my culture. I respect my culture. I follow my culture.” —Chandini
Jacinta frames the Parha system as a living democratic technology rooted in place, kinship, and collective deliberation. Unlike hierarchical modern governance, Parha creates community built on the values of relational accountability and ecological embeddedness. In addition, Parha revival resists extractive logics by centering decision-making within community, assemblages, memory, and territory, which in turn produces governance that is more life-sustaining than imposed models.
In our area, in Adivasi community, we have our own governance system… democratic governance system.” “…our democratic system, village system, is different from hierarchy-based system, which is modern.” —Jacinta Kerketta
Education as Counter-Colonial Technology
Both Chandini G. and Jacinta K. are correcting what modern systems erase, including sex–gender–identity workshops because curriculum erases trans complexity and night schools teaching what modern schools “don’t teach” about Adivasi philosophy.
“In the curriculum, only little information about transgender… we are going to break that framework. If we create a good environment, why we are going to leave school? We will continue education.” —Chandini
“I was teaching what modern schools don’t teach us about Adivasi people. We were talking about our own philosophy and culture… and about what our ancestors were struggling for. —Jacinta
Nature as an archive, healer and Source of Resilience
The Forest and rivers are active agents of resistance and renewal for both. Jacinta speaks to how nature heals the wounds inflicted by market hierarchies and sustains Adivasi relationality. She positions ecological connection as a deep source of epistemic clarity and collective endurance amid the mining and state encroachment.
Jacinta:
“Nature has healed us so much.”
Chandini: (ritual river milk offering):
“We take milk to the river… it represents freedom and renewal, hope.”
Language, access, and epistemic gatekeeping
For Chandini English is a barrier that has prevented her from applying to fellowships and from participating in formal networks. ORA becomes meaningful to her because it confers global legibility without requiring English language hegemony.
The ORA fellows are grappling with racial, gendered violence in the Andes region and throughout Latin America. The goal of the fellows’ work throughout the region has been to raise awareness and visibility around the gruesome acts that women are facing, which intersect with the exploitation of natural resources during major political shifts that impact the region. As a result, fellows had difficulty achieving legal and social justice for these victims. In response to these crises, the fellows embraced more artistic modes of storytelling and community arts activism to mobilize the outrage experienced by queer women and their families in the wake of these tragedies.
There is wide critique of extractivist practices: land, wind, solar power, fire, and water, and clear recognition of all living things animated with spirit. Honoring Pachamama is most important.
Ancestral knowledge: Pachamama and Land-based Autonomy
“Esta intervención también ha aportado a una desvinculación de la espiritualidad…(This intervention (extracting natural resources) has also supported a disconnect with spirituality…).“ —Isapi Rua, Guaraní Community Communicator and Environmental Advocate, Bolivia
With the realization that everything has a spirit, honoring these spirits (people, serpents, animals, plants, wind) is important to the everyday lives of the communities most impacted by extractivism and exploitation of natural resources. These elements threaten the cultural transmission of language, rituals, and customs that have defined Indigenous communities before Spanish colonialism.
Spirituality as a practice of remembering or creating social memory for the dead is also salient. Each community creatively honored the memories of victims who have died because of political brutality.
“Every time I pray, I pray to my saints, and they (the victims of sexual violence) are my saints. They are my own saints, like my own Santería. My own religion, where I keep her memory alive and where, when I ask the sky or wish for a good wish, I am sure they are protecting me too. I feel that a relationship has been established a little between that which is unspeakable, which we cannot explain, but which connects us with them…“ —Evaluna Valdivieso Segura, Theater Director, Performer, Educator, and Activist, Chile
Arts and sound as social practice
The fellows are using interdisciplinary arts to respond to climate and political crises in their regions. In Latin America, theater, sound art, and radio broadcasting are some of the creative methods that fellows are introducing to their communities. Each of these artistic practices has a community-based focus coupled with accessibility as problem-solving tools that everyday people can learn. For example, Isapi Rua learned to use radio broadcasting in Guaraní communities because her grandparents listened to the radio frequently when she was growing up. “Siempre recuerdo a mi abuela escuchando la radio, cocinando, escuchando a mi abuelo.” (I always remember my grandmother listening to the radio while she was cooking and listening to my grandfather.)
These creative modalities in South America also overlap with the fellows’ endeavors in disparate regions of Africa.
For example, fellows from Kenya and Nigeria suggest ways to navigate daily life amid sociopolitical and environmental instability. African fellows emphasized that resistance to the imposition of Westernization, the maintenance of cultural practices, and ways of knowing are critical to environmental and political crises. Facile movement between colonial and Indigenous ancestral paradigms resonates with the synthesized practices that fellows used in India and Latin America.
Kenyan multimedia journalist Agnes Aloo commented that the imbrication and undergirding of environmental crisis with local hostility, particularly against women and girls, was a concern in the regions where she works in Kenya. Agnes asserted journalism’s power as witness to gendered violence and discussed visual storytelling and video journalism as forms of resistance that produce increased community awareness about the violence.
Along with the challenges of telling stories about climate change, Agnes Aloo works with communities that do not rely solely on media; instead, they collect information and knowledge locally through community leaders.
Also in Kenya, historian, musician, and performing artist, Mwongela Kamencu (Monaja) notes the assault on traditional spirituality and ways of knowing and healing. As a result, there is ongoing resistance to the imposition of Christianity and continual reliance on traditional medicine, the arts, and relationship with God as part of community life. “Colonialism portrayed traditional healers as evil, devilish, and traditional spiritualities by extension” (Monaja). He also emphasizes the centrality of ancestral reverence and relationship, particularly for those who engaged in struggle, as beings with “spiritual agency.” Therefore, Monaja also stresses the importance of African spirituality as a decolonial tool, which he communicates through the arts.
In Nigeria’s Delta region, Development Studies scholar/activist Prince Eze described the confluence of extraction, corruption, and multinational corporate domination. He observed that progress in the region involves building community collaborations to achieve small improvements given the environmental crises.
In summary, this essay provides examples of the technological themes presented in the Zine. The complexities of these cultural practices are beyond the scope of this project phase, but we offer them as additional analysis to highlight the incredible dedication, commitment, and work of the fellows who joined us in conversation.
