Technologies
An ORA Research Zine By Susan James, Jadele McPherson, and Jackél Agboola
Technology is more than the tools we build.
It is also the knowledge, relationships, and practices that sustain life.
Beyond the Machine: Rethinking Technology, Resilience, and Resistance
What if some of our most powerful technologies have existed for generations?
Through conversations with 10 ORA Fellows across Africa, India, and Latin America, this zine explores how communities are drawing on cultural, spiritual, ancestral, and digital technologies to navigate the polycrisis.
Facing environmental destruction, colonial violence, and the erasure of Indigenous knowledge, these communities turn to collective governance, ritual, storytelling, radio, art, and ecological knowledge as tools for survival and resistance.
Their work challenges dominant understandings of technology as a means of efficiency, extraction, and growth. Instead, technology emerges as a relational support structure, preserving memory, strengthening community, and making different futures possible.
— Susan James, Jadele McPherson, and Jackél Agboola
Our findings
Technologies for Collective Transformation
Technology as a Relational Support Structure
Technology extends beyond machines and digital innovation to include kinship systems, collective governance, ritual, and community practices. These longstanding structures sustain relationships, preserve knowledge, and support collective wellbeing. Rather than optimizing growth, they help stabilize and protect life.
Spiritual Technologies & Collective Memory
Ancestral practices, sacred rituals, and relationships with the natural world serve as living infrastructures of care and resistance. By honoring ancestors, preserving cultural memory, and restoring spiritual relationships disrupted by colonialism, communities protect ways of knowing and being that might otherwise be erased.
Art, Narrative & Witness as Resistance
Storytelling, theater, poetry, music, and radio are more than forms of cultural expression. They are technologies of survival and political action, preserving histories, mobilizing communities, and transforming experiences of violence into collective meaning. Through art, communities make resistance visible and imagine new possibilities.
Community Knowledge & Cultural Liberation
Indigenous and community-based knowledge systems are not alternatives to dominant frameworks, but complete and longstanding ways of understanding the world. By centering these ways of knowing, communities challenge colonial paradigms and reclaim the authority to define their own futures. Cultural transformation becomes a foundation for political change.
“When I lose my hope, I see around me forest and river.”
— Jacinta Kerketta, ORA Fellow