Sayra van den Berg
“Through a series of creative co-creation workshop sessions, including visual reflection, music and theatre exercises, and artefact sharing, participants emphasised the importance of dignity-centred approaches within research and practice on displacement and harmonised around concepts of relationality, refusal and continuities as central features of such pathways to dignity”
In December, the Civil War Paths project co-hosted an impact workshop, together with Professor David Mwambari (KU Leuven, Belgium), at the African Leadership Centre in Nairobi, Kenya. The workshop, entitled ‘Dignity & Displacement’, brought together researchers, practitioners and community members with distinct ties to displacement – including lived experiences, academic and applied research, and practice. Over the course of two days, participants from throughout East Africa reflected on and recast notions of displacement and dignity. Through a series of creative co-creation workshop sessions, including visual reflection, music and theatre exercises, and artefact sharing, participants emphasised the importance of dignity-centred approaches within research and practice on displacement and harmonised around concepts of relationality, refusal and continuities as central features of such pathways to dignity. Here we highlight a number of overarching themes that emerged through the generosity of these shared reflections, experiences and frustrations.
Dignity is relational
The existence of dignity as an innate human quality and right is beyond question. Yet, throughout the course of the workshop, participants reflected on a deeper and shared understanding of dignity, namely that: we all hold dignity because we exist, but we experience this dignity through others. Thus the duality of dignity emerged, as both an intrinsic quality (the irrefutable existence of dignity) and a relational experience (the exercise and experience of dignity).
Dignity is about wholeness
Building on the previous ‘Dignity as Decolonial Research Method’ workshop co-hosted with the Africa Research Network at York, discussions also brought into focus the decolonial contributions and potential of dignity-centred approaches in conditions of displacement. Participants shared that dignity that advances decoloniality requires resisting narrow and singular assumptions about communities, individuals and spaces, which reduce them to simple and homogenous units. Instead, participants argued that dignity-centred approaches must create space for individual and collective complexity, and embrace the discomfort of the multiplicities and contradictions that accompany this.
Dignity involves refusal
Concurrently, and of equal importance, is the need to protect space for refusal in our work. Discussions converged around two dimensions of refusal: as a right held by research participants to decline sharing, wholly or partially; and as an ongoing ethical responsibility held by researchers to carefully consider what they ask, what they share and why. Participants shared examples of times they felt or exercised dignity not as what was shared, but precisely through what was not shared or asked. These conversations invite us to think more deeply about how to balance being critical and compassionate in dignity-centred research. Reflexivity throughout research projects that encourages researchers to sit with the question of ‘am I doing this because it’s important or simply because it’s interesting?’ thus emerged throughout the workshop as one way to translate dignity into methodological praxis. Ultimately, balancing complexity and opacity grounded our discussion on dignity as wholeness, both of which are essential to advance dignity as decolonial praxis.
Dignity is continuous and situated
Another layer of complexity in dignity emerged around temporalities. Through discussion, sharing personal artefacts and theatre exercises, we agreed that dignity is not only about where and who people are now – it’s about where we were before; how we got here, and what happens next. These temporal entanglements hold particular value in conditions of displacement, shared by some participants as the experience of being ripped from one’s physical and emotional sense of belonging, and navigating ways to hold your past in an uncertain present. Dignity-centred approaches thus must attend to where people came from in order to meet them where they are.
A common challenge shared among participants, in their work and/or experiences, extended temporality to the uncomfortable question of what happens after a research project or human rights intervention ends? Here discussions navigated the different ways in which impact can be recast to centralise the needs of individuals and communities, the importance of clarity in communicating the scope, purpose and limits of our work, and the need to dignify the process regardless of the limitations we confront in our capacities for impact.
Conclusion
“Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity” – Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie
The Dignity & Displacement workshop created a space for participants to share their stories, and through creative co-creation, their hopes and vision for how dignity can amplify, complexify and protect those stories.
The generosity of experiences, challenges and hopes shared during the workshop coalesced in calls for dignity-centred work to: actively exercise dignity beyond merely acknowledging its existence; create space for individual complexity while also protecting space for refusal, and; unlearn our research and practitioner silos that limit where and how we meet people, where they are, were and going.
