Build Your Own Economy is an hour-long interactive storytelling experience that uses fictive micro-stories and poetry based on real-life happenings, to discuss transformative communal economies, which can be defined as group-based economics. The storytelling delves into global histories and logistics of collectives, exploring the ways they have allowed Indigenous and other diasporan people to survive (and sometimes thrive) throughout time, e.g. before money was invented; amid forced displacement; during enslavement, post-emancipation, and colonialism; in times of inflation; through financial meltdowns; or within war-torn areas.
The workshop will be an immersive experience where participants engage in collaborative decision-making to address specific financial scenarios the facilitator provides. The activity will showcase ways attendees can be economic agents of change and perhaps consider starting economic projects in their families and/or communities. The communal economy stories will weave in Indigenous knowledge around grassroots approaches to develop imaginative economic possibilities that foster collective responsibility and solidarity for families and communities.
As a scholar whose work is grounded in African ways of knowing and community economies, I designed the workshop format to embody the way that African Indigenous people have always shared knowledge, that is via stories. The workshop is committed to keeping the art of African oral histories and storytelling culture alive in an increasingly digital world. In the Build Your Own Economy experience, I will share African Indigenous Knowledge nuggets that will demonstrate the value and importance of ancestral wisdom, and show its relevance, even in modern times. My goal is to illustrate African ways of knowing, which are amenable, agile, and flexibly responsive to the needs of their localities, and reflect on how such knowledge might be adapted to attendees’ contemporary lives and spaces.
