Metaphors for Un/Making CSC

Metaphors are powerful tools for political imaginings. For Paulo Freire, dreaming is a political act, connected with hope, imagination and creativity, and a necessary antidote to resist neoliberal fatalism (Freire, 2007). Escobar (1995) highlighted the role of generating new narratives in making and unmaking development and the Third World, and later (Escobar, 2018) called for a kind of ‘social dreaming’ to imagine alternative futures. Used method for research inquiry, metaphors may enable us to access non-Western ways of knowing by refusing the Euro-centric scientific “dualism between the real and the unreal, between realities and fictions” and instead by working allegorically “we imagine coherence without consistency.” (Law, 2004, p. 139).

This data collection showcases the material metaphors created through a series of participatory and creative ‘Making Metaphors’ workshops with organisations in Malawi and India. Participants created models of metaphors using craft and everyday materials, including materials from local shops and markets. These were created in response to prompts such as ‘our organisation is like… ‘ ‘communication for us is like…’, ‘social enterprise for us is like…’, ‘donors are like…’, ‘development is like…’.  

The affective, precise fictions for unmaking and remaking communication for development that were generated offer an “immersion into their worlds” and “a temptation to listen” (Foster, 2015, p. 52).