Darvaja: Visualizing Intersectionality and Methodology
Background
Darvaja is an agency dedicated to addressing intersectional challenges and creating equitable realities. Their work involves intellectual theories and bespoke methodologies designed to drive systemic change for their partners. I am collaborating with Darvaja to make their work streamlined and impactful.
Objective & Purpose
Define and visualize how Darvaja brings together complex and seemingly disconnected methodologies to their consulting and collective work. These visuals will be used with future clients and collaborators, forming a part of the practice framework, explaining their strategy.
Enhance communication and accessibility of their work for workshops, trainings, and broader audiences.
Develop data maps and process flow diagrams to deepen the understanding of intersectionality in practice.
Process
Understanding the Methodology: Worked closely with the Darvaja team to deeply understand their methodological underpinnings and bespoke services.
Visual Storytelling: Translated their intellectual work into simple, effective visuals, ensuring the essence of their message was preserved while enhancing clarity.
Iterative Design: Collaborated through iterative feedback sessions, incorporating insights and refining the visuals to meet their needs.
Working Visuals
Visualizing Darvaja’s Process:
Darvaja’s Process Expanded:
Darvaja’s Methodology:
Black Feminist Thought: Black feminist traditions have generated multiple ways of understanding overlapping systemic oppression, out of a need for self-determination, and to work on behalf of social justice. Key frameworks and prisms uses in darvaja’s practice are Intersectionality (Crenshaw); and the Matrix of Domination (Hill Collins).
Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR): A practice where researchers are communities and groups, collectively defining, exploring, and understanding the research topic or area of focus. From this approach, darvaja “focuses intentionally on questions of power and injustice, intersectionality and action” By placing those most embedded in the reality of migration and violence central to our learning journey, they are able to embed an intersectional approach to knowledge production alongside individuals, communities, and movements dedicated to social justice; rather than extractive evaluation practices and subsequent advocacy work that are not community owned or generated.
Systems Design: This brings to darvaja’s practice foresight tools that support them to structure thinking; especially when so much of their work can be about looking at a difficult current reality. Systemic approaches enable the holistic contextualising of lived experiences and inequitable outcomes as consequent of multiple interlinked systems of oppression and injustice.
For this work, these three grounding approaches mean darvaja will approach this work as a collaborative learning journey by focusing on building anti-oppression competency, they seek to ensure a cohesive and supported Shared Ground Residential, where participants feel valued, nourished, and supported.