Tackling Colombian inequality with art, dialogue, and a community think tank
Launching this year, Incite’s Global Change Program (GCP) will further internationalize and develop our mission by partnering with project leaders around the world who are tackling issues ranging from poverty to climate change to unequal access to health care.
Dr. Allison Benson-Hernández
To pilot the program in 2023–2024, Incite awarded its first GCP grant to Dr. Allison Benson-Hernández, a former Obama Foundation Scholar whose organization Re-imagenemos (Reimagining) is fostering the first national-level conversation about inequality in Colombia. Incite’s funding will support the project’s program of eight regional dialogues on inequality, followed by local dialogues in each of Colombia’s 32 departments. Through these dialogues, more than 150 people from different social backgrounds and professional perspectives will work together to build an agenda of community-led initiatives on inequality. With Incite’s support, Re-imagenemos aims to organize seven Cross-Regional Dialogues On Inequality reaching in excess of 20,000 people.
Dr. Benson-Hernández discussing Re-imagenemos.
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A conversation with Dr. Benson-Hernández
Chris Pandza sat down with Dr. Benson-Hernández to learn more about inequality in Colombia, Re-imagenemos, and Benson-Hernández’s ambitious plan for the next year.
Pandza:
Inequality is the primary lens through which your work is focused, but inequality can mean different things in different contexts. What does inequality look like in Colombia?
Benson-Hernández:
Inequality in Colombia looks like two worlds that don't think about each other—that don't ever meet.
For example, there’s spatial segregation. Our cities are distinctly split between rich and poor parts, and most people don't go from one area to one another. Another visual dimension of inequality has to do with skin color. If you look indigenous, or if you are black, you're probably in a more vulnerable situation from a socioeconomic perspective. So inequality also has a color.
Another very key way in which inequality can be seen is across the regions of Colombia—the urban-rural divide. It's very big. A city like Bogotá can be similar in many ways to New York in terms of access to service, infrastructure, and transport. But if you go to a rural area, even if it's 40 minutes away from Bogotá, you will arrive in places where there are only dirt roads where you have to walk for two hours to go to a bank. Where water and energy are not constant throughout the day. We say that we have a lot of countries within the country.
So these call like territorial dimension of inequality is very geographical dimension of inequality is very important. And that at the core of this project that Incite is supporting, which is the territorial dialogues.
Participants at a 2023 Cross-Regional Dialogue On Inequality.
Pandza:
How did inequality become your focus?
Benson-Hernández:
During our presidential elections, I wondered why all the candidates were speaking about a lot of problems that we have, but not the one that I thought was the root cause: inequality. They were openly speaking about corruption, and violence, lack of social expenditure, and education quality, but none of them openly spoke about inequality as a problem.
I think that has to do with the fact that speaking about inequality is more difficult than speaking about poverty in academia, politics, or regular conversations, because inequality implies that there are some people in an unfair position or with unfair privileges. That's difficult to realize, and difficult to make a collective purpose.
And in political terms, we have this very complex reference of Cuba—and especially Venezuela, which did have a redistributive narrative. But because the results have been so difficult for these countries and people have actually become poorer, it's easy to sideline this discourse as utopian, that it's going to lead us to communism.
To create social change, we have to first recognize the issues. We have to be able to say that things are bad. So the purpose was—how can we start talking about inequality as a depoliticized word, but a word that brings people together instead of scaring people or discarding narratives? Once we realize this, how do we create change in our daily lives?
Pandza:
How did that realization lead to founding Re-imagenemos?
Benson-Hernández:
After the elections I wanted to write some pieces about inequality in a national newspaper. But I realized I'm not an expert in every topic, so I invited people to cooperate with me.
I invited a friend who is a PhD in public health and another academic working with land issues. But I realized that our perspectives would be more impactful if we didn't speak from a theoretical, privileged position in which we analyze social reality as a thing that you study. I wanted to think about how we could talk about this as something that we live, not only study.
That’s why I thought of inviting other voices. I originally wanted to speak about 12–15 types of inequality, but when I invited people, they brought in more and more topics—and the list kept increasing. We ended up with these 30 topics of inequality. Others suggested that we should also invite artists. It was like a collective ideation process and then we realized we were 150 people organizing 30 different topics for almost three years.
All the work that we did through these three years was completely informal. We were like a collective, but not really an organization. The full formal organization process came during the Obama Foundation fellowship in which I registered and did everything to formalize what we were doing organically. We're describing ourselves as a community think tank. We want to be recognized as a key—and maybe the only—community think tank in the country.
Pandza:
Your work is actualized through dialogue across sectors and regions. Why dialogue? And in practice, how does Re-imagenemos mobilize dialogue?
Benson-Hernández:
Social dialogue is very worthy in itself, especially in a context like Colombia, in which social dialogue has been silenced by the armed conflict for many years. So this was a country, or is in a way, a country in which if you speak, you can be stigmatized as being a guerrilla activist or a paramilitary activist. Or you can be killed.
Finding a space of rebirth of dialogue is very worthy in itself, but it is not enough. So what material products can we build? From the process of dialogue, we are thinking about four concrete products.
One is what we call the incidents, the social incidents or the advocacy products, which are these columns and social art pieces that we're going to publish on social media.
The second product is a report with policy recommendations. We're going to spend a year talking to hundreds of people throughout the country. And in this exercise, we're going to identify solutions that are happening around the country. We're going to organize all of these in a policy report and then give this report to the Ministry of Equality which was created a couple of months ago. We wanted to give it to governors and mayors and say this is an input we hope you use.
The third product that we want to create is the collaborative research agenda. We are going to pair academics from the big universities that have all their resources and visibility—and that are almost all located in Bogotá—with academics from very small, regional universities so they can come up with research questions and build a research agenda. That starts with the dialogues, but then can last for years of research, analysis, and conversations.
The fourth product is micro grant support for communities to actually replicate and appropriate our project. For example, how if you're a teacher in a school, or you can organize these types of dialogues with students or with students and teachers. Or if you're a social leader, and you want to organize it with your members and the government, or the enterprise that generates jobs in the region.
Pandza:
How do you anticipate GCP will impact your work? I know you’re planning several in-person Cross-Regional Dialogues On Inequality that will also be broadcast online.
Benson-Hernández:
Without these resources, we would not be doing Cross-Regional Dialogues On Inequality. GCP will allow us to organize seven events reaching an additional 20,000 people through our online and social media outputs.
We’ll also be able to build or identify a network of people who are working to build equality all throughout the country. In the exercise of inviting people to the conversation and to the events, we're doing a very big work of actor mapping. That's a very concrete output that we expect. And again, this comes to the, goes back to the idea of these dialogues being just like the first seed of something that we want.
We want these discussions to translate into action. Not only improbable dialogues, but also improbable action across sectors.
Pandza:
You mentioned that you include artists in these discussions. Why?
Benson-Hernández:
One of Re-imagenemos’ essential differentials is bringing the arts into the conversation.
When I invite artists to the conversations, and I say we're going to talk about race inequality, they sometimes say, “Oh, I'm not an expert on race inequality. I don't know about those things.” And I always answer that I want them to speak from two perspectives.
First, as people who actually experience these things. Not as a technical concept, but as a lived experience. You are not an expert, but you have eyes, you have feelings, you live in this country, so you do have things to say. That's bringing artists into the social conversation. That's part one.
Second, artists can translate the dialogue that is happening between different forms of language into communication channels that can actually connect more with people, because they appeal to emotion. To aesthetics. To things that actually connect with our capacity of reimagining other realities. They have a potential that words cannot ever reach. So that's what the invitation is. To use their abilities to translate conversations into more relatable languages that people can actually process more.
Pandza:
At Incite, when we think about how we engage with people outside of the university, we talk a lot about extractive work or extractive practices. How does this factor into your work?
Benson-Hernández:
Yeah, that's a great question.
First, we should not call what we do outreach activities—outreach is about asking the questions, coming up with the answers, and then telling others about it. It's a very top-down approach about taking academia outside, and from a hierarchical position.
What we're trying to do is not outreach, but inreach—what we'd call building bridges of communication, of empathy, and of relations of ideation. So for us, the process of communicating with other actors from other sectors starts from a human connection and then we go into connecting ideas and narratives.
But the first step is to say okay, we're two people, and we're talking about an issue. And this implies being cognizant and aware of biases that we have.
We had a conversation on Friday wherein we had people who were social leaders who never went to school. And then we had a PhD researcher who is very well known, not only in Colombia, but internationally as a researcher. I opened the panel with the activists and then the last one to speak was the researcher, because if he would have started, that may have introduced a power relation, an expectation that everyone would speak with the same kind of language as the researcher. We talk a lot about a dialogue between forms of knowledge—acknowledging that there are a lot of forms of knowledge, not only the formal scientific knowledge that we should all value. That they all have contributions to the process of collective knowledge generation.
Participants at a 2023 Cross-Regional Dialogue On Inequality.
Pandza:
Do any other images from that event stick out in your mind?
Benson-Hernández:
There was this point in which one of the speakers told the audience to take a minute to look at this stage because what you're looking at in this moment is special. We are seven people from seven very different backgrounds. With seven very different colors of skin, but we are all sitting here listening to each other and achieving a dialogue from diversity.
It’s something that doesn't happen every day. So I think when he actually called people to notice this, which is the essence of what we've been trying to do in these three years, I thought, okay, we’re doing it.
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