The Mischiefs We Inherit - Personal narrative lessons from development work in the Caribbean

Summary

A Trinidadian development practitioner’s account of coming to narrative work through “a growing discomfort with the stories I had inherited”. Omar Mohammed, of the Global Narrative Hive, borrows Eric Williams’s ‘old mischief’ for colonial ideas that outlive their interests, and offers practices for noticing them. Narrative consciousness, he writes, often begins when we recognise “that common sense has a history”.

Rationale

Part 1 says dispositions do most where they’re least noticed. Mohammed’s workshop questions try to surface them, starting with where an assumption came from and whose interests it once served.