Year 2010: empathy and storytelling
Story #6 of 16-part chronicle: ‘The evolution of my social design craft’
It’s the 29th of August 2010. My husband and I got married the day before, and were just about to embark on our honeymoon road trip, driving around Lebanon’s towns and villages, staying with locals in guesthouses, and getting to know more about the great diversity that is Lebanon. As well as all the things couples want to get out of their honeymoon, I was very much looking forward to this experience helping me build empathy with Lebanon’s diverse communities, as well as collecting stories that can inspire a nation to change. I know these are not typical honeymoon goals, so let me offer up some context…
I had started my part-time PhD research a couple of years back. My research aim was to explore the potential role that design can play in integrating young people from different social groups in post-conflict contexts. I was focusing on Lebanon as a case study, because:
- This is where I’m from and as a child, I grew up through the civil war that ended in 1990, so the subject is close to my heart.
- Even though violent conflict had ended over 20 years ago, the lines of segregation are still apparent in how different social groups (don’t) interact with one another on a day-to-day basis.
- All attempts at social integration historically have often taken the traditional conflict resolution approach of dialogue amongst community leaders, with little active intervention and innovation to change how people live and interact, and no exploration whatsoever of what a design approach could enable.
The problem is that growing up, much like other children of my generation, I had little opportunity to interact with people from other Lebanese social groups. I grew up in a small Christian Maronite village in Mount Lebanon, attended two Maronite schools, and a Maronite university. My father is a diplomat in the Lebanese army so although we did travel and go to schools abroad when he was on mission, that still didn’t expose us to Lebanese from other social groups. I remember distinctly that I met my first Muslim friend at the age of 18 at university, the second at the age of 21 at an astronomy club, the third at the age of 22 at work, and the fourth at the age of 27 after I had moved to London and started the research. I later came to realise that this is actually rather shocking even if it is the norm. Firstly, because Lebanon is very diverse. It brings together communities from over 18 religious sects (not surprising considering its proximity to where the three abrahamic religions initiated) with proportional representation in government. Secondly, because it takes no longer than 5 hours to drive the length of the country north to south. In fact the whole of Lebanon as a country is just over 6 times the surface area of London. So, the social segregation lines between communities must run so deep, to prevent communities from interacting with one another when they live so close to one another!
So when my husband and I set out on our honeymoon road trip that summer of 2010, I saw it as an excellent opportunity to prepare myself as a researcher by starting to expose myself to the diversity of Lebanese social groups. This would help me build my own sense of empathy in these specific contexts before I embarked on my fieldwork of interviews and workshops with young people across the country. I also saw it as an opportunity to better understand my dual identity as both researcher and young member of a Lebanese social group, and understand the benefits and contentions that come with that. This immersive method to building researcher empathy is sometimes called ‘autoethnography’, as it helps a researcher draw on insight from their personal experience through the immersive study, and complement that with insight from participant interviews (and other methods of insight gathering), in order to create a richer understanding. This is how Leon Anderson, one of the most prominent writers on autoethnography, articulates this value:
“The resulting analysis recursively draws upon our personal experiences and perception to inform our broader social understanding and upon our broader social understandings to enrich our self-understandings.” (Anderson, 2006, p.390)
This immersive approach to empathy building also helps with a researcher’s understanding of ‘reflexivity’, which Charlotte Davies defines as the “researcher’s awareness of their necessary connection to the research and hence their effects upon it” (1997, p.7).
So settled in our rental car, my husband and I visited 20 diverse regions, towns and villages in total. The choice of destination was dictated either by the locations where I knew local hosts would accommodate us, or where guesthouses were promoted as part of the Dhiafee Programme; A Ministry of Tourism initiative to boost internal tourism. We were able to live and share experiences with the locals, and get to know their towns, villages, assets, and communities through their own personal explanations and interpretations. We slept in their homes, shared their meals, prayed with them, were escorted on local walks, and sipped tea as they re-told stories about their family’s, home’s or town’s histories. I did not have a discussion guide, but I did keep a journal! Our road trip experience helped me develop a more empathic understanding of the lived-reality of diverse Lebanese social groups. I also built my sense of confidence to communicate and interact with individuals from these different groups for both research and collaboration throughout the PhD.
One year later, I made the leap from building my own sense of empathy, to sharing stories to inspire change to a 600-people audience at TEDxBeirut 2011.
Since that road trip, I had mustered the courage to interview 59 young people from 12 districts about their lives and their beliefs, attitudes, motivations and behaviours towards social integration. With dozens of insights, a segmentation of personas, and a clear set of barriers and drivers buzzing through my head, I let all of that technical analysis go, and stood on that TEDx stage to simply share two stories; the story of Sahar who lives in Tyr in the south, and the story of Charbel who lives in Besharreh in the north. Sahar and Charbel (pseudo-names) have a lot in common; they enjoy the same sort of music, they spend a lot of time on Facebook, they love hiking in the mountains, they have an immense sense of pride in Lebanon, and they have similar goals towards a better Lebanon. But Sahar and Charbel have both not ventured much outside their hometowns (and beyond Beirut the capital), and have not had much opportunity to meet others outside their own social groups. The reality is that despite Lebanon being a tiny country, and despite their similarities, it is highly unlikely that Sahar and Charbel would ever meet (without intervention). The reality is that the complex combination of sectarian, political and geographic stigma creates the worst odds for them to ever meet. So on the 24th of September 2011, I invited that TEDxBeirut audience to join a change movement — Imagination Studio — where young people will co-design the interventions we need, for people like Sahar and Charbel to have the opportunity to meet and see what value this and other diverse relationships can bring to Lebanon’s social fabric, social mobility, resilience, peacebuilding, the economy and more. And I have experienced the power of storytelling first hand. Since that TEDxBeirut talk, over 30 ‘Imaginers’ joined me on a year-long journey, to co-design, prototype, test and pilot the change (more on this in a future story).
We always hear that stories re-told are a great mechanism for change. My colleague Thomas Wastling wrote an excellent blog on that last week. But if you’re a researcher/designer, and these stories are so important to move communities and nations towards the change you’re designing (and I would argue that they always are), then you really need to own the stories. Immerse yourself in people’s lives, live a part of your life with people, hear the stories first-hand, and re-tell them with genuine empathy, to get others on-board the journey.
Upcoming story #7 — Year 2010: facilitating collaboration (September)
Previous stories:
Read story #1 — Year 2000: deconstructing and reconstructing
Read story #2 — Year 2003: risk and persistence after failure
Read story #3 — Year 2007: curiosity and questioning
