We are drawn to stories that exist beyond dominant frames of visibility—stories shaped by unequal attention, cultural hegemony, and the quiet violence of being spoken for.

Across geographies, certain groups and perspectives are repeatedly centered, while others are submerged, reduced, or treated as secondary. In many places, people are not only underrepresented but misrepresented: their lives simplified into symbols, their complexity edited out, their dignity negotiated by narratives built elsewhere. Some stories remain untold. Others are told, but fabricated—flattened into stereotypes, filtered through fear, pity, fascination, or convenience. Dakar & Beyond is drawn toward what sits beneath these distortions: lives that have been overlooked, misread, stereotyped, or made invisible—not to “fix” them with a louder story, but to approach them with seriousness and allow them to be seen with nuance, agency, and depth.

Stories shaped by lived reality, not imposed narratives

We are interested in stories that arise from how people actually live—daily rhythms, relationships, work, survival, celebration, contradiction—rather than how cultures are typically explained or summarized.

Stories where dignity has been compromised by representation

We are attentive to contexts where media bias, cultural framing, or inherited stereotypes have tarnished dignity—where people are treated as problems, statistics, archetypes, or background. We are drawn to work that restores dimensionality without romanticizing.

Stories that resist simplification

We value stories that carry complexity intact—where truth is not a single statement but a layered reality. Contradiction is not edited out. Ambiguity is not treated as weakness. The goal is not a neat message, but a fuller encounter.

Stories at the edges of visibility

We are drawn to places and lives that remain outside mainstream cultural focus—peripheral neighborhoods, borderlands, rural regions, overlooked communities, and environments shaped by social or political marginalization—where existence is often treated as secondary in dominant narratives.

Stories that reveal shared emotional ground

Across cultures, the emotional register is recognizably human. Grief, tenderness, pride, fear, humour, longing, resilience—these are not regional. We are drawn to stories that make this shared ground visible, without erasing difference. Everyone matters; every life carries equal worth.

Dakar & Beyond gravitates toward stories that widen perception rather than shrink it. Stories that let people appear fully human, slipping past the frames that have tried—often too neatly—to contain them.