Stories shape how the world is understood.

They influence how people see one another, how places are imagined, and whose lives are considered visible or significant. When stories are simplified or detached from lived reality, they lose their ability to reflect the fullness of human experience.

We work from the belief that storytelling carries responsibility — not to explain the world, but to remain attentive to it. Approaching stories through lived experience allows space for nuance, difference, and shared humanity to exist without being resolved or reduced.

This work matters because it resists easy narratives and opens room for deeper understanding, allowing stories to be encountered rather than consumed

Dakar & Beyond exists to intervene at this level of representation.

It is committed to forms of storytelling that resist reduction, treat lived experience as a legitimate source of narrative authority, and hold complexity as an ethical requirement rather than a stylistic choice.                                                                                                                                                                     The work privileges duration over immediacy, proximity over distance, and accountability over spectacle, recognizing that meaningful understanding is produced through sustained engagement rather than accelerated output.

This is not an effort to replace one dominant narrative with another, but to widen the conditions under which stories are formed and encountered.

At its core is a refusal to accept hierarchies of human worth, and a commitment to approaches that allow people and places to appear as fully human—beyond the frames that have historically constrained how they are seen.