Lived experience as a source of knowledge. What has the room been through? What do participants already know from the inside?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.
Read the note before you run this first. It is not optional here.
This lens has a problem the other lenses in this theme do not. The room’s own experience is both the best material available and the most dangerous thing in the session. Nearly everyone was raised inside some account of who God is and who is outside it, and that is real knowledge that belongs in the room. But this theme also has targets in it, and a lens that opens the floor without structure will find the Jewish participant explaining Israel, or the Muslim participant explaining Hamas, within twenty minutes, and neither of them came for that.
So the move here is to start with formation, not with conflict. What were you taught, who taught you, and what were they afraid of. Everyone can answer that, including people with no religion at all, and it puts the room on the theme’s actual subject: how a boundary gets installed in a person early, by people who love them.
Anchor questions
Sample prompts. Adapt hard, and see the facilitator guide. Let people pass, and mean it.
- What were you raised to believe, and who was outside it? Not what you believe now. What you were handed.
- Who taught you that, and what did they seem to be afraid of?
- Was there a group you learned about only as a warning? When did you meet one of them?
- Have you ever been the person somebody else was warned about?
- Has anyone ever asked you to answer for something done in your name, by people you have never met?
- If you left a faith, what did it cost? If you stayed, what have you had to hold?
- Have you ever stopped being able to look a neighbour in the eye? What had to happen first?
Materials that may help
Free unless marked otherwise. Everything in this lens is people speaking for themselves, with one deliberate exception noted below.
Being asked to answer for it
- ‘Til Kingdom Come (Maya Zinshtein, 2020, 76 min). If this theme watches one thing, watch this. An Israeli director follows a poor Kentucky evangelical church that sends money it cannot spare to Israeli settlements, and the Israeli organization that collects it, and the American politics that runs on the arrangement. She does not caricature anyone, which is exactly why it is hard: the Kentucky congregants are generous and sincere and are funding dispossession, and the Israeli fundraisers know what the theology says about the end and take the cheque anyway. Nobody in the film is a villain and the thing they are building is a catastrophe. Paywalled: gooddocs.net
The people it happened to
- Palestinian Oral History Archive (AUB). A thousand hours of testimony from first-generation refugees, indexed by the village they came from. Free: libraries.aub.edu.lb
- The Nakba Archive. Five hundred filmed interviews with Palestinians born before 1948, shot slowly, so people finish. Free: nakba-archive.org
- Zochrot: Testimonies. Palestinians who were expelled, and Jewish fighters who did the expelling, gathered by an Israeli organization whose purpose is making Israelis remember. Both voices on one site, collected by people from one of them. That is not neutrality, it is a position, and it is the most useful thing here. Free: zochrot.org
- Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (Institute for Palestine Studies). Where to go when the room asks what was actually in a place. Free: palquest.org
- Al-Nakba: The Palestinian Catastrophe, Episode 1 (Al Jazeera, 2013, 47 min). About 1.4 million views. Part one of four: the Ottoman collapse and the Mandate, from the Palestinian side, in archival footage and testimony. Qatari state funded, which is a standpoint and not a disqualification; say it and use the material. Free: youtube.com
When the boundary was drawn across a country
- The 1947 Partition Archive. Thousands of oral histories from the year a religious line was drawn across a subcontinent and somewhere between one and two million people died in the sorting: Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, all of them, mostly killed by neighbours. Run this beside the Palestinian archives. Both are 1947 and 1948. Both are what happens when a border is asked to do the work of a boundary. Free: 1947partitionarchive.org
- Ratna Kapoor, Shaheen Bagh (2022). Muslim women in Delhi, many of them grandmothers who had never protested in their lives, occupying a road for a hundred days against a law that made religion a condition of citizenship. Free, open access: frontiersin.org
- Suraj Yengde on Annihilation of Caste (118 min). About 14,000 views, niche. A Dalit scholar reading Ambedkar as a man the text is about, not as a historian of it. Take a section. Free: youtube.com
When the neighbours stop looking at you
- Where Have All the Neighbours Gone? (Law & Society Trust, 2014). The best testimony document in this theme. Sri Lankan Muslim and Sinhalese researchers walked into Aluthgama days after the June 2014 violence and wrote down what people said. The finding that matters is not the arson count. It is that people who had lived side by side for generations could no longer meet each other’s eyes. That is a border being installed between people who already knew each other, which is what this theme is actually about and what statistics cannot show you. Free, 84 pages, by the publisher’s own grant: lst.lk
- Groundviews on Digana, 2018 and 2019. First the state’s own Special Task Force beating worshippers at a mosque, from ten survivors who were too frightened to be photographed. Then, one year on, one man, his shop, and the mosque next door with two hundred years behind it. Read in that order. Free, Sri Lankan citizen journalism.
- First They Targeted Our Culture and Language (Rohingya Language Preservation Project, 2022). End here rather than on any UN report. Rohingya researchers in the camps, studying the destruction of their own language and publishing it themselves. Its subject is not massacre; it is grammar. A theme about religion as a border should have to explain why the thing erased was a language. Free, 54 pages: squarespace.com
- Rohingyatographer. Forty Rohingya photographers shooting their own camps, and deliberately refusing the wire-service gaze: memory, faith, craftsmanship, beauty, grief. Not atrocity. Free to view, CC licensed: rohingyatographer.org
A note on method
Formation first, conflict second, and probably in a later session. A room that starts by asking what people were taught about who was outside is doing this theme’s work. A room that starts on Gaza is having a different meeting, and it will not get back.
Watch the turn. There is a moment in almost every session on this material where the room, without meaning anything by it, swivels toward the one Jewish participant or the one Muslim participant and waits. Your job is to see it coming and take the question yourself. Nobody is here as a delegate.
‘Til Kingdom Come does what an argument cannot. You can tell a room that American evangelicals fund settlements and that their theology ends with Jews converting or dying, and they will file it as a fact about strangers. Then they watch a Kentucky family who has very little give money to people who will never think of them, for reasons those people find grotesque and take the money anyway, and it stops being a fact about strangers. It is paywalled, which is a real problem for this lens, and there is no free substitute that does the same work.
Status
First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. It is the theme’s thinnest, for a reason worth naming rather than fixing quietly. The Palestinian testimony here is deep and the Israeli testimony is not. Zochrot carries Jewish fighters’ accounts of 1948, and beyond that there is nothing here from Israelis about their own formation, nothing from the second generation of Holocaust survivors, nothing from Mizrahi Jews expelled from Arab countries, whose experience fits neither story this theme tells. That is a serious gap and it is the one most likely to make a Jewish participant feel this theme was built about them rather than with them. There is also no first-person account from inside American Christian nationalism except through Zinshtein’s camera, and no ex-Islamist voice at all. On the Buddhist side the Sri Lankan Muslim testimony is strong and the Sinhalese testimony is absent, the same shape as the Palestinian and Israeli imbalance above and for the same avoidable reason. There is no Rohingya first-person video testimony here from a stable free host: the USC Shoah Foundation holds full-length Rohingya testimony but most of it requires being physically inside a subscribing institution, which is a real barrier for a free school. Contributions welcome, and these ones especially.