Growing Roots Through Our New Year’s Dinner Party

This past January, we hosted our new year’s dinner party, which has now become an annual tradition. When we organised the first one in 2023, we had wanted to gather our community in person for the first time at our office. As an organisation whose work—and, for that matter, interactions with one another—mostly lives online, these rare moments to enjoy each other’s presence are precious. They’ve quickly become one of my favourite parts of the job. For this year’s party, we wanted to go back to our roots, which includes paying homage to Bedok, the neighbourhood our office is part of.

To understand why this was important, we have to share more about what the Kontinentalist team has been busy with over the last year. For those of you who are not aware, Kontinentalist debuted our new mission and vision recently. We felt that our old mission and vision no longer fully encapsulated our evolving values (you can read more about our thinking here), and came up with a new one: “To advocate for a more equitable world that fosters connections between Asia’s sources of knowledge. We nurture community around data and human experiences.” We feel this better reflects our desires to facilitate meaningful, equitable connections between people and honour various, often-overlooked Indigenous and local knowledge forms across the region. 

Alongside this, we’ve been fleshing out a renewed decolonial methodology that prioritises non-extractive, ethical ways of working with communities and partners in data storytelling. As a data storytelling studio that relies heavily on research, we’ve come to recognise that we often inherit harmful legacies. Research has historically been used as a tool of imperialism, as described by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, the Indigenous scholar and writer whose work on decolonial methodologies has been instrumental for us. Part of this new direction also means learning how to attune ourselves to our immediate environments, and grounding our research in the lived realities, knowledge systems, and relationships with land that are unique to each place and its communities. 

For us, one of those places is Bedok, where many of us in Kontinentalist spend our days crafting and working on the stories we tell. Bedok is a place rich in Indigenous histories of coastal communities. This also means acknowledging histories of dispossession, forced migration, erasure, and resistance tied to this land. Without that recognition, our research risks repeating the patterns of colonial extraction. So when we began brainstorming for this year’s dinner party, we knew we wanted to centre Bedok.