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Contribution short abstract

Acholi storytelling (ododo) is presented as a performative method of community repair and future-making. Through a brief staged demonstration, I show how ododo functioned as social infrastructure, revealing embodied forms of justice and agency beyond institutional processes.

Contribution long abstract

This contribution reframes Acholi storytelling (ododo) not as an object of analysis but as a performative research method through which communities in northern Uganda generated forms of justice, cohesion, and futurity during periods of violence (1986–2006). Instead of offering a conventional paper, I will stage elements of this practice to demonstrate how ododo functioned as emergency social infrastructure, enabling communities to rebuild trust, negotiate harm, and collectively imagine social futures when institutional justice mechanisms—such as the ICC and state-led transitional justice schemes—remained distant or insufficient.

Drawing on performance studies, Theatre of the Oppressed, and decolonial approaches to knowledge, the session will illustrate how embodied practices carry analytic power: they reveal how communities define justice beyond legal closure, mobilise cultural knowledge systems, and enact forms of agency unavailable to bureaucratic frameworks. Through a short micro-performance and participatory exercise, I will show how storytelling operates as a live method of social inquiry, allowing participants to feel how communities navigate violence, repair, and moral imagination.

By shifting analysis into embodied demonstration, this contribution aligns with the panel’s call to centre community agency, alternative epistemologies, and speculative futures. It offers a tangible example of how performance can serve as both method and infrastructure for reimagining development from the ground up.