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Contribution short abstract

To speak of development is already to enter a conversation structured by Northern institutions, their metrics, their temporalities. Vernacular terms do not simply translate development into local contexts. They refuse its underlying assumptions about progress, individualism, and accumulation.

Contribution long abstract

To speak of development is already to enter a conversation structured by Northern institutions, their metrics, their temporalities. Vernacular terms do not simply translate development into local contexts. They refuse its underlying assumptions about progress, individualism, and accumulation. This contribution draws on the "Becoming Otherwise" project, which examines how individuals across the UK, Brazil, and South Africa reimagine success beyond conventional achievement narratives. Through digital storytelling with over 100 participants, the research reveals three distinct approaches to rethinking success: Celebrators who embrace alternative metrics of worth, Translators who negotiate between competing value systems, and Refusers who reject achievement frameworks entirely. These archetypes expose how deeply meritocratic narratives constrain not just individual aspiration but collective imagination about what counts as progress.

In the Global South contexts of this research, vernacular framings of success prove particularly revealing. They demonstrate how development discourse, even when critiqued, continues to structure the terms through which people articulate their desires, frustrations, and possibilities. Yet they also show moments where participants reach for language that escapes these frames entirely, gesturing toward forms of collective flourishing that resist Northern metrics of achievement. The contribution explores ideas of development and its alternatives through the linguistic and conceptual infrastructures that reside in creative visions about the future.