About

or who we are

We do workshops and trainings for journalists and people in civil society

They focus on topics like migration, and how they are portrayed in the media

They are based on reflection and self-analysis, and invite people to look at themselves

In a time when migration has come to be at the centre of media reporting and debates across the world, we hold workshops where people get to look deeper at their own relationship with the topic. We invite professionals from the media and civil society to reflect on how we think and write about refugees and migration, and find ways to not reproduce stereotypes and narrow notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Journalists and people in communication are used to observing and speaking about others, but rarely get the chance to look at themselves and their own relationships with what they report on.

This – inviting people from across a wide professional spectra to reflect on themselves and their own experiences, in order to understand how these shape the way they look at the world – is at the core of our workshops.

Our people:

Our workshops in Lebanon are organised alongside two partners: Mashallah News, a collaborative media platform, and Jibal, an environment and social justice association, and held by Jenny Gustafsson, Angela Saade and Rana Hassan.

Jenny Gustafsson

is a journalist/writer and political scientist born in Sweden and living in Lebanon since 2009. She has reported from across the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere, including Bangladesh, Honduras, Guatemala, Sri Lanka, Libya, Algeria, Tajikistan, India and Saudi Arabia. Her work often focuses on migration, development and other issues related to society, as well as crafts and heritage. Her work has been featured in outlets including The Guardian, Foreign Policy and Al Jazeera. In 2010 she co-founded Mashallah News, an online platform on social issues and urban life across the Middle East, and has since worked on a number of different related storytelling/reporting projects.

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Angela Saade

is a co-founder of Jibal and Tabadol, both working on how to build diverse and intercultural societies with equity and justice at the centre. She has a background in anthropology and has developed and collaborated on several projects including trainings for youth workers, teachers and journalists. Angela has also been the technical advisor for the youth programme of the Lebanese NGO Mouvement Social, mainly working with underpriviledged young people from different areas of Lebanon. She has a personal experience of exile and migration, having been one of many forced to leave Lebanon with her family during the 1975-1990 civil war. Angela speaks Arabic, English, Spanish and French.

Rana Hassan

is a community facilitator and an urban researcher. With an academic background in Urban Studies, Rana’s research and practice in that area focuses on urban social movements, feminist urbanisms, informal settlements and participatory planning. More recently, she has been focusing on group facilitation; she joined forces with other trainers and facilitators to co-found a cooperative that is dedicated to community facilitation from a feminist perspective with a focus on supporting cooperatives and horizontal groups, as well as movement building.

Jibal x Switch Perspective

Switch Perspective is a project organised through Jibal in Beirut

Jibal is a non-profit association that works to advance social and environmental justice in Lebanon through furthering collective organisation and supporting open and accessible knowledge. The organisation has a holistic approach to societal development and promotes sustainability in all of its forms, including on the human, economic and social levels as well as in the built and natural environment. Activities range from workshops and trainings to applied research and projects based on community engagement and learning, where participants play a central role. In Arabic, jibal means “mountains”, a place where the founding members like to spend time. The word is also an adapted acronym of جمعية من أجل العدالة البيئية والإجتماعية في لبنان or Association for Environmental and Social Justice in Lebanon. Jibal was founded in Beirut in 2017 by Ounsi El Daif and Angela Saade.