Dr. Melanie Lombard and Dr. Carlos Andres Tobar Tovar
Funding period: 18 May 2025 – 28 February 2026
Type of funding:
Other Grants
Partner organisations: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana Cali (Colombia) and Asociación Mejorando Vidas – Asomevid
Lead organisers: Melanie Lombard, University of Sheffield (UK) and Carlos Andres Tobar Tovar, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana Cali (Colombia).
Team members: Laura Page, community artist; Gabi Putnoki, comic book producer; and Kevin Nieto, illustrator.
Contact: Melanie Lombard, University of Sheffield (UK)
This research project was funded by a Knowledge Mobilisation Award grant.
Abstract:
Our USF Pandemics and Cities project ‘From social infrastructure to pandemic resilience?: Learning from and with low-income urban communities’, investigated how community-based organisations (CBOs) responded to gaps in basic needs during the pandemic in marginalised communities where official responses were often slow, ineffective or punitive. We found that CBOs are often first responders to crisis situations in marginalised neighbourhoods, yet they struggle to achieve longer-term resilience due to lack of visibility and effective state partnership. Moreover, while episodic crises such as the pandemic dominate media and state narratives, everyday multiple and overlapping crises such as inequality, hunger, violence and political unrest are often more significant for marginalised communities. Our research suggests that, in such contexts, ‘social infrastructures of care’ capture the less visible yet critical role of CBOs in responding to everyday, often overlooked crises, based on their socio-spatial embeddedness at neighbourhood scale.
This Knowledge Mobilisation Award project aims to present these findings to wider public, policy and private sector audiences, in Cali and beyond. Working with community-based organisations in Cali’s marginalised Aguablanca District, and arts practitioners, we will undertake three activities as follows:
- Production of comic about the origins and evolution of ‘habitancia’, a concept which emerged during our research and was developed by teacher-activists working with young people at the Instituto Educativo Nuevo Latir, a ‘megacollege’ in the heart of Aguablanca District. Habitancia elaborates a scheme of self-care, care for others, care for the community, and care for the local and global environment, in a setting where precarity dominates. The comic is aimed at local school and neighbourhood communities, wider public and municipal official audiences, and online international audiences.
- Exhibition of photography in the community-founded Memory Museum, barrio Charco Azul, Aguablanca District, where local organisation Asomevid use auto-photography and personal archives to tell the story of the neighbourhood’s development through the community’s constructive efforts in conditions of marginalisation and violence. The exhibition will present memory as a form of care, for audiences including neighbourhood and local communities, municipal officials, other local organisations, and researchers.
- Launch of the Habitancia Network, to be held in the Memory Museum in February 2026. The Habitancia Network comprises five organisations working in diverse neighbourhoods in Aguablanca District. The launch event will allow member organisations to present their work to other local actors, and showcase the exhibition and comic as part of the network’s activities relating to care as crisis response. The event will invite local communities, municipal officials, private sector representatives, other local CBOs and NGOs, and researchers.