Somayina CoLabs is founded, curated and edited by Kai Hodgeson.

Hi! My name is Kai and I am a Black queer feminist and narrative change practitioner with over a decades’s experience in social justice advocacy at the intersection of communications, advocacy and feminist movement building. 

I am a non-monogamous relationship anarchist who lives between India and South Africa.

I have worked for a long time in feminist movement building oriented work and from very early on had a sense that activism is deeply spiritual work. That sense has only grown stronger since.

I look at liberation, freedom, social justice and feminist movement building work like a big puzzle. There is a lot required, in different forms and shapes and sizes and colours to dismantle systems of oppression and birth more expansive ways of organising societies that are rooted in freedom, dignity and equity for all. I think shifting global-political moments determine which pieces are most necessary. And I think time tells us which pieces are obsolete, which need a bit of a rethink and where the spaces occur for new pieces to be imagined and built. Somayina CoLabs, or just CoLabs for short, is a puzzle helper. As our tagline says – a feminist social justice movement partner.

A feminist social justice movement partner that helps us to zoom in or out [depending on the moment] so we can better understand and analyse this ‘reality’ that has been given to us by systems of oppression. We better understand it by using narrative frameworks and devices. So that, hopefully, we may navigate our way past, through and in-between all we’ve been taught about what ‘is’ to find ourselves looking towards what [else] can be.