Identity, Belonging and Agency: A Transformative Development Framework for Global Africans/Black Peoples

Abstract

1. Who am I? 2. Where do I belong? 3. What am I called to? These three questions represent the narrative shifts that are the outcomes of the Identity/Belonging/Agency (IBA) transformative development framework. The IBA framework emerged from the author’s critical reflections on fiction reading and dialogues in 12+ community conversations to explore everyday global African/Black experiences. It responds to the self-inquiry: How do global Africans/Black peoples experience developmental transformation in the context of social marginality? It conceptualizes that the key developmental tasks of global Africans/Black peoples lies in claiming identity through differentiation from dominant narratives of marginality, belonging through locating self-in-society and community, and agency through a focus on self-in-transcendence. The IBA framework is proposed as core to understanding how global Africans/Black peoples, and perhaps other socially constructed racialized groups, can choose to move from marginality to personal as well as social transformation through their agency.