How can Tibetan experiences and practices help us reimagine crisis, embrace planetary interconnection, and rethink what it means to be human in these catastrophic times in order to rebuild a world habitable for all? Dawa Lokyitsang's ethnographic book project, Resurgent Tibetan Otherwise Worlds, which she will work on at IIAS, explores how Tibetan communities in exile have responded to historical trauma and ongoing colonialism with powerful, future-oriented practices of care, education, and solidarity. Following the Chinese Communist invasion and bombardment of Tibet in the 1950s, tens of thousands of Tibetans were forced into exile, fracturing families and displacing entire communities. Yet, in the face of profound loss and dislocation, Tibetans built new worlds—establishing their own schools in India and sustaining transnational kinship networks that continue to thrive across the globe.
Based on oral histories from three generations of Tibetan exiles (from the 1960s to the 2000s), this book traces how everyday practices of community care have become acts of anticolonial resistance and ethical worldmaking. These stories offer vital insights into how displaced peoples remake collective life from sites of loss, and how cultural and political refusal can serve as tools of repair and reimagination.
Engaging with Black and Indigenous radical thought, Resurgent Otherwise Worlds positions Tibetan survival not as passive endurance, but as an insurgent form of relational sovereignty—one that redefines what global solidarity and decolonial futures can look like within and beyond Global Asias.