Meet
Juhi Sohani
Co-Founder | Director, Systems Change + Integrative Design | Narrative Guide
Juhi’s passion for movement-building was seeded by ingrained collectivist principles in her Pakistani upbringing and the class struggle that affects us all. She grapples with her positionality in the complex landscape of “South Asian” diasporic discourse by looking to the leadership of Dalit feminist thought, in addition to having been raised Muslim in a non-Arab household where she has had to recognize and intercept the racism and linguistic imperialism in the (often wrongfully considered monolithic) Islamic world. Juhi is a migrant settler living as an uninvited guest in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal), land that is still the unceded territory of the Kanien'kehá:ka Nation and was built by the labour of enslaved Indigenous and African people. Juhi hopes to constantly inform her practice by this history that resulted in the construction of — and continues to uphold — the white supremacist systems of oppression through which colonial states govern today.
Her practice has grown to veer away from conventional approaches to communication as she strives to re-root herself in the stories and connection to community that seeded her passions in the first place. Today, she approaches her research and design work as a communicator by sharing stories, as opposed to telling them. Along this journey, her outlook on monitoring and evaluation has shifted toward community-centric methods that equitably collect and prioritize data as it benefits people, not just institutions and processes. Disrupting and restructuring approaches to M&E has come hand-in-hand with recentring cultural and varied ways of sharing stories and reprioritizing traditional knowledges in all their forms. She is intrigued by how we can decolonize our relationships to storytelling, decentralize our approaches to communication, and amplify the voices of those who are at the heart of the work we do.