In our October 10th xChange Paul Skinner, founder of MarketingKind, will interview Malka Older, award-winning novelist, academic and aid worker, to explore how we can narrate our way to a safer and more humanitarian future.

The narratives that guide us have an enormous effect on how we respond to, address and recover from our most profound problems, even including our disasters and emergencies. So in the face of changes in technology and divisive societal trends how can we ensure that our cultural narratives are helping us to be prepared, responsive and resilient?

Malka’s science-fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by Kirkus, Book Riot, and the Washington Post, and shortlisted for the 2019 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award. With the sequels Null States (2017) and State Tectonics (2018), she completed the Centenal Cycle trilogy, a finalist for the Hugo Best Series Award of 2018. Links to her short fiction, poetry, and essays can be found at https://malkaolder.wordpress.com/publications/.

Named Senior Fellow for Technology and Risk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs for 2015, she has more than a decade of field experience in humanitarian aid and development, ranging from field level experience as a Head of Office in Darfur to supporting global programs and agency-wide strategy as a disaster risk reduction technical specialist. She has responded to complex emergencies and natural disasters in Sri Lanka, Uganda, Darfur, Indonesia, Japan, and Mali, in the last three as Team Leader.

Her doctoral work on the sociology of organizations at the Institut d’Études Politques de Paris (Sciences Po) explores the dynamics of multi-level governance and disaster response using the cases of Hurricane Katrina and the Japan tsunami of 2011.