Who Are You in the Room? Identity, Positionality, and the Quiet Politics of Showing Up

There's a particular silence that happens when someone in the humanitarian sector is asked who they are in the room. Not what they do. Not which agency they represent. Who they are.

It's an uncomfortable question because the sector trained most of us to lead with title. Country Director. Programme Coordinator. Senior Advisor for the Something-or-Other Cluster. The vocabulary is professional armour. The minute you take it off, things get political and personal, fast.

Aisha Tambajang came to this conversation prepared to take it off.

Identity vs Positionality

The distinction that anchors this episode is one the sector talks around but rarely talks about. Identity is what you bring into the room. Your background, your history, the people whose names live in your inheritance. Positionality is what the room does with you. Where it places you. What it permits you to say. What it expects you to be.

You can have a strong identity and a weak positionality. You can have a weak identity and a strong positionality. Most of the harm in this sector comes from people pretending those two are the same thing.

Aisha is clear: this isn't an academic distinction. It shows up in coordination meetings, in donor calls, in the quiet moment when a national staff member is asked to validate a decision that was already made in another time zone. The room knows where everyone sits. Pretending it doesn't is its own kind of violence.

Ancestral Responsibility

One of the most striking ideas in this episode is what Aisha calls ancestral responsibility. The sense that her work isn't only accountable to the present moment but to the people who made her possible, and to the people her decisions will make possible (or impossible) tomorrow.

It's a framing that cuts against the sector's usual time horizon. Logframes work in twelve-month cycles. Strategic plans cap out at five years. Donors want results before the next grant window. Ancestral responsibility says: none of those timelines are mine.

That's not a rejection of accountability. It's a deeper one.

Rushing to Fix vs Curiosity to Solve

The sector loves a fix. A pilot. A pivot. A new framework. The annual report is full of them. But Aisha draws a line between rushing to fix something and being curious enough to actually solve it. She argues most of what we call innovation is the former.

Rushing to fix is reactive. It's anxious. It treats the problem as the obstacle to the work. Curiosity to solve is patient. It treats the problem as the work. The difference, she suggests, is whether you trust the people closest to the problem to be part of the answer, or whether you've already decided they're not.

Leadership in Times of Disruption

And then the conversation turns, as conversations on this podcast tend to, to leadership. Specifically, leadership when the ground is moving.

The sector is in a disruption phase that nobody wanted and nobody planned for. Funding contraction. Donor consolidation. Geopolitical realignment. The infrastructure of the last twenty years is shrinking faster than the infrastructure of the next twenty is forming. People in leadership positions are trying to hold organisations together while the organisations themselves are quietly asking whether they should.

Aisha doesn't offer a recipe. She offers a question: what does it mean to lead with values when the values cost something?

If your values only show up when it's safe, when the funding is there, when the politics align, when the cost is borne by someone else, they're not values. They're preferences.

The Uncomfortable Bottom Line

This episode doesn't end with action items. It ends with a recognition. The room you walk into matters. The room you build matters more. And the people you bring into both, and the people you leave outside, say more about your leadership than any framework ever will.

Who are you in the room?

It might be the only question worth asking before any of the others.