A Glossary of Key Concepts from Season 1
By Lila Raouf and Omyra Lakhanpal
Throughout Season 1 of The Imposters, one question repeatedly surfaced: Who gets to be seen as an expert? As conversations unfolded across twelve interviews, recurring concepts, language, and ways of understanding expertise began to emerge. This glossary is a synthesis of those conversations.
It captures how guests collectively defined, challenged, and reimagined ideas related to expertise, knowledge, leadership, and humanitarian practice.
Part I: Rethinking Expertise
Season 1 begins by challenging traditional ideas of expertise. These concepts explore how lived experience, identity, and recognition shape who is considered knowledgeable—and why some forms of expertise continue to be overlooked.
Imposter Syndrome
While imposter syndrome is often understood as individual self-doubt despite one’s accomplishments, Season 1 explores it as a response to systems that repeatedly fail to recognize certain forms of expertise. For practitioners with lived experience of displacement, conflict, or migration, this self-doubt may reflect exclusion rather than a lack of ability. Rather than asking “Why do I feel like an imposter?” the conversations invite a different question: Who gets to be seen as an expert?
Explored with: All season 1 guests
Expertise
Throughout Season 1, expertise is reframed as something broader than formal education or professional credentials. The conversations suggest that expertise can also come from lived experience, contextual understanding, long-term relationships, and community knowledge.
Explored with: All season 1 guests
Lived Experience
The personal knowledge accumulated through navigating particular social, political, cultural, or historical realities.
Explored with: All season 1 guests
Lived Expertise
The ability to interpret, apply, and translate lived experience into professional judgment, decision-making, leadership, research, or systems change.
Explored with: Samia Mazhary, Aafreen Shah, Mohammed elHajj, Jill Barasa, Najlaa Dawod
Recognition
Recognition is the process through which knowledge is acknowledged as legitimate. Throughout Season 1, guests argue that many practitioners already possess expertise, but institutions often fail to recognize it because of who they are or where that expertise was developed.
Explored with: All season 1 guests
Belonging
Belonging is more than feeling accepted—it is being recognized as someone whose knowledge and experiences matter. Throughout Season 1, guests suggest that belonging is created not by fitting into existing systems but by transforming them to value different forms of expertise.
Explored with: Aafreen Shah, Samia Mazhary, Lila Raouf, Najlaa Dawod
Marginalization
Marginalization is the process by which individuals or communities are excluded from recognition, decision-making, and power. Throughout Season 1, Mohamed Kappi reframes imposter syndrome through this lens, arguing that feelings of being an imposter may reflect experiences of discrimination and exclusion rather than individual insecurity. This shifts the conversation from “What’s wrong with me?” to “What systems have shaped my experience?”
Explored with: Mohamed Kappi (Episodes 4 & 5), Nana Ama Boa-Amponsem (Bonus Episode)
Part II: Rethinking Knowledge
Building on the question of expertise, these concepts introduce the theoretical foundations that emerged throughout Season 1. Together, they help explain why some forms of knowledge are privileged while others are dismissed, and how we might begin to rethink what counts as evidence and expertise.
Coloniality
Coloniality describes the ongoing systems and structures that continue shaping whose knowledge is valued long after formal colonialism ended. Throughout the season, guests connect coloniality to education, humanitarian practice, and ideas about expertise.
Explored with: Mai Abu Moghli, Najae Murray, Nana Ama Boa-Amponsem
Orientalism
Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism explains how the “East” has historically been represented through Western perspectives. In Season 1, this concept helps explain why people from the Global Majority are often treated as objects of study rather than authorities on their own experiences.
Explored with: Mai Abu Moghli, Lila Raouf
Unlearning
Unlearning is the process of critically examining assumptions we’ve inherited about expertise, leadership, and knowledge. Rather than simply learning something new, it involves questioning what we’ve been taught to accept as normal.
Explored with: Lila Raouf, Mai Abu Moghli
Epistemic Privilege
Researchers may translate lived experience into academic knowledge, but without the knowledge held by communities themselves, there would be no research to produce. From this perspective, lived experience is not something to be made objective—it is itself a source of knowledge.
Explored with: Mai Abu Moghli
Contextual Intelligence
Contextual intelligence is the ability to understand the social, political, cultural, and institutional realities of a place. It is a form of expertise developed through experience and relationships rather than textbooks.
Explored with: Jill Barasa
Community Knowledge
Community knowledge is the practical understanding developed through lived experience within communities. Throughout Season 1, guests argue that refugee-led organizations and local leaders often recognize needs, risks, and solutions long before external actors do.
Explored with: Najlaa Dawod, Mohamed elHajj, Fadela Novak Irons, Tharwat Abaza
Evidence Generation
Evidence generation is often associated with formal research. Season 1 expands this idea by showing that storytelling, conversation, and lived experience can also generate valuable evidence for policy and practice.
Explored with: All guests in season 1
Pockets of Epistemic Resistance
Spaces where different ways of knowing are welcomed and people do not have to fight to have their knowledge taken seriously. In the bonus episode, Lila reflects on The Imposters itself as one example—using conversation and storytelling to make complex ideas more accessible.
Explored with: Mai Abu Moghli, Lila Raouf
Laboratories of Hope
Aya Sharfi describes universities as “laboratories of hope”—spaces where new ideas can be imagined, debated, and tested. Rather than simply transmitting knowledge, universities have the potential to create more just futures.
Explored with: Aya Sharfi
Part III: Rethinking Humanitarian Practice
These concepts explore how humanitarian action, education, and international development begin to look different when communities are recognized as experts, partners, and leaders—not simply beneficiaries.
Localization
In Season 1, localization is framed as a question of power rather than resource transfer. It asks whose voices set priorities, whose knowledge shapes decisions, and who defines success.
Explored with: Nana Ama Boa-Amponsem, Aya Sharfi, Najlaa Dawod, Lila Raouf
Local Leadership
Local leadership means communities shape agendas rather than simply participating in programs designed elsewhere. Throughout the season, guests argue that meaningful localization begins when local actors lead decision-making.
Explored with: Nana Ama Boa-Amponsem, Fadela Novak-Irons
Refugee-Led Organizations (RLOs)
Season 1 challenges the idea that refugee-led organizations should simply be included in humanitarian systems. Instead, guests argue they are already essential parts of those systems because they possess trust, contextual intelligence, lived expertise, and leadership within their communities.
Explored with: Najlaa Dawod, Fadela Novak-Irons
Accountability to Affected Populations (AAP)
AAP is the idea that organizations should be accountable not only to donors and partners, but also to the people they serve. Tharwat Abaza argues that humanitarian organizations already know how to practice accountability—they simply need to apply it more consistently toward affected communities.
Explored with: Tharwat Abaza
Agenda Setting
Agenda setting refers to deciding which issues matter in the first place. Throughout Season 1, guests argue that meaningful participation isn’t just about being consulted—it’s about having a voice in defining priorities from the beginning.
Explored with: Nana Ama Boa-Amponsem, Mohammed elHajj, Fadela Novak-Irons
Participation
Participation is often understood as involving communities in decision-making. Season 1 challenges this view by arguing that meaningful participation means people with lived expertise help shape priorities, influence decisions, and exercise agency from the beginning—not simply respond to plans already made.
Explored with: Fadela Novak-Irons
Co-Design
Co-design means creating programs, research, or policies with communities from the beginning rather than seeking feedback after major decisions have already been made. Throughout Season 1, co-design is presented as a practical expression of recognizing lived expertise.
Explored with: Fadela Novak-Irons, Nana Ama Boa-Amponsem
Capacity Sharing
Rather than “building capacity” as if communities lack it, capacity sharing recognizes that knowledge already exists across organizations and communities. Learning becomes reciprocal, with everyone bringing expertise to the partnership.
Explored with: Fadela Novak-Irons
Solidarity
Solidarity means working alongside communities as partners, recognizing existing expertise rather than assuming it must be created or transferred. It shifts relationships from helping people to building with people.
Explored with: Fadela Novak-Irons
Part IV: Building What’s Next
How do we create spaces where lived expertise can thrive?
The final concepts look toward the future. Rather than simply critiquing existing systems, they explore the relationships, conversations, and communities needed to create more equitable approaches to knowledge, leadership, and learning.
Mentorship
Throughout Season 1, mentorship emerges as a way of recognizing and developing lived expertise. Rather than presenting leadership as an individual achievement, guests emphasize community, mentorship, and collective growth.
Explored with: Aafreen Shah, Mohamed elHajj, Lila Raouf
Explaining Souls
Coined by Tharwat Abaza, “explaining souls” describes conversations where people committed to unlearning can speak openly without constantly defending or justifying their experiences. These conversations create space for deeper understanding and more honest dialogue.
Explored with: Tharwat Abaza
Why this Matters for The Imposters
Together, these concepts reveal a different way of thinking about expertise. Rather than offering fixed definitions, this glossary captures how practitioners, researchers, and people with lived experience collectively reimagined knowledge, leadership, and humanitarian practice throughout Season 1.
We hope it makes these conversations more accessible—and invites readers to continue asking the question that shaped the season: Who gets to be seen as an expert?
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