Oliver Dante Garcia
I'm Oli, co-founder, editor, and designer of The Songbird, and I am an independent journalist focusing on underground travel, culture, and politics. I find the world's most revealing stories are found at its edges, where lived reality diverges most from the headlines. My work is about uncovering these stories that mainstream outlets won't tell.
About
Parsiah Brandon
I'm Parsiah, co-founder and Editor-in-Chief for The Songbird, which I started because parachute journalism kept landing in the wrong places. I based The Songbird on the radical idea that we should understand cultures on their own terms, rather than applying essentialising, othering, or judging by Eurocentric assumptions, as mainstream media tends to.
I'm fascinated by state formation and nationalism, nomadism, ritualised economies, occult knowledge systems and identity hybridity. Crucially, I want to challenge liberal epistemologies of 'modernity', 'development' and 'individuality' through showing how different cultures build their own knowledge systems.
As an ethnographic correspondent for The Songbird and a Mandarin speaker mainly covering China and Inner Asia, I keep running into questions liberal frameworks can't answer: "Why do borders matter so much to states and so little to the people who cross them?" "How does identity survive when three different empires claim your territory as theirs?" "What knowledge gets lost when only certain languages count as credible?" I study Human, Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge, where I learned to challenge hegemonic knowledge systems. . Like any anthropologist, I'm always keen to get off the veranda, into the field and use both etic and emic perspectives to understand culture - the promethus. Unlike most, I think journalists should be too. The Songbird exists because the best stories require learning local customs, history, being willing to ask uncomfortable questions and understand a culture in its own light.
Dawud Mustifa
I'm Dawud, co-founder of the Songbird, and I'm a travel writer and independent journalist whose work is grounded in firsthand experience in under-reported and remote regions around the globe. I document everyday life, cultural norms, and social realities that are often overlooked, alongside the political and structural forces that shape them. I began travelling at a young age, and had visited 85 countries before the age of 20, experience that continues to inform how I approach travel writing and field journalism.
