Building narrative power
...and the future of narrative change
hope-based slack is back! After taking the summer off, normal service is resumed, with new posts coming fortnightly.
Last week, I attended Confluencia a meeting about Building Narrative Power convened by IRIS, the Narrative Hive and Puentes.
For me, narrative power is about building new ways of seeing the world.
Because whenever we use an old frame or concept, even to expose it, we reinforce it.
We must be conscious that whenever we use terms like colonialism, Global North/South or “good immigrant” narrative, we activate and reinforce the very concepts we oppose as the only way of seeing what is possible in thsi world.
We often fall back on these concepts because they are familiar: people already know them and can relate them to lots of prior information.
A creative agency executive recently told me social change stories should focus on problems, because they are more concrete and specific than the solutions.
But what social change communicators and activists need to do is make our solutions concrete and specific! To add texture to our ideas with stories, images and emotion.
That is exactly what Puentes do. Their campaigns, like Familias Ahora and Creo, reclaiming the concepts of family and religion respectively. They do it by bringing to life values-based narratives by pushing out streams of simple, rich, engaging content: quotes and questions on Facebook, Whatsapp stickers, infographics and empowering people by telling their authentic stories (including, crucially, the stories of people who grew up fundamentalist but who changed and want to inspire others to change too).
This is the essential “last mile” of narrative change work. You will find a similar strategy for civil society narratives in this new toolkit (I will write a post presenting it soon) and I think the same approach should be used to amplify welcoming narratives around migration.
What Puentes understands is that we need to mobilize people who share our values to spread our messages for us, in order to make our narratives more salient. Anat Shenker-Osorio calls this “mobisuasion”. Or, as Monica Roa, the inspiring founder and executive director of Puentes said in her speech last week, making voices heard is a collective task, that when we get behind our values we are “pure potency”:
“We all have the power to imagine, create and tell the stories that write History; that is, that we have narrative power. We are left with the collective task of expanding the social imagination so that people can once again dream of the futures we desire.”
The future of narrative change work
I was (unusually and embarrassingly) lost for words at one of the panels when asked to summarize Puentes in one word. I instead had to say that, for this reason, they are the world’s leading narrative change organization. Because they do not settle for analyzing harmful narratives, they bring new ones to life.
I borrowed one word to describe the work of Puentes from another Confluence participant Trevor Smith: world-building. (BTW, check out his org’s new Reparations Narrative House (you know I love a good messaging house)).
Another word for Puentes is simply: the future. Their approach is the future of narrative change work, and perhaps social change communications in general.
Narrative power is also about the future
Narrative power means telling a story to change the future, rather than to make known what happened in the past. You have to be mindful that the story you tell is likely to influence future decisions other people make about how they behave. The stories we tell, and the way we tell them, shape the future. (neuroscience note: our brains are prediction machines constantly trying to predict the future, based on prior experience).
When we talk about the current narratives that are dominant or harmful, we are doing narrative analysis. When we use new, alternative or values-based narratives, we are doing narrative change.
Another way to make sure we focus our messages on the future is to have a clear worldview or meta-narrative. At Confluence we talked about a human-centred meta-narrative similar to the Shared Humanity human rights worldview that I have talked about before - I’ll write more about this is in a forthcoming post.
Feed what you want to grow, not what you want to fight
Building narrative power demands building new vocabularies. This requires making people familiar with your ideas rather using old, harmful frames and tropes to get your point across. Because when you use the old frame, your reinforce it in all our minds, making us more likely to see the world through that harmful lens. Define people by the transformation you them to accomplish in future, rather than by the terms imposed by oppression.
If you are talking about harm, still talk about it, but also say how things should be instead. For any message, for any story you tell, ask if you want people to copy that action?
At Confluence I heard people use some powerful hope-based shifts: Majority countries instead of Global South (Nishant Shah), and indigeneity as the opposite of colonialism (Márquez Rhyne from Reframe). Being truly radical means offering something completely alternative in opposition to oppressive, dominant ways of thinking.
hope-based homework - fix your prefix
Usually when we do narrative analysis, it is because we do not yet have a strong vocabulary to articulate the change we want to see.
Try to track your own use of prefixes in the coming days.
When you find yourself using words with prepositions like “anti-” or “post-”, ask yourself what new vocabulary you might use to define your message by the new thing you want, rather than the old thing.
If someone is anti-capitalist, what are they pro-?
What does it mean to be de-colonial or post-colonial?
If society became more anti-racist, what would it be like?
If we want people to move beyond the dichotomy between global north and south, what new identities would need to be activated?
If those words are obvious, then let’s use them more. They are after all the foundation of the social change we want to see.
What sort of words come to mind when you try to make these shifts? Please share in the comments below or @ me on the socials.
Hopey, changey stuff
Another reason to beware using old frames to articulate harms is that both the oppressor and oppressed can internalize them in their identity. Bayard Rustin, quoted in this weekend’s FT, said it “can never produce anything politically creative” and “it could well happen that the guilty party, in order to lighten his uncomfortable moral burden, will finally begin to rationalise his sins and affirm them as virtues. And by such a process, today’s ally can become tomorrow’s enemy.”
A final note on power. Fintan O’Toole warns the left to remember the distinction between the concepts of power and “a universal idea of justice” and between skepticism and cynicism. Meaning: do not accept the right-wing worldview that all power is cynical, and beware even more narratives that appeals to universal human rights are always a smokescreen to conceal a struggle for domination. The article is an important reminder that human rights groups should be very cautious about repeating cynical, authoritarian narratives suggesting governments only care about universal values when politically expedient. Progressives should always believe in the possibility of progress (the clue is in the name): “The opposite of progressive hope is not realism. It is paranoia.”
Mobilizing Hope: The Comms Hub is an exciting new organization and they have just shared advice for talking about civil society in Poland. Key messages: focus on the future, make voters feel empowered and emphasize power in numbers.
A study on emotions and climate activism quoted in the Guardian got a lot of people in the hope-based community slack group talking: “Anger is by far the most powerful emotional predictor of whether somebody plans to take part in a climate protest….while sadness, fear and hope were the best predictors of behavioural change.” That the headline defines protest as climate action, but not behavioural change, says a lot about how we currently think about activism and social change.
If you are looking for more narrative content on substack, check out Brett Davidson, whose latest post is about the importance of listening.
New campaign from #SocialCareFuture. Please watch and share. (via Neil Crowther)
Events
Tomorrow, our hope-based friends Next Big Thing are holding a webinar on Listening to Gen Z: Building a Culture of People-First Values. Sign up here.
Also this week, Othering & Belonging Conference in Berlin! Let me know if you will be in town for it.
Shift of the week
On the theme of anger and climate protest, when climate activists threatened to disrupt the Berlin Marathon last month, my running group’s chat was full of vegan, Green-supporters freaking out. You are meant to antagonize your opposition, not the middle AND your own base! This is harmful because it pits two internal identities against each other - forcing people to choose. Not only is using the same tactic not radical, but it can undermine support for climate action even in people who care deeply about it.
Instead, climate activists should seek to reaffirm that green identity in people: give them more opportunity to activate the deep love of nature that is inherent in all human beings? That would be truly radical. More on this coming soon.
Quote of the week
“While it may be difficult to change the world, it is always possible to change the way we look at it.” - Matthieu Ricard
How we see the world impacts how we change it. Do we focus the sunlight of our attention on the problems, making them bigger, or do we nurture the small signals of hope that shows how we can make things different?
What’s making us hopeful
Zadie Smith is back challenging binary narratives, a living embodiment of art as a source of nuance that politics often lacks. “Sometimes there are strange freedoms that can happen in the place where nothing is labeled and nothing exists”.
“We are all the same. Return to that place.” Jon Batiste’s song, Worship, from his new album World Music Radio. Like the lyrics, the album’s concept (made with a global mix artists and genres) is rich in shared humanity and ubuntu. Latest addition to the hope-based playlist.