narrative change

Our world is shaped by dominant political imaginaries of which there are relatively few at any point in history.

Elsewhere, while COVID-19 may have abated from peak hellish weirdness, the narratives that collapsed then have not been put back together again

when you aren’t just dismantling the narrative but providing another one, you are creating a new reality for your audience.

What beliefs keep the system in place? And what new narratives could change or replace the system?

Or, as illustrated by one of my all-time favorite quotes:

*“The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody sees.”

*Erwin Schödinger

Stories are thought experiments that cut through contemporary interests and structures to imagine an alternative world. Stories help us understand the current system but also provide the tools to investigate how that world is changing and reveal solutions to work to a different futures.

Organizers seek to impact all of these things—the way people reconstruct the past, the way we understand the present, and ultimately the way we envision what could be. Creating against the grain. What stories are we telling ourselves? What are we sowing into the world when we speak? Our politics are the product of this world-building process. And

When these narrative shifts occur among communities and groups of people, new potentials arise. People are capable of taking actions that defy systems of oppression and popular expectations. But to ready people for such moments, we must do more than raise the alarm about injustice.