Newsletter #1
Discover more from Inter-Narratives
Welcome!
This is the first Substack edition of our fortnightly newsletter for the re-imagined Inter-Narratives community, the first edition in our new home (Reset Narratives Community newsletter #36). To find out more about the community and our approach, see our launch article.
In these newsletters you’ll find out about our upcoming public and community sessions, and receive links to relevant work, insight and events, tagged according to our simple model.
Off we go!
Sessions
Community
22nd June, 14:00
Come join the first community session. For the uninitiated these are warm, welcoming spaces to gather, learn, share work and burning questions. It will be hosted on Zoom, and won’t be broadcast or recorded. If you’d like to share work at the session do let us know at inter-narratives@greenfunders.org with the subject “Session”.
Public
More details to follow about our first Public session, which will be hosted in July by one of our expert curators, Adam Corner.
credit: Patternity, Judy Schmidt
Shares
Key: 📝 Article | 📋 Report | 📢 Campaign
Harnessing Narrative Persuasion For Good
Kirk Cheyfitz
“Bridging the gap between academic study and impact storytelling for political and social change.” A thorough discussion of what it means to work with narratives in pursuit of pro-social change. It includes a consideration of the language we use in the field, and the need to consider broader audiences as we do. It also explores the role of ‘undernarration’ in harmful narratives and how to balance fact and emotion to promote healthy narratives – a topic in need of further study, and a timely opportunity for academics and practitioners to collaborate.
#deepnarrative #narrativestrategy
Testing Times
Sanjiv Lingayah & Nina Kelly, Reframing Race
New research shows a mixed picture on race: 4 in 10 members of the public think some races are naturally harder working than others, yet 9 in 10 people support action to tackle racism. The full groundbreaking Testing Times report – involving 20K participants - gives an insight into the language and information most likely to move people towards anti-racist thinking.
#data #insight #language
Misunderstanding Misinformation
Claire Wardle
Challenging the “atomised” approach to assessing and responding to misinformation – ”We researchers become so obsessed with labeling the dots that we can’t see the larger pattern they show” – calling for a recognition that “people aren’t influenced by one post so much as they’re influenced by the narratives that these posts fit into.” The answer involves breaking out of silos and learning to participate on the ground, in pursuit of “healthy information ecosystems”.
#data #narrativestrategy
We Need A Better Story
Philippa Stroud, Arc Forum
Witness the tactics and approach of typically progressive narrative change efforts being adopted and promoted by a more conservative, if contrarian, group. “Corrosive cultural criticism in recent decades has left the coherence of our cultural stories hanging by a thread. Our lack of a common narrative has left us feeling disillusioned and disempowered in a time when humanity is more prosperous, healthy, and better resourced than at any point in history.”
#narrativestrategy #tactics #reactionary
Breaking The Silence On Climate Change
Claire Brown, Alex Evans and Kate Pumphrey, Desmog
Could the humble conversation be the missing ingredient to mass scale agency-building and climate action? Larger Us think it might be, so in the interest of “expanding our circles of compassion,” they are teaming up with membership organisations across society to train people to hold creative conversations based on “listening, respect, generosity and curiosity.” Their hunch is that people are looking for a different kind of activism: “the kind of activism that gives us a sense of agency and hope rather than helplessness and doom; that welcomes in rather than calling out; and that builds the connection and joy that so many of us yearn for.”
#data #narrativestrategy #tactics
New words to hold the invisible world of possibility
Nora Bateson
The first of three essays exploring ‘warm data’, which Nora Bateson explains is “information of another order…that is alive within the transcontextual relating of a living system”; information that is “wiggly, unpredictable and sometimes invisible”. We are encouraged to reflect on its role in helping us to make change “within ‘industrialized’ perception”, without ”re-produc(ing) the dreams of the cul‐ture in which it was forged.”
#data #language #narrativestrategy
Imagination is (still) not a luxury
Gabriella Gómez-Mont, JRF
An overview of Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Imagination Infrastructuring event, from one of its curators. An article that goes deep and wide, “perhaps this time between worlds, with all its unknowns, with all its grief-making and intense necessities, its joys and its terrors, will at least end up being ‘the axe for the frozen sea inside us,’ as Franz Kafka once wrote.”
#narrativestrategy #tactics
Events
Rehearsing Futures Part 2: Experiments in Imagination
13 July, 6.30pm - Conway Hall London and online
Part of ‘Rehearsing Freedoms’, a groundbreaking 2-year programme of work by Healing Justice London. This public conversation, organised by Healing Justice London and Kin Structures, will feature cultural workers, artists and producers who are visioning and imagining liberatory futures where we can all live with dignity, safety and belonging.
Quotes
“I believe that through all of this we have learned to fight with joy, even though it gets very hard and painful. We must know that we don’t have a backup planet, we only have one.” — Berta Cáceres
“I believe that in order to understand reality, we have to keep in mind that reality is this network of relations, of reciprocal information, that weaves the world.” — Carlo Rovelli
“Narrative organizing is the act of building, creating and using narrative to shift power towards justice, equity and democracy...When we bring alignment, polyvocality, and community leadership to narrative work we are organizing people to hold and exert narrative power.” — Rachel Weidinger
“Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.” — Chimimanda Ngozi Adiche
"Only in death is there rebirth. The balance is not a stillness, it is a movement, an eternal becoming." — Ursula K Le Guin
Thanks for joining us for this first edition!
If you have something that you’d love to see in these newsletters, or have any feedback, please reach out at inter-narratives@greenfunders.org with the subject “Newsletter”.
See you soon,
Paddy & Ella