Newsletter #12
Decolonising | Liberatory | Participatory
Hi folks,
Before diving into our usual round-up of narrative work, we’d like to share specific material about communicating the atrocities in Israel and Palestine.
We reached out to experts in this community, who generously signposted us to insight they are finding helpful.
Shared, as ever, with care.
Israel and Palestine comms
Please note that some of the guidance might have been created for a different country, so please do sense-check it with your context.
If you have other narrative guidance or research that you think would be helpful to others, please do share with us.
📋 Guides
Solutions Not Sides: Avoiding Antisemitic and Islamophobic Hate Speech
Bend The Arc: Dismantling Antisemitism guidance
CCDH: How to navigate online disinformation and propaganda and practicing information resilience
Save The Children: How to talk to kids about distressing current events
Frameworks: Building the Bridge to Peace: Reframing Peace and Peacebuilding (2022)
📊 Insight
YouGov: British public sympathies
Public Event
Narratives for Stewarding a Different Economy Into Existence
Nov 14th | 16:30-18:00 GMT
Curator Cassie Robinson will host this session on how we story a different economy into existence. Including what needs composting from our current economic models, the new narratives we need to seed to see different economies emerge, and examples of where that’s already happening. She will be joined by Ashanti Kunene (Culture Hack Labs, Learning 2 Unlearn), Azul Carolina Duque (Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, En Cuidado da terra) and Anastasia Mourogova Millin (Second Muse Capital, Coralus).
Shares
Key: 📝 Article | 📋 Report | ⚙️ Tool | 🎬 Video
Climate Science Denial Rife at Launch of Jordan Peterson’s ARC Project
Adam Barnett, Desmog
Having learned some lessons from the narrative change field, ARC seeks “a better world where every citizen can prosper, contribute and flourish.” But speakers at their launch claim that “carbon emissions have ‘declined’, the climate crisis is a ‘secular religion’”, and the better world needs fossil fuels (also see). ARC is backed by “the UAE-based investment firm Legatum Group and British hedge fund millionaire Paul Marshall, who together own the TV channel GB News. As revealed by DeSmog this week, Marshall’s hedge fund holds $2.2 billion worth of shares in fossil fuel companies.”
#deepnarrative #issuenarrative #tactics #reactionary
Decolonising Economics: African and Feminist Perspectives on Post Growth Futures
Sonia Tesfaye, Post Growth Institute
On the need for “a more holistic understanding of wellbeing that incorporates cultural heritage, social cooperation, environmental stewardship, and community resilience” And how “a critical approach to Western-imposed metrics opens up space for formerly colonized nations and communities to redefine progress on their own terms and restore agency over their destinies…non-western cosmologies can contain approaches that reveal alternative, regenerative ways of life and economic systems. ‘Better futures’, in other words, need not be dreamed up — they already exist, if we know where to look…”
#deepnarrative #issuenarrative
Designing a Liberatory World
Pierce Gordon, Post Growth Institute
“The definition of design is to devise courses of action and change existing situations into preferred ones.” “When trying to create a ‘better world’, it’s necessary to look critically at the ways oppressive systems, in particular white supremacy, are enmeshed with the things that get designed and built.” “Every opportunity to build this space is a new chance to plant seeds, to harvest your knowledge, to connect with other people and figure out what the world can look like. So shut up and let the students teach you.”
#deepnarrative #tactics
Participatory Storytelling for Climate Justice
Abdel Mandili & Lucia Roggero, Resilient
A conversation with the founder of People's Planet Project which “trains Indigenous communities in filmmaking and geospatial mapping, giving them the tools to document the environmental injustices they face.” “Stories told in a participatory way have the capacity to change perspectives and delve into the root causes of a problem (...) when people who form part of a story are a part of their creation, over time that story represents something much closer to the truth and much more genuine.”
#narrativestrategy
How To Build Trust With Unlikely Allies
Claire Brown, Larger Us
“This is the story of how anti-fossil fuel campaigners and off-shore oil workers have come together to push for a fair transition to renewable energy…We shouldn’t be talking about phase out without also talking about just transition and concrete plans for support. We want to make sure the workers who came up with these demands are part of that discussion.” An instructive insight into the successful collaboration between Platform and Friends Of The Earth Scotland.
#tactics
Orienting Together: Mapping Your Narrative Landscape
Rachel Weidinger, Narrative Initiative
Practical guidance for creating a narrative landscape: “a map of the harmful and helpful narratives that affect how people think about, talk about, and make decisions about your cause.” Which can be followed with “a network map, a power map, a narrative capacity assessment, or a narrative integrity audit, so you know who you are working alongside and what you are up against.” And finally “how you will get to your destination — the stories, activations, art, and campaigns that will bring your narrative to life.”
#narrativestrategy
⚙️ Read here
Money Talks - Interactive Dashboard
Black Sands, Stack Data Strategy, Nice and Serious
A tool for navigating recent research into “public attitudes on global issues such as climate change, poverty and inequality, providing insights on how to communicate in order to win support for investment to tackle these issues,” with “new recommendations and insights for how to communicate about international investment in climate and development.”
#insight #tactics
⚙️ See here
The Reparations Narrative Lab
Liberation Ventures (US)
“A research hub that builds public support for reparations by assisting organisers, artists, and organisations in understanding the reparations narrative landscape, creating and testing stories and messages, analysing their audiences, designing experiments, and assessing the impact of their strategies.“ Their ‘Narrative House’ is a “co-created narrative tool built in coordination with organisers and advocates across the reparations movement.”
#narrativestrategy
⚙️ See here
Hold The Line
Oxfam, Creatives For Climate
A film featuring “first-hand experiences of human rights defenders on the frontlines of the climate crisis in South Africa, Colombia, and the United States, detailing how the operations of large brands and corporations impact them.” Created as a compliment to Oxfam’s Threats to Human Rights Defenders: Six Ways Companies Should Respond briefing paper from April 2023.
#issuenarrative
Quotes
(This selection of quotes is intended as a resource, in the hope that they may be useful for your own communications.)
“A poem cannot stop a bullet. A novel can’t defuse a bomb. But we are not helpless. We can sing the truth and name the liars. Stories are at the heart of what’s happening… we must work to overturn the false narrative of tyrants by telling better stories.” – Salman Rushdie
“Our cultural practices, media, and institutions must reinforce the future we want.” – Bina Venkataraman
"Ideology is often weaponised by those who are totally morally bankrupt to control those who are oriented towards values." – Rachel Donald
“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.“ – Arundhati Roy
"The antithesis of beauty is not ugliness, it’s carelessness” – Stefan Sagmeister
Thanks for joining us, see you here again in two weeks.
A reminder that if you have something that you’d love to see in these newsletters, or if you have any feedback, please reach out at inter-narratives@greenfunders.org
Very best,
Paddy & Ella