#brettdavidson Guest User #brettdavidson Guest User

In the Zones (of Narrative Change work)

The term ‘narrative change' is used a lot these days, but since it has many overlapping meanings and entails very different functions and applications, conversations between people who say they do narrative change can sometimes get a little confusing. There are several contending or competing conceptions of what narrative change aims to do—the ends of narrative change—and how we should be doing it—the means.

Read More
#brettdavidson Guest User #brettdavidson Guest User

Digging out from Narrative Collapse

In a widely viewed TedX talk back in 2009, Tyler Cowen urged his audience to be suspicious of stories. Cowen’s advice came in the context of increasing use of storytelling that Cowen felt could be manipulative because it moved people while hiding its creators’ biases, perspectives, and assumptions.

In an article in The Atlantic in 2023, James Parker observed that we now distrust narrative. We are in a crisis of narrative. Not (just) a contestation between different stories but a contestation and crisis over narrative itself. So what does all of this mean for those of us who work in the world of story and narrative?

Read More
#brettdavidson Mia Deschamps #brettdavidson Mia Deschamps

How We Think About Thinking

It’s time to be more intentional about using machine metaphors for machines and telling better stories about humans.

Through descriptive language, music, sounds and images, stories engage our senses and our embodied thinking. They combine emotion, factual information and various forms of tacit knowledge, often in deceptively simple ways.

Read More
#brettdavidson Guest User #brettdavidson Guest User

Blurring the Boundaries

We need new ways of thinking about our narrative change work.

When people think beyond the immediate problem they are trying to solve, when they envision a world in which they’ve already won, those visions of a just world end up being remarkably similar, no matter what issue they started from.

Read More
#brettdavidson Guest User #brettdavidson Guest User

Connecting ethical storytelling and narrative change

Connecting ethical storytelling and narrative change

If storytelling is to be a truly powerful tool for social justice activism, it is important to pay as much attention to the process of storytelling as to its outcome. Unless it is approached thoughtfully and with great care, impact-driven storytelling can easily become transactional and extractive, inflicting some of the very harms it seeks to address.

Read More