Shaping Narrative, Shifting Power
Shaping Narrative, Shifting Power
Featured Story
Shaping Narrative, Shifting Power: Interviews with Organizers
We asked veteran organizers how their work transforms public narrative. They told us stories that demonstrate the power of narrative to shape the way we make sense of the world and the possibilities for changing it.
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Ricardo Levins Morales Bringing Back Ideology
Two of the architects of the narrative turn in organizing talk about the changes in community organizing that they’ve helped to spark over the past thirty years. Now that organizers have embraced narrative work and begun analyzing political and economic systems, they argue, it’s time to talk about ideology.
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Ricardo Levins Morales From Commodification to Public Good: Changing Our Housing Narratives
To guarantee a home for everyone, we must stop treating housing as a commodity and see it as a public good and a human right.
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Ricardo Levins Morales “We are essential, but we are excluded”: How Organizers Are Challenging Dominant Narrative about Immigration
The global economy encourages corporations to ship raw materials and goods around the planet but punishes workers who cross borders. Here’s how immigrant organizers in Florida are fighting back.
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Ricardo Levins Morales Reclaiming the Public in an Uncertain Era
Narrative strategy is integral to organizing and can create a powerful role for people in public life.
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Ricardo Levins Morales From Exploitation to Democracy: How We Will Save the Planet
Extractive racial capitalism is destroying the planet, but a thriving democracy can save us.
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Ricardo Levins Morales Just Transition: Moving from an Extractive to a Regenerative Economy
Miya Yoshitani has “shovel-ready” ideas for how the current crisis could prompt a just transition from the extractive economy to a regenerative economy.
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Ricardo Levins Morales Caregiving is Essential Work: Changing the Narrative to Make Care Work Visible and Valued
Organizers for the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Caring Across Generations talk about how we can move to a narrative of caregiving as a collective responsibility that demands collective solutions.
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Ricardo Levins Morales “The Organizing and the Narrative Were Always One”: The Campaign to Win the Affordable Care Act
Narrative is not a messaging strategy but the story driving the entire campaign.
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Ricardo Levins Morales Pulling Back the Curtain to Reveal What’s Possible
Most people operate under a set of competing narratives. Our job is to bring their most progressive understanding of the world to the fore.
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Ricardo Levins Morales Putting the Nails in Neoliberalism’s Coffin
"This is going to be the decade of Reconstruction if we can organize well."
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Ricardo Levins Morales “Love is Love” and Other Stories: The Role of Narrative in Winning the Freedom To Marry
To win the freedom to marry for gays and lesbians, we didn’t need new arguments. We didn’t need to find new rights. We needed to transform the hearts and minds of the public.
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Ricardo Levins Morales Fighting for Retail Workers’ Rights Means Revealing the Lies of Racial Capitalism
Retail corporations tell powerful narratives about the irresistible forces of economic and technological change to obscure the impact of their focus on short-term profits — often at the expense of workers. Winning campaigns with retail workers requires changing those narratives.
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Ricardo Levins Morales Safety Depends on Everyone Believing They Have a Future
Why we must move beyond “welfare queens” and “superpredators” to narratives that create opportunities for all of us.
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Ricardo Levins Morales Editor’s Note
Narrative is not a communications strategy to be layered on top of organizing campaigns but fundamental to the work we do as organizers: expanding people’s sense of possibility, agency, and power to create change.
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Ricardo Levins Morales Challenging Neoliberalism by Building Power for Tax Reform
Challenging the power structure and the assumptions of capitalism requires building a movement with millions of people. We can only do that if we transform the dominant worldview.