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Stories Of Change Narrative And Social Movements: A Systematic Study of Narrative Analysis



Study of stories and storytelling in social movements can contribute to our understanding of recruitment that takes place outside formal movement organizations; social movement organizations' ability to withstand strategic setbacks; and movements' impacts on mainstream politics. This paper draws on several cases to illuminate the yields of such study and to provide alternatives to the overbroad, uncritical, and astructural understandings of narrative evident in some recent writings. It also urges attention to the role of literary devices in sociological analyses of collective action.




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The second edition of the guide covers how to develop a strategy to guide your work, how to tell great stories in any format and engage audiences, some methods used in telling stories for social change, and the structure you need to incorporate stories into your everyday work.


The first edition of the guide, published in 2013 and aimed at grantmakers, was based on over 75 interviews with funders, communications experts and storytellers of all sorts. It looked at the recent history of storytelling and social change; reviewed the theories of change behind this work; provided case studies of 10 projects and their funders; offered guidance on every stage of grantmaking; included sidebar interviews and other features; and listed resources for additional exploration. The guide also featured a foreword by playwright and actress Anna Deavere Smith, and an afterword from philanthropy expert Gara LaMarche. It was supported in part by funding from the Brimstone Grant as administered by the National Storytelling Network.


The Center for Story-based Strategy (CSS) s a national movement-building organization dedicated to harnessing the power of narrative for social change. e offer social justice networks, alliances and organizations the analysis, training and strategic support to change the story on the issues that matter most.


In the first seven sessions of the program, you will learn to craft your own public narrative and coach others to help craft theirs. You will then learn how to use public narrative to create an empathetic bridge that enables others to respond to urgent challenges of loss, difference, power and change in your organization, your community, or among your constituency.


Although stories about people navigating everyday environmental decisions likely resonate with readers due to their familiar context, not all commonplace heroes may be equally relatable. Characters with persistent, intrinsic pro-environmental motivations, i.e., those motivated to take actions with the intention of having a positive environmental impact, and who consistently engage in collective (e.g., rallies, petitions) and lifestyle (e.g., veganism) climate actions, can be perceived as disruptive and radical13, or as trying to appear more moral than they actually are14. They may even face do-gooder derogation i.e., their advocacy might end up demotivating others because they are seen as annoying, too moral and unrelatable15,16. Therefore, it is possible that characters whose actions are driven by external factors (rather than intrinsic motivation), for example, someone who takes climate actions under social pressure from their friends, may be seen as more relatable and have a lower chance of demotivating others. However, evidence also suggests that those who are intrinsically (as opposed to extrinsically) motivated are more consistent in their behaviour i.e., they are more likely to persist with a behaviour over time, even in the face of difficulty17. This matters because, readers identify more with coherent characters, those whose actions are consistent and driven by their motivation and goals18.


Stories can prompt readers to attribute intentions to characters9 and speculate what mental states caused their actions27. Intentions are indicative of motivation and instrumental for behaviour28. Intrinsically and extrinsically motivated behaviour is performed because the activity itself provides satisfaction or to achieve an unrelated, external goal respectively29. So, the same pro-environmental action can either be intrinsically or extrinsically motivated based on whether the actor performs it to protect the environment (i.e., has pro-environmental intentions) or to gain social approval (i.e., has status-seeking intentions) respectively. As a result, intentions are crucial social signals in narratives. Readers expect characters to take actions consistent with their intentions9 and therefore use intentions to infer if the actor is intrinsically or extrinsically motivated, form moral judgements about the character27, infer their goals and values, and predict their future behaviour.


Although the intentional environmentalist narrative increased support for climate policy and intentions to take collective and individual pro-environmental actions, it did not increase the amount participants donated to environmental charities, relative to the control. This finding is consistent with other research that finds the effects of narratives on pro-environmental self-reported attitudes, beliefs, and policy support, but limited effects on revealed donations behaviour6,7,23. Does this mean that narratives are unable to change pro-environmental behaviour? Not necessarily: it is possible that our treatment may have impacted pro-environmental behaviours which are more congruent with the narrative (e.g. dietary choices), but which were not measured in our experiment. Indeed, while many studies use donation outcomes as a proxy for pro-environmental behaviour, recent experimental evidence shows little to weak correlations between donation behaviour elicited using incentivised tasks to helping and pro-social behaviours in the field33. This is largely because the determinants of behaviours vary greatly based on situational context.


A longstanding challenge of community-based participatory research (CBPR) has been to anchor evaluation and practice in a relevant theoretical framework of community change, which articulates specific and concrete evaluative benchmarks. Social movement theories provide a broad range of theoretical tools to understand and facilitate social change processes, such as those involved in CBPR. Social movement theories have the potential to provide a coherent representation of how mobilization and collective action is gradually developed and leads to systemic change in the context of CBPR. The current study builds on a social movement perspective to assess the processes and intermediate outcomes of a longstanding health promotion CBPR project with an Indigenous community, the Kahnawake Schools Diabetes Prevention Project (KDSPP).


Social movements, generally viewed as large group actions that promote social change [14, 15], share a set of common features with CBPR, such as aiming to reverse unequal relations of power by creating broad social, policy and systemic changes [4, 16, 17]. The field of social movement research has produced a vast array of theoretical approaches, providing substantial theoretical tools to understand and facilitate collective action and social change [14, 15, 18,19,20,21]. While many fields of research and action aimed at social betterment have been inspired by social movements [10, 22, 23], to our knowledge social movement theories have never been explicitly used to inform and better understand CBPR processes. We believe these theories can provide a coherent representation of how mobilization and collective action is gradually developed and leads to systemic change in the context of CBPR.


As a first step in assessing the relevance of social movement theories to understanding CBPR, we conducted a framework synthesis of illustrative CBPR projects (8) using a multidimensional social movement theory-based framework [24]. This synthesis, presented elsewhere [24], resulted in the development of a multidimensional framework through which to conceive and map community change processes in the context of CBPR. In addition, our synthesis demonstrated the relevance of using modern social movement theories, such as resource mobilization theory [15, 20, 25, 26], political process theory [14, 20, 21, 27] and framing theory [14, 28,29,30], to understand and examine CBPR processes. More specifically, it demonstrated that CBPR projects, like social movements, can be envisioned as collective processes evolving dynamically and iteratively through a four-stage lifecycle: (1) emergence, (2) coalescence, (3) momentum, (4) maintenance, consolidation, integration or decline. Key elements of this four-stage process include capitalizing on resources, opportunities, and building partnership and collaboration among different organizations and entities. Just like a social movement, CBPR also makes strategic use of collective framing processes to define a representation of a social problem (cause), mobilize around the cause as well as to define a collective action strategy leading to system changes addressing the problem [24]. Here, we draw on the conclusions of our previous work to design and evaluate a specific CBPR project.


In accordance with KSDPP principles, this study builds on a community-based participatory approach, involving partnership building, regular exchange among partners, and experience sharing between the researchers, KSDPP intervention staff and the Community Advisory Board (CAB) [54]. This study uses an interpretivist perspective, which holds that reality is constructed through the meanings developed by social actors, including the investigators. Thus, findings emerged through dialogue and negotiation of interpretations between the researchers and stakeholders involved in this study. 2ff7e9595c


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