Narrative Power Summit Opening Remarks

What’s good, narrative power builders!?

Thank you. Thank you to each of you here in Long Beach for traveling from near and far to join us this week.

And thank you to our virtual attendees for being present with us while doing what you need to do to care for yourselves and your families.

me @ #NPS22
photography by Green Tangerine Photography

The RadComms Leadership team and ReFrame staff are infinitely grateful for your sacrifice of time and your commitment to freedom and liberation. We see you.

In 2016, at the request of some of you and with the support of many, I initiated the infrastructure for the Radical Communicators Network as a repository for our grief, angst, desire for connection, and collective thinking after the 2016 elections.

As a safe place to explore the most radical ideas and approaches in the field of social justice communications; somewhere to commune and strategize about how to mitigate the ongoing threats to our communities, and somewhere to share best practices for building narrative power for our collective and liberated future.

And so much can happen in 6 years.

Climate change, created by unfettered economic growth and wealth accumulation by the capitalist class, has claimed an untold number of poor lives. Back-to-back hurricanes, deadly flooding, unrelenting drought, wildfires, and deadly heatwaves destroy Indigenous communities and ancestral lands. And we know that the people who have contributed least to the climate catastrophe are hit first and worst.

The lives of pregnant people—and those who become pregnant in the future—hang in the balance. The United States is one of only three countries to reverse abortion rights in the last century. And historical political conditions show us that we can expect the total weight of our criminal legal system to be leveraged on those who find ways to take abortion care into their own hands.

We know the best way to make our communities safer is by investing resources in people with good jobs, schools, and universal healthcare. Still, national and local elected officials are investing millions into already overloaded police budgets. They continue to fund the police to solve social problems they're neither trained nor qualified for while ignoring essential services like public education, food banks, and prevention programs.

We suffered through and defeated Trump and continue to resist Trumpism, neoliberalism, fascism, racism, anti-Blackness, homophobia, nativism, fatphobia, transphobia, ableism, and white supremacy—in all of its manifestations.

All over the world, false narratives and propaganda, including misinformation and disinformation campaigns, plague social movements organizing to wrest power from global elites. These campaigns often work to delegitimize the efforts of those challenging varying forms of racial, economic, and gendered oppression.

In the midst of all this, elected officials have decided the COVID-19 pandemic is over at the expense of the disabled, the immunocompromised, the aging, and other vulnerable communities.

We came together during a watershed moment in United States history, lived through it, survived it together, and grieved our personal and collective losses. And together, we have resisted and built narrative power for revolutionary ideas.

In those six years, we have made meaning of the world together by applying lessons from movements past and adapting contemporary strategies to counter the prevailing conditions of white supremacy, corporate greed, climate destruction, and interpersonal violence.

We have built narrative power and organized for—at a minimum—a more just and dignified world.

Whether the wars oppressed people fight are ideological, geopolitical, or both, it presents an opportunity to intervene. Narrative opportunities materialize from our sociopolitical conditions, and when there is sociopolitical disruption, we can weaken dominant narratives and insert a new narrative.

Together, we have witnessed narrative power in action and engineered some of the most significant social justice narrative interventions in the 21st century.

photography by Green Tangerine Photography

When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged and work norms quickly changed for millions of Americans, disability justice advocates took advantage of that disruption to proliferate messages that weakened dominant narratives about normative work culture, which privileges people without disabilities. They poked holes in and delegitimized ableist arguments by illustrating how quickly companies pivoted to remote work policies and practices when profits were threatened compared to the slow or non-response when disabled people made the same demands. We see you. We thank you.

Narrative experts leading survivor justice communications efforts proliferated feminist arguments globally and reframed the #MeToo movement as one that was spurred and nurtured by Black women. We see you. We thank you.

Organizers, scholars, and activists whose discipline tactics have reframed what some mislabel as the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” into a conversation about apartheid, racism, and the denial of fundamental rights. We see you. We thank you.

Communicators who continue to widen our collective understanding of gender beyond binaries. We see you. We thank you.

To the Black liberation communicators and organizers who delegitimized narratives of Black pathology that were used to justify the wars on poverty and drugs and the militarization of police in Black communities—and who, in turn, put the blame for Black suffering where it belongs—on the state. We see you. We thank you.

We build narrative power for social justice when we take advantage of political opportunities to construct narrative interventions that delegitimize hegemonic beliefs; and expand the collective perception of what is socially, economically, and politically possible.

We use the practice of communications to define what our future society looks, feels, smells, and tastes like, how we treat one another, what we do and do not believe, and how we understand the individual and the collective’s value in relation to social structures and the natural world.

Because we know … our humanity, freedom, and self-determination are directly connected to the power and resources, we have to distinguish ourselves from our oppressors.

In the six years since we became a Network and the five years we last convened, we have grown to more than 5,000 members in almost every U.S. state and at least 20 countries, illustrating a hunger for belonging and connectivity and an abundance of interest in the field.

And in that time, many of us have been deeply transformed in the service of the work. I know I have.

RadComms has become a transnational network of mutual aid with a vigorous exchange of ideas, exploding into solid relationships and new projects. For example, in 2021, inspired by this network, long-time RadComms member and my comrade autumn marie launched the Rwanda Communications Network to bring together communications professionals in Rwanda to collaborate, exchange best practices, provide professional development, and collectively support the growth of Rwanda’s communications industry.

The work autumn is doing is so important. Revolutionary social movements, like the ones to which many of us belong, require networked communities that expand beyond local bounds to transform political opportunities into long-term social protest or change.

Together we have democratized knowledge production. As we speak, I have the privilege of co-editing a RadComms anthology with THE Marzena Zukowska, which details world-building narrative campaigns and strategies led by YOU — progressive and leftist social movement communications workers in the 21st century. The funding for the book came from RadComms members, and it features more than 50 voices from our network.

We know first hand the language we use and the stories we tell significantly shape our views of the world, its people, and the policies we support.

However, while narrative power can inoculate us against false solutions, it cannot alone change the material conditions under which oppressed people live—and we must be aware that it is often co-opted and weaponized against us. And so we must remain vigilant and organize.

Palestinian historian Shereen Seikaly reminds us,

“At the thin intersections of popular memory and archival practices lie the stories people tell to make sense of the everyday. They weave these stories to shape the present, build connections to the past, and stake claims for the future.”

We have our work cut out to stake our claim for the future.

We know narrative shifts and social change do not happen overnight—nor do they occur one organization at a time. It requires all of us to be in community with one another.

Thank you:

RadComms Leadership team: Zaineb Mohammed, Hermelinda Cortes. Jewel Bush, Chelsea Fuller, Marzena Zukowska, Beaulah Osueke, and Shiyam Galyon, and to the RadComms support team Gaby Moss and Ariana Busby for your commitment to the network, your time, expertise, and energy:
The ReFrame staff team, especially Hermelinda Cortes, Raine Brandon, Joseph Phelan, & Alejandro Cantagallo, for your partnership, camaraderie, and collaboration.
The 31st Productions Event team, Leslie, Jamal, Hibba, and Paulette
To the Vfairs team: Hassan squared
To our photographer and my best friend, Sasha Matthews
Our merch vendor, Fresco Steez
Our virtual D.J. DJ Carmen Spindiego
Our emcee, hollis wong wear
Our graphics team, Gaius Benbow, and Look We Made It
Tiffany Hill and our virtual and in-person ASL teams
The NPS volunteer team
The Maya Hotel staff. We appreciate your labor.
To The California Endowment for resourcing this summit and to Mary Lou Fulton for your commitment to all things narrative.
To all of our sponsors for your support, we thank you.