Talking Change

It is a truth universally accepted that stories change the world. However, there is a lot of anxiety about how we can measure, witness, and demonstrate this change. In this final  episode  of Doing Things with Stories, two extraordinary artists and story-tellers, Bhavani Esapathi and Terry Jerry A'wase propose to us that the answers to that question are difficult because we got the question wrong in the first place.

From his practice as a film-maker who uses fiction as a way of imagining different and new kinds of futures for the youth in Africa, Terry Jerry asks us to pay attention not to the measurement but the experience of change, and locates it in the imaginaries and imaginations of the communities that dream differently. In a very different setting, in her work on health and migration, Bhavani tells us that change is internal, and sometimes so small, that it might never register on the seismic scales of change making instruments. Both of them invite us to think about impactful stories, not through the lens of scale, but through the lens of intensity. Stories that travel are not the same as stories that stay, and make home with the people who they are important to.

Narrative change cannot be a radical process of disruption that is measured in traditional metrics of engagement, numbers, audiences, and growth. Instead, it requires new nuances, instruments, and frameworks that can help us feel and map the change that is produced as stories grow, share, and become emotional milestones of care and collectivity.

Section 1: Bodies that change

Narrative Change invites us to remember that our stories are embodied experiences. The kind of bodies that are involved, invoked, and implicated through the acts of story-telling, need to be at the center of our narrative practice. Especially in the digital networks, where contexts collapse and stories travel beyond human scale and speed, it is easy to think of stories as abstracted things that are pure information. But it is important to emphasise that every story is about many lives lived, and as stories grow and share, they influence and shape many other lives and bodies. Stories change when the bodies around the stories change.Bodies change when stories touch them, and we need forms of talking and listening for narrative change to find roots in our collective consciousness. It is this change, of bodies and stories meeting,

In this audio introduction, Terry Jerry pays attention to the bodies and practices involved in change making. He reminds us that imagining change is a condition of privilege – and many people do not have the capacity for it. Story-telling then becomes a way of not just dreaming but also empowering people to imagine change, and making and documenting those possibilities. He offers insights, tools, and experimental practices through which change can be conceived of, and insists that Narrative Change begins when stories are told to inspire and find futures worth fighting for.Terry Jerry's poetry and conviction invites you to think about the various everyday activities of talking, meeting, collaborating, listening, engaging, organizing, and eating as social and political labors that have to be incorporated into our measurement of narrative change.

Section 2: Body of Change

Collectives are often recognized as many different people coming together for a common purpose. But stories are as much about putting ourselves together – finding intimacies with our own selves – as they are about organizing people into common clusters. Narrative Change encourages us to look at change through the body that marks, imprints, experiences, narrates change, and also to look at change as a body that moves, absorbs, shifts, connects, experiences and transforms the individual into a collectively held person. In order to think of the change that narratives produce, we need to think of the journeys a body takes, at becoming itself, and aligning with others: Stories are not things we measure, stories are measures of the things that we do.Narratives, are not nouns, but they are verbs,

Bhavani begins with the vast landscape of the small bodies that we have to help us identify where change is located and lives in our bodies. She asks us to explore what our bodies communicate about change – envisioning change within our bodies – and take stock of the traces, scars, marks, wrinkles, and spots, that write our life on our skins. Instead of looking outside for standard indicators of change, she offers change as a unique experience that is written on to our bodies, and held together as coordinates for a collective map of change. She invites us to create change through a constellation of bodies, experiences, and communities in order to think about the impact that narratives make.  

Section 3 : Memories of the future

Narrative Change practices challenges the individual driven stories of fighting against and overcoming challenges. Instead, we need to recognize the moments of vulnerability, crises, and fragility, that inspire individuals to start movements. The stories we tell cannot just be about the actions of and individual as a hero. Narrative change begins when we talk about the reasons that forced or shaped somebody to do something extraordinary, and the stories have to address the conditions that necessitate the action, rather than the gloriousness of the action itself. Thinking through the questions of communities the individuals together, and the stories that keep communities together offers us a way of focusing on histories and pasts that mark the narrative practice.

In this poignant podcast, Bhavani and Terry Jerry both help us identify a particular moment in their life that changed their own trajectories of who they would become as people. Recognizing these moments where decisions are made – the histories that shape our futures – becomes an important part of narrative change. Change doesn't just remain an abstract, untethered phenomenon, but sparks from these moments when a community understands and decides that it has to take action from a particular challenge or crisis. In their reflections and recollections, we learn how to find the desire to make change, and to recognize the personal spark and the collective energy that fuels and inspires change making practices.

Section 4: Dream the change you want

Narrative Change has to begin with the realm of the possible. Stories are powerful because they help us imagine alternatives. It is only when we see the alternatives, that we can become the kind of people who can make those alternatives. Stories are invitations to action. Stories invite us to step in, as different characters, who can make dreams come to reality. Narrative Change recognizes the creative spark and artistic imagination in all of us, and looks at stories, not merely as reflections but as aspirations of futures that we want to collectively live in. In this, they become a call for action, and their power has to be measured in this call, which reaches out and transforms people into being stories and not just telling them.

In this last duet of a poetic film and a monologue, Terry Jerry and Bhavani invite you to reimagine the landscapes and rebuild environments that you and the communities you work with, desire. They help us realize how stories become the fuels of our change making practices, and how they can inform our critical voices to build hope. Simultaneously, they ask us to think about our own understanding of change, practice of change, and the work and exchange that goes in the making of change. It is only when we imagine change that we can build hope and in hope we become narrative change makers who harness the power of narratives for collective action.  

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