Ep 2: Changing the Narrative

If the first episode was about re-framing the crisis, the second episode, with Alejandra Ibarra Chaoul and Sabah Khan, is about changing the very structure of our stories. Both of them, drawing from their practice in organising collectives – Defensores de la Democracia (Defenders of Democracy) in Mexico and Parcham in India– remind us that stories can often be habits. More often than not, while telling stories, we resort to popular images, dominant narratives, and accepted images of people, places, and events.

Narrative Change is a conscious decision to disrupt and stop the status-quo arcs of stories and how we tell them. Stories cannot be just old, packaged in a new format, but need to be careful and considered, about how they create the realities that we find ourselves in. Alejandra and Sabah show how, even while offering stories of change, we often fall back on the very tropes and stereotypes that we are trying to fight. Instead of focusing on just new formats of telling stories for collective action, they are showing us how the very framing of our stories need to change so that they become a way of disrupting the accepted knowledge and old patterns of making change.

Section 1: In the Voices of Others

Sabah and Alejandra work in very specific communities and conduct their narrative work as a response to very different problems. Be in the activism for Muslim women reclaiming space in public or the archiving of work of journalists murdered in Mexico, they find their common ground in how they challenge the dominant narratives. In these 2 videos, they offer tools to identify stereotypes, deconstruct perception, change narratives, and educate the world with new ways of perceiving and relating with these stories.

In this exercise, Sabah and Alejandra demonstrate the power of offering our stories to others to tell. Despite their different locations, perspectives, and approaches, they engage in an act of generosity and trust, allowing the other to speak in their own voice. The exercise subverts the idea of the dominant mode of speaking only for ourselves, and instead raises questions about how do we give our stories to others and how we benefit from hearing our stories being held with care by others. Underlying this entire exercise is for us to think about the labour of receiving somebody else’s narrative, the responsibility of re-telling somebody else’s story, and the joy of being held by someone who tells our stories.

Section 2 : In their own voice #1

The focus on formats and circulation of stories often ignores looking at the ways in which stories perpetuate certain harmful practices. In addressing a crisis, we often reinforce the ways in which the crisis frames us, and our realities. If our stories become just illustrations of the crisis, we endorse the way it portrays people and offers solutions, without realising that it strengthens the crisis. Through the framework of Narrative Change, we understand how we fall back on easy-available stories and accept the frameworks and structures that are defined by others.

In this section, Sabah picks up the threads of her story from Alejandra, and talks to us about the ways in which her collective Parcham in Mumbai, India, is invested in changing the narratives of Islamic women’s identities. She shows how, many times, activists working on minority religion rights, buy into and reinforce the same stereotypes and images that they seek to fight against. With concrete examples and focusing on creative methods of organising communities, Sabah shows how Parcham produces new narrative conditions for different kinds of stories to emerge about Muslim women in India.

Section 2 : In their own voice #2

Stories are made of many different elements. Story telling is not just about the style and aesthetic but also about the kind of information that we foreground and choose in the telling. It becomes important to realise that stories eventually reflect the biases and limitations of the data that they are informed by, and can perpetuate certain tropes unconsciously. Narrative Change frameworks propose that we need to pay as much attention to the information that enters into a story, as we do to the stories themselves. The form and meaning of the story begin before the story gets told, and paying attention to it helps us to craft stories that challenge the dominant structures.

Alejandra takes reigns of the story of her organisation, Defensores de la Democracia, as she talks about the need to archive the legacy of journalists who have been killed in Mexico. She explains how she finds ways to gain attention, educates through challenging stereotypes, and amplifies the changed narratives, so that bodies and identities can gain more agency to reclaim their own lives, identities, and stories that go beyond the stories imposed on them. She shows how she refuses to accept these journalists as victims, and instead shifts the focus to talk of them as representatives of vulnerable communities, building a legacy of the larger collective that they stand for rather than the individuals that they are being reduced to. In doing so, she shows how the reframing of the story captures the impact on the lives of the journalist’s families, communities, and larger concerns around the crisis of freedom of speech and expression in her country.

Section 3 : Talking with Each Other

Stories are collectives. They are held together by communities. The individual does not tell the story to the many – the many make the story possible. It is important to recognise stories as conversations, and things that grow in dialogue. In doing so, the focus of the stories change, we become new things, and new people. Stories also become more than the message, and become a medium of building allies, sharing, drawing strength from previous legacies that communities hold dear to themselves. It is only when stories become commonly owned that they travel together to build resilience and sustainable change practices.

In this reflection video, Sabah and Alejandra remind us that it is not only how we tell the stories but what we tell the stories for, that is important. How we frame the story, reinforces or questions the problem that is at hand. Narrative Change becomes impactful when the personal and the structural come together, but this is not an easy process. They share insights from their own work, in how to stay with the trouble, and use the experience of personal joy, longing, belonging, and solidarity, to create new ways of approaching crises. This episode invites you to reflect on the narratives that drive the formation of specific images and stereotypes that we take for granted in habits of everyday life.

#doingthingswithstories #changingthenarrative #framingstories #care