This document discusses the power of narrative and storytelling. It notes that narrative provides meaning rather than objective truth. It explores how power shapes the point of view and assumptions underlying stories, and how stories can normalize power and universalize certain experiences. The document advocates examining dominant stories in culture and finding ways to change narratives by reframing issues and repurposing existing stories and pop culture to shift understanding.

3. We are made of stories
Truth vs. Meaning
The currency of narrative is not truth, it is meaning

5. NARRATIVE ANALYSIS OF
POWER
STORY-BASED
STRATEGY

6. Elements of Story
 Conflict
 Characters
 Show Don’t Tell Images & Symbols
 Foreshadowing
 (Underlying Assumptions)

7. Power Over
EXTERNAL INTERNAL
Physical/Economic Narrative/Ideological

9. Narrative Power Analysis
 Changing the Stories: not what people
don’t know, but what they do know =FILTERS
 Examining Dominant Stories in US Culture
 Power shapes Point of View of the story
 Stories can Normalize Power/Universalize
Experience

10. “Loots” “Finds”

12. Meme
“A unit of self replicating cultural information”
Contagious ideas, stories, images, and rituals that spread from
imagination to imagination, generation to generation, shaping and
shifting human cultures…
a capsule for a story to spread…

15. Frame:
The larger story that shapes understanding of
information, experiences, and messages; the structure
and boundaries of a narrative that defines point-of-view
and power. Frames operate is pre-existing narrative
lenses in our minds.

24. Foreshadowing
Framing with Vision

25. Re-Purposing Existing Narratives
Repurposing Pop Culture

26. Points of Intervention
War
or
Occupation?
Making the Invisible Visible

27. Deepen Analysis/Connect
Mobilize story Amplify
Organize

29. A call to innovation…
o Facing the Slow-Motion
Apocalypse
o Harnessing psychic breaks
o Towards Ecological Justice…

30. www.smartMeme.org