Conversation and change in a world reaching for justice
Doyle Canning (BA EDU ’03) wrote Re-Imagining Change: How to Use Story-Based Strategy to Win Campaigns, Build Movements, and Change the World and founded the Center for Story Based Strategy (storybasedstrategy.org).
Doyle created the Center based on the idea that “fundamental social change is not only possible, but deeply necessary. Real shifts are needed to address the ecological crisis, social injustice, oppression and state violence. Social movements organize towards long-term change when we target the root causes and shift cultural norms. Stories shape our understanding of the world and what changes are possible in it. New and innovative solutions emerge when we challenge oppressive narratives and the potent mythologies that stifle political imagination. The Center for Story-based Strategy is targeting dominant narratives of power, and changing the story,” he says.
The Center operates on the premise of “Storytelling as Social Change” and that a story-based strategy links movement building with an analysis of narrative power and places storytelling at the center of social change. Nothing gets much better than that.
Note: an abridgment of this story appears in the article, “Is Activism Dead?” in the Clockworks Fall/Winter 2015 issue on page 11.