"Most people are forced to live inside someone else’s imagination!" So create preferable stories about your community’s future, says Narrative Initiative
The futures represented above demonstrate imagination used to reshape dominant narratives of an ethnic or racial group. Each future exists to show the potential future if/when that group controls power over its own narrative. Credits: Dar El-Nimer for Arts & Culture, Whimsical House – Nautilus House in Mexico City, Why Marvel’s ‘Black Panther’ Is Resonating Globally – Knowledge@Wharton.
We have come across Narrative Initiative’s work before, doing sessions with its CEO Jee Kim, but we really liked this recent blog on how “futures work gives people [and communities] space and tools to imagine a world free from the boundaries of historical narratives and the limits of today’s policies and politics”. Lots of useful tips about how to practically conduct this work with groups and localities.
See excerpts below:
…Futures help us identify why we need power in the first place. In 2015, Ivana Milojevic and Sohail Inayatullah wrote about the role of power in narrative and how futures are a thread connecting the two:
Analysis of power is foundational to understanding which narratives succeed and which fail. To create change, first normalized categories must be challenged. Second, alternative futures and new worldviews are created and then, third, data and a new metaphor – a story – can be presented which supports the change and aids in creating the alternative future.
– Narrative Foresight, 2015
The essence of the process is to first name and describe the future. With that future in our vision we can talk about, write down and even draw the narratives that surround that future. Those narratives describe a history that hasn’t been created – a history that isn’t dependent on today’s dominant narrative and its power.
By reverse-engineering the future we create new stories. Those stories have people, groups and cultural objects in them. Those stories have a feel. They even have smells and tastes. Here’s a closer look at the process we often use:
Describe the future. Futures thinking for narrative change recognizes history but leaves today behind. We start by identifying possible futures. We get people out of the mundane. Look 10 years, 30 years or even further into the future. Get people to describe that future. Answer this question: Tell us what has fundamentally transformed?
The stories that got us there. We surface the narratives that had to change to create this future. Our goal is to get people out of their analytical box and tap into imagination. For some, this can be like a game.
What does that world look like?
Get visceral: how does it taste, smell, feel?
What do you see when you look around? What are you noticing?
Record these stories together. Speak them out loud. Write them down. Act them out.
The power to get there. Narrative change work provides people with a guide to creating new futures and the tools to practice doing it. We ask people to describe:
Who made these stories possible?
Who was needed to change this narrative?
What technologies were needed?
What policies changed to make this story possible?
The Narratives of the Future Worksheet offers examples of the process and questions you can use in a similar futures process.
….We see far fewer projects in our [futuring] sector than in corporations, governments and the military. This limits the scope of possibility. Even activists and progressives shy away from naming, describing and fighting for changes that match the scale of our challenges.
Corporate futures work is largely dystopian and undemocratic. These futures view people as consumers rather than citizens with agency.
COVID-19 has prompted many to ask if we live amidst a crisis of imaging. Professor Ruha Benjamin recently spoke to the need to take control over imagination and the future.
We should acknowledge that most people are forced to live inside someone else’s imagination! This means that for those of us who want to construct a different social reality, one grounded in justice and joy, we can’t only critique the world as it is, we have to work on building the world as it should be.
– Professor Ruha Benjamin addresses Columbia University’s School of Social Work 2020 graduates.
Imagination opens up our field of vision so we see beyond today. Most people operate inside a Cone of Probability [image below]. The future is based on what seems probable given our history. Futures work starts (perhaps unsurprisingly) in the future and works back from there. We look to provide a framework for creating narratives about the preferable. Not the probable.
Narrative Initiative is very open with its toolbox of concepts. For example: what’s the difference between a story, a narrative and a deep narrative? This blog gives a helpful example:
The movie Jaws is a story about an insatiable man-eating shark [something happens to someone]
All the stories about insatiable, man-eating sharks add up to a broader narrative of sharks being dangerous and predatory creatures [a narrative permeates a collection or system of stories]
The narrative and stories about sharks rest on powerful deep narratives about the human relationship to nature and a fear of the unknown [deep narratives are “pervasive, intractable…providing a foundational framework for understanding both history and current events, and informing our basic concepts of identity, community and belonging”]