Organisations
- Center for Story-based Strategy: a national movement-building organisation in the USA dedicated to harnessing the power of narrative for social change
Storytelling
- Robert McKee: Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting
- Jonah Sachs Winning the Story Wars: Why Those Who Tell—and Live—the Best Stories Will Rule the Future
Narrative and social movements
Story-based-strategy
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- Re:Imagining Change: How to Use Story-Based Strategy to Win Campaigns, Build Movements, and Change the World – Doyle Canning and Patrick Reinsborough
Marshall Ganz and public narrative
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- What is Public Narrative?
- What Is Public Narrative: Self, Us & Now (Public Narrative Worksheet). Working Paper.
- Public Narrative Participant Guide
- Public Narrative, Collective Action, and Power
- Why Stories Matter: the art and craft of social change.
Articles and papers
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- Narrative and Social Movements – Francesca Polletta, Pang Ching & Bobby Chen
- It was like a fever: narrative and identity in social protest – Francesca Polletta
- Narratives: from Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology – Francesca Polletta
Narrative and the climate movement
- Australian Conservation Foundation: How to tell compelling stories that move people to action: narrative handbook
Narrative, climate change and climate politics
- Philip Smith and Nicolas Howe: Climate change as social drama: Global Warming in the Public Sphere
- Story Wars: podcast and transcript: discussion of ‘storytelling in the age of climate disruption’, featuring:
Jonah Sachs, author of Winning the Story Wars: Why Those Who Tell—and Live—the Best Stories Will Rule the Future | Carrie Armel, researcher at Stanford University | Jon Else, director of the Documentary Program at UC Berkeley School of Journalism; series producer for the PBS documentary The Eyes on the Prize, and executive producer, The Island President.
Hero narratives: some features
For people interested in hero narratives, here’s something worth checking out. Many observers have noted that hero narratives frequently have a number of features in common. Back in 1928, Russian literary theorist Vladimir Propp wrote Morphology of the Folktale, in which he identified recurring patterns in traditional stories.
See an outline of the 31 features he described. His claim is that any one story would include a combination of at least some of these features. (Once you’ve got to know them you can try out the “Authentic” Russian Folktale, Outline Generator). You’ll be able to see how some of the features can be drawn together to structure the story of (for example) Greta Thunberg or the campaign against Keystone XL.
Read more:
- Comparative Narrative Story Structures Charted!
- The Story Structure Countdown: How Different ‘Experts’ Say You Should Structure a Story
- An overview of ‘arch plot’ – the type of story structure discussed by Joseph Campbell and Robert McKee
- A critique / some questions about this model
Issues that arise for climate storytellers include:
- what ‘recurring patterns’ or features appear in stories we tell about climate change?
- how do features like those that appear in the links above ‘map’ onto the kinds of stories we tell? – how we ‘set the scene’/ narrate the background, and describe the narrative tension of the present?
- While not all of these features will be relevant to climate change storytelling, which of them are useful for describing (1) where we have been (2) where we are now (3) the next stages in the story? [Or what other narrative elements are important for making our stories ‘come alive’?]
Examples of narrative in the climate movement
Lock the Gate/ Coal Seam Gas
- Fractured Country – An Unconventional Invasion
- Undermining Australia – Coal vs Communities
- The Bentley Blockade: The Bentley Effect – Trailer
Pacific Climate Warriors
Stop Adani
350.org
- Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math: (Bill McKibben): the case for narratives that feature the fossil fuel industry as the enemy.