Narrative Building for Bold and Powerful Movements
Speakers:
Panthea Lee
Sarah Joynt-Bowe
Micha Frazer-Carroll
Alex J Bledsoe
18/10/2023
19:00 – 21:00
ICF @ Block 336
336 Brixton Road
London SW9 7AA
Description
A panel conversation between Panthea Lee, Sarah Joynt-Bowe, Micha Frazer-Carroll and Alex J. Bledsoe exploring narratives for movement building and power building.
Narratives – by which we mean collections of stories we tell rooted in shared values, themes, and frames – shape the way we understand and communicate our conditions, as they inform what we believe is common sense, ‘true’, socially acceptable and possible. Bringing together practitioners from across visionary narrative practices, this session will explore how we build narrative strategies, capacities, tactics, and interventions to support bold and powerful movements. Our speakers will explore narrative change through the lens of organising, film, strategic communications, and journalism and unpack the role of storytelling and cultural strategy as part of mobilising at scale during these times. There will be a short screening of OAKLEAD, a work-in-progress feature-length documentary about lead poisoning and environmental racism in Oakland, California and beyond, by Alex J. Bledsoe.
This event will be BSL interpreted.
Biographies
Panthea Lee is a writer, activist, and transdisciplinary designer and facilitator in service of life and liberation. She has built and supported coalitions of community leaders, artists, healers, activists, and institutions fighting for dignity in over 30 countries. Her practice is rooted in commitments to decolonization, collective healing, and global solidarity, and explores ways – narratives, initiatives, and infrastructure – to weave the spiritual and political in realizing structural justice. Panthea has held fellowships at Stanford University’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity and Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination. She is a board member at The Laundromat Project, RSA (Royal Society of Arts) US, and DemocracyNext. From 2010-23, she served as co-founder and Executive Director of award-winning social justice organization Reboot. Her work has been covered by Al Jazeera, CNN, Fast Company, and the New York Times, and her writing has been published in The Atlantic, In These Times, The Nation, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and more.
Sarah Joynt-Bowe is a communications and narrative change strategist with over 15 years of experience developing dynamic, effective strategies for movement-aligned organisations such as Migrants Organise, NEON, Gendered Intelligence, People’s Economy, Trans Safety Network and others. Sarah is currently Director of Communications Strategy at Healing Justice Ldn and an active community organiser working within anti-racist, abolitionist, and migrant justice movements.
Micha Frazer-Carroll is Senior Media and Communications Manager at Healing Justice Ldn. She has a background in campaigning, journalism and communications. At university she founded Blueprint, a mental health magazine, and went on to be elected Welfare and Rights Officer at Cambridge University Students’ Union. Since then, she has acted as an editor for platforms including HuffPost, gal-dem, the Guardian and the Runnymede Trust; as a columnist for the Independent; and as a writer for many other publications. In 2023, Micha wrote Mad World, a book on the topic of mental health from a radical political perspective. She has experience of conducting communications work for charities, abolitionist groups and grassroots campaigns, and is a trustee of the National Survivor User Network (NSUN).
Alex J. Bledsoe is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is rooted in Black liberation and healing justice. Alex is currently directing OAKLEAD, a documentary about lead poisoning and environmental racism in Oakland, California, and beyond. OAKLEAD is a Sundance Documentary Film Program grantee and winner of the Jonathan Logan Elevate Award for investigative journalism. Previously, Alex directed Heart Race (currently in post-production), documenting her cousin’s attempt to obtain a heart transplant while grappling with medical racism in Milwaukee. Alex produced the narrative feature, Residue, about gentrification in Washington, D.C., which is currently streaming on Netflix after premiering internationally at La Biennale/Venice International Film Festival. Alex’s nomadic installation, Reroot, Reroute, explores Black diasporic homemaking in the wake and ongoing violence of racial capitalism and displacement, and opened at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in 2022.
