Tag: smartMeme
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Help Us Make Beautiful Trouble
There’s some beautiful trouble brewing, and Beyond the Choir has got caught up in it. We’re part of an exciting collaboration called Beautiful Trouble. It’s a collaboratively-written (and collaboratively funded!) guide for trouble makers. Check out the new video about the project: [kickstarter url=http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/151304769/beautiful-trouble width=480] Beautiful Trouble is an important new resource for people who…
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Grassroots organizational branding | grassroots communications tips pt.4
Branding, in the advertising world, is imbuing a company or product with positive associations inside the consumer’s mind. Marlboro, for example, has so successfully associated cowboys and the wild frontier with their product (cigarettes), that some of their ads don’t even mention the name “Marlboro.” They don’t need to, because the product comes to mind…
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Narrative insurgency | grassroots communications tips pt.3
Progressive change agents often engage in something that I call narrative attack; they make a direct attack on one narrative or worldview from the vantage point-and in the language-of their own opposing narrative or worldview. For example, when some people wrap up their anti-environmental views (e.g. climate change denial) in the rhetoric of their creationist…
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Speak the Truth, Tell a Story | Building a Successful Antiwar Movement (Role 1: Interpretive)
This is the second installment in a four-part series written by Jonathan Matthew Smucker in collaboration with Madeline Gardner, originally published in 2007. Click here to read the previous essay, Three Roles of an Antiwar Core Interpretation The first primary role of an antiwar core that we will discuss is to attach meaning to unfolding…
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Asymmetry of Victim Stories (or: why the rich get away with whining about taxes)
I’m reading two great books about the power of story as an organizing tool in social change struggles. One is smartMeme’s RE:Imagining Change (a guide for activists on story-based strategy), the other is It Was Like a Fever: Story-telling in Protest and Politics by Francesca Polletta. Amongst other subjects, both Polletta and smartMeme discuss…
Jonathan Matthew Smucker 