Framing, Narrative, and Strategy

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31 May to 7 June 2025

new stories for a different world

Effective strategies for social transformation involve the contest for how we think, how we see, and the stories we tell about our world. New stories, new thinking, help new worlds come into being. This trainingĀ aims to help our movements to tell better stories for a different world.

We witness the power of narrative and story on a daily basis. Division and hatred are spread by the rightwing press, and sometimes by politicians. The issues of the day are quickly framed on social media. Historical stories provide deep undercurrents of understanding of our national and global psyches. And, within this ecosystem, our movements are also telling stories of need and despair, hope and change: think Greta and the school strikers, campaigners for marriage equality, or the Movement for Black Lives.

But how can we be sure that the stories we are telling—the way we are communicating the issues we care about—are effective? How do we know that they are catching people’s attention, engaging, motivating, building our movements for change, and ultimately creating change?

The training will focus on the role of framing in work on climate justice and tackling the rise of the far right in Europe.

In the training, we’ll explore the process for developing effective narratives. We’ll demystify the terms around story, framing and narrative and take a whistle-stop tour through the theory behind the framework. And we’ll move through developing a vision, understanding the narrative landscape, and creating and testing new routes through this landscape.Ā 

In detail, the training will cover:

Developing vision

  • Understanding framing as a movement process
  • Community-building through vision development
  • Building clarity on goals and our core story

Ā Understanding the narrative landscape

  • Understanding narrative as popularly and often deeply-held beliefs
  • Exploring existing narratives
  • Exploring methods for investigating existing narratives

Ā Developing new frames

  • How to develop new ways of communicating issues
  • Guiding principles for effective communications
  • Getting creative

Testing frames

  • The importance of testing our communications
  • The accessibility of testing
  • The multitude of methods of testing

The training will be participatory and practical throughout.

Participants can expect to gain:

  • Practical understanding of framing and narrative,
  • Skills in participatory narrative development,
  • Tools to analyse the narrative landscape around an issue,
  • Methodologies for creating and testing communications.

ā€œIt is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of the mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.ā€

—Ben Okri, Author

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Equip

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Sergio

Germany

Location:

Germany

Sergio (all pronouns) was born in Romania and migrated to Germany in the early 2010s. In the past, he was a social worker with homeless people and a social consultant for Eastern European migrants for various organisations. Trained as a filmmaker, he spent two years making a documentary about the ā€˜civic reawakening’ in Romania and the waves of protest it brought with it. In connection to this, Sergio is currently co-steering the development of an online open-source participative knowledge production platform on activism in Romania. Over the past nine years, Sergiu has offered his skills to various journalists, grassroots collectives and campaigns, mostly working within the labour rights, climate justice, international solidarity and anti-authoritarian movements in Germany and Romania. Nonetheless, his biggest focus since 2020 has been his work as an organiser with the anarcho-syndicalist Free Workers Union, where he focuses mostly on organising Romanian migrant workers on construction sites, in factories and in the agricultural field.

Linzy Na Nakorn

Location:

Jeroen

Location:

Ella

Location:

Alex Swain

Location:

Nina Scott

Location:

Pròxims Cursos

El nostre Nom

Ulex: del LlatĆ­, (argelaga en catalĆ ) nom:

1. Arbust espinós de fulla perenne i floració, amb gran capacitat de regeneració i resistĆØncia. Les seves pues s’obren en entrar en contacte amb el foc i torna a brollar dels tocones carbonitzats. Planta successional que creix bĆ© en condicions difĆ­cils. Millora la fertilitat del sòl mitjanƧant la fixació de nitrogen, preparant el terreny per a una renovada biodiversitat.

2. Una opció tradicional per a encendre focs. Crema amb intensitat i lluentor.

3. Un projecte en xarxa que aporta nutrició i fertilitat als moviments socials europeus a través de la formació