How can social movements, including those fighting for human rights, harness the power of narrative to advance their goals?
On February 27, experienced movement communications strategist — and former communications director for the Movement for Black Lives — Shanelle Matthews will explore this question in “Liberation Stories,” a public talk hosted by the Pozen Center. The talk will run from 12:15 p.m. through 1:30 p.m., and lunch will be served to those who register.
Drawing on case studies from an upcoming anthology she co-edited, Liberation Stories: Building Narrative Power for 21st-Century Social Movements, Matthews will examine how activist groups can craft and circulate powerful stories that advance new visions of the future and engage people to mobilize on their behalf.
Examples discussed will include the #MeToo movement (especially as it related to Black women and girls), the Movement for Black Lives, and the Vermont Workers’ Center’s “Healthcare is a Human Right” campaign that convinced Bernie Sanders to make Medicare for All the centerpiece of his presidential campaign.
“In each of these cases, stories and narrative played a vital role,” Matthews says. “And that’s something we can learn from in this political movement, where social movements have a real opportunity to articulate alternatives to the status quo, to delegitimize oppressive strategies and build support for liberatory ones.”
Matthews came to social movements by way of journalism. As a journalism major in the early 2000s, she assumed she would go on to make a career in newsrooms. After an externship at a social-movement-oriented women’s newspaper, she recalls, “I realized I was much more interested in working directly with movements.”
In 2016, while working for the Movement for Black Lives, she started the Radical Communications Network (RadComms), a space that connects communications workers across the social movement ecosystem. “It’s a way for people to work together, to sharpen each other, to be aware of what people are saying and how they’re saying it,” she says.
Matthews started bringing her experience into the classroom in 2017 when she became The New School’s first-ever activist-in-residence. In 2023, she joined the faculty at the City College of New York, where she teaches courses like Narrative Power in the Black Radical Tradition, Rhetoric of Liberation: The Role of Narrative Power in Contemporary Movements, and Black Women's Resistance: Narratives of Safety and Survival.
Her goal, she says, is to create a meeting place between scholarship on histories of effective communication with practical organizing experience.
After her talk, Matthews will speak to Ishani Dasgupta’s Human Rights Field Work course.
This is the second event in the Pozen Center’s Stories of Human Rights series, which explores the multiple ways that human rights and storytelling intersect. The first event, held on January 30, was a talk by journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian about her new book, The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World. After the talk, Abrahamian met for dinner with students interested in learning more about careers in journalism and writing.