Most scholarship defines narrative as a static one-way process, emphasizing the imposition of powerful societal narratives on individuals or, in contrast, highlighting the affective authenticity of personal stories. Working in community activities with people who are the subjects of powerful narratives of exclusion or inequality, the “narrating change, changing narratives” research group foregrounds the interaction of political and personal discourses in our daily lives. While narrating is at the center of public life, public discourse is not neutral; the public can impose or open, stagnate or enrich. With considerations of diverse narrative contexts (such as domestic worker struggles, undocumented youth rights, civil rights memorializations) and media (such as storytelling, testimony, literature), our working group focuses on changing narratives. We begin by questioning diverse public contexts, processes, and institutions – shifting, for example, from a focus on what is silenced in public policy or social media as well as what is voiced. Our collective occurs inside and beyond the academy with diverse goals and perspectives, considering how to use narrating itself to guide social change rather than to reify the status quo. Beginning with interdisciplinary scholarship, we are facilitating field-based understandings of the purposes, aesthetics, and processes of dynamic narrating. With a variety of community organizations in addition to artists, activists, writers, and musicians, narrating change involves original engaged research.
Events
Conversation: May 4, 2016, 06:00 PM – 08:00 PM, Room C198
Fight for the City: School Desegregation, Race, Resistance, and Class Struggle
Past Events
Conversation: Nov 2, 2016 10:00 am to 11:30 am, Psychology Hub Room 6304.01
Critical Perspectives on Community Based Research and Praxis
Working Group, Performance and Film Screening: October 30, 2015 6:30 pm, Segal Theatre
Whose Movement Is It?
Public Storytelling Research Forum: October 23, 2015 9:30am-2:00pm, 9205
Narrating America in the Contemporary Community College
Panel Discussion: March 4, 2015 6:00pm, Graduate Center 6112
Stories of Struggle: Histories of Childcare Activism at CUNY
Faculty Co-leaders
Colette Daiute is Professor of Psychology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a leader in research on child, youth, and adult development in extremely challenging and rapidly changing environments. Currently leading several funded research programs, her most recent books, Human Development and Political Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Narrative Inquiry: A Dynamic Approach (Sage Publications, 2013) have put her at the forefront of the study of narrative and shifting social paradigms.
Jeanne Theoharis is a distinguished professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the author of numerous books and articles on the Black freedom struggle, including the recent, award-winning The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Three years ago, seeing the need for more spaces for the public to learn and discuss new work in Black history, she co-created a monthly series at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture with Sarah Lawrence professor Komozi Woodard. That series—Conversations in Black Freedom Studies—features a roundtable of scholars and writers on the first Thursday of each month on a topic in Black history, usually centered around a new book(s) in the field.
Sujatha Fernandes is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center. She is the author of several books and articles on social movements and cultural politics, with a focus on Latin America and Latino immigrants in the United States. She has always been concerned with conveying her scholarship to a broader audience and she appears frequently on national and international news outlets, as well as writing for major news publications such as the New York Times and The Nation. Her latest manuscript in progress is entitled Mobilizing Stories: The Political Uses of Storytelling, and is a global look at the ways that storytelling has been mobilized by states and social movements across the globe. In the research for her book she has collaborated with local New York City based groups such as Damayan Migrant Workers Association, Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees (HWHR), and Domestic Workers United (DWU), and seeks to build meaningful collaborations between these social movement organizations and the academy.
Community Partners
Damayan Migrant Workers Association
Sadie Nash Leadership Project
Partner Biographies
Terri Nilliasca has been organizing around issues of class, race, and gender since she was in college. After graduating, she organized welfare recipients and then embarked on a 10-year career as a labor organizer of low-wage workers in the South for the union, UNITE. She also spent five months in the Philippines with the militant labor organization, Kilusang Mayo Uno (the May 1st movement). Inspired by the depth of the movement in the Philippines, Terri decided to go to law school to gain more tools for the struggle for a more just society. She graduated from CUNY School of Law in 2011. She has also been active in NYC Filipino organizing for more than a decade, first as a founding member of Network in Solidarity for the People of the Philippines and now as a Community Advisory Board Member for DAMAYAN Migrant Workers Assn. As an activist, she has been actively involved in the use of storytelling. As an organizer, she encourages workers to tell their stories of abuse by their bosses in order to build a class-based consciousness. As a union organizer, she has strategized around how to tell workers’ stories in order to build public support for the right to organize. While working with Filipina/o victims of trafficking, Terri grappled with other anti-trafficking activists around questions with storytelling as a tactic: does re-telling of stories re-traumatize victims; how does the telling of the worst abuses affect juries when they hear trafficking stories that are not as “egregious;” who crafts the stories and for whom? In a recent blog post, Terri posed provocative questions about the narrative surrounding the passage of the NY Domestic Worker Bill of Rights and whether legislative reform merely reinforces a neoliberal agenda or advances workers’ rights.
Chitra Aiyar is the executive director of the Sadie Nash Leadership Project, and a lawyer and longtime social justice organizer. Sadie Nash Leadership Project (SNLP) was founded in 2001 to promote leadership and activism among young women. SNLP serves approximately 700 young women annually who are in middle and high school in New York City and Newark and is designed to strengthen, empower, and equip young women as agents for change in their lives and in the world. By increasing the participation of women in social, political, and economic decision-making, SNLP seeks to question and redefine the nature of leadership and to promote perspectives and practices that are cooperative, accountable, ethical, and effective. SNLP runs a 6-week intensive summer institute along with afterschool programs for young women that utilize a popular education methodology to address questions about race gender, and class, along with providing a nourishing space for community activists more broadly.
Projects
Conversations in Black Freedom Studies
Three years ago, seeing the need for more spaces for the public to learn and discuss new work in Black history, she co-created a monthly series at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture with Sarah Lawrence professor Komozi Woodard. That series features a roundtable of scholars and writers on the first Thursday of each month on a topic in Black history, usually centered around a new book(s) in the field. Given the reception The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks has garnered among community activists, church leaders, teachers, young activists, and other members of the public, the need to build resources to bring this history more substantially into the public square has come more clearly into view. This need for resources inspired the creation of multi-media website which launched on February 4, 2016, what would have been Rosa Parks’ 103rd birthday: rosaparksbiography.org.
Goals
– Fulfill a desire for substantive history of the civil rights movement and Rosa Parks to enhance and build diverse models for youth leadership and sense of possibility for social change
– To develop resources because people and activist groups around the country are desiring this more substantive history (for political events and community talks)
– To correct mis-histories, historical white-washing and lack of substantive history that young people receive in school that impact young people’s interest and understanding of history, distort and diminish the movement and the role of young people and women in it, which make it difficult to learn from those struggles or see ourselves in them
– Provide community organizers with intellectual sustenance and resources to learn from previous histories of struggle
– Strengthen ties between academics and community activists and together create usable histories of previous social movements
CUNY Impact
This partnership takes up the theme of “narrating change” by aiming to produce spaces and resources where substantive histories of Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement can be made available, discussed, dissected, and learned from with young women and also community organizers. Quite literally, then, ‘narrating change’ becomes the task of making substantive, critical usable histories for high school students, community activists and other members of the public to engage with. So many young adults can be nourished by the knowledge of what has come before getting to college and yet often are disillusioned by what they don’t learn in their classes, the histories they don’t get but need, the distorting and limited histories they receive in school and from the world around them. This project aims to play a part in addressing this.
Narrating America in the Contemporary Community College
Narrating America in the Contemporary Community College will be a one-day workshop with key participants defining the public role of community college as an inclusive democratic space. Educators and researchers at the Graduate Center, CUNY are organizing this forum for increased public engagement and collaborative research in higher education.
President Barack Obama heightened attention to the contemporary community college as a public American project when he mentioned it in his 2015 State of the Union Address. The President announced a plan to make community college attendance free for all students “willing to work for it”. This announcement extended ongoing debates in the public media, and scholarship about the community college as an institution of opportunity and challenge for millions who want to improve their lives by obtaining vocational training, English language skills, and, perhaps most importantly, affordable higher education. The community college has been described as a potential access space for millions of immigrants, academically under-prepared students, older students, parents,
At the forum, research with students’ stories will be the basis for collaborative working groups of students, faculty, administrators, community leaders, and public officials to interpret and extend these stories into new narratives that are useful for community college missions, curricula, and policies. The goal of the day is to use this public forum to take students’ voices seriously as the basis for collaborative reflection and action. What is at stake is public reflection on a transforming site of American participation.
Goals
– Communicate the urgency of the question, What is the meaning of the contemporary American community college?
– Find stakeholders in positions within and outside of the community college system who bring valuable insights to this question
– Create an agenda for the forum to generate a doable set of action strategies
– Foster the implementation of collaborative action items generated at the forum into pilot studies
CUNY Impact
Ideally, new narratives about the community college will emerge from this project, not only rhetorically, but also in pedagogical/policy practice and in the way the community college is discussed in public institutions and in the popular media. Right now, the public narrative turns on deficits and failures, which contrasts what we are reading in hundreds of narratives from diverse groups of community college students participating in our research. Beginning with these student voices, the fall forum and pilot studies are open to collaborative interpretations that we hope will generate action strategies to effect change in a way that can be replicated at other community colleges.
Narratives and Strategies of Domestic Worker Organizing
We aim to bring together faculty, graduate students, domestic workers, and organizers to discuss the experiences of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights campaign in NYC, the potential and pitfalls of the legislative strategy that is being applied nationally by domestic worker advocacy groups, the role of foundations in promoting certain types of strategies and guiding movement goals, the use of culture and storytelling in those campaigns, and the question of alliances, especially black/immigrant alliances.
Goals
– To provide spaces for conversation and dialogue around the history of the domestic workers movement and the efforts of domestic workers to organize themselves.
– To bring together activists in different parts of the city trying to work toward a common goal of building a domestic worker-led movement.
– To critically interrogate the dominant narratives that have defined domestic worker organizing, which have been mostly defined by middle class activists and foundations.
– To publicize the work being done by domestic worker leaders at the grass roots in order to counter the dominant narratives that promote an exclusive focus on a legislative agenda.
– To find ways for domestic workers to tell their stories in ways that allow their full experiences to be expressed in their own voices.
CUNY Impact
As a public institution located in New York City, CUNY has much untapped potential to interface with community-based organizations and provide spaces for engagement and exchange of ideas. One of our aims is to find ways to build stronger collaborations that respect and include the voices of those most affected and those doing the work at the grass roots.
Comments by Jessica Murray