RadComms is the infrastructure that ties political opportunity to collective action among social-justice communicators.
What does it take for old systems to die and for new ones to be born and to thrive?
Time, organizing, and the shaping of public imagination. How do we shape imaginations and build public will for crucial, innovative ideas like defunding the police, climate change, and a world that values Black, queer, and TGNCI people—one story of liberation at a time.
The Radical Communicators Network is growing and strengthening the ecosystem of social-change communications by bringing together a global cohort of communicators to cross-pollinate conversations across a variety of movements, organizations, levels of experience, geographies, languages, and political associations, and by radicalizing the field to focus on building narrative power, thereby putting people closest to the oppression at the center of our efforts.
The brilliant, thoughtful people in RadComms have ushered in world-altering advancements in radical narrative strategies:
from narrative interventions that reframed the #MeToo movement as one that was spurred and nurtured by Black women, to message discipline tactics that reframed “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” in a conversation about apartheid, racism, and the denial of basic rights, and widening our collective understanding of gender beyond binaries.
Each of us has a role to play in defending democracy and building narrative power for truly inclusive societies. Join us.
“The vision of RadComms answers a longing that so many of us who stand at the crossroads of communications, strategy, and organizing have sought in our practice. Our work as strategic communicators in service of movements for liberation marries the best of organizing and political strategy with an eye towards narrative, story, frame, and message because words inform beliefs and beliefs inform behavior. Our work is both macroscopic and microscopic – it is in the trenches with communities and organizers trying to weave together sense out of nonsense, and it is navigating the mines of entrenched values, feelings and behaviors.
What we practice is the messy braiding together of logic, emotion, data, bias, ideology, imagination, and truth into a vision of a world we wish to see and we shout it to the rooftops enticing people to join us in shaping a new world. Our role and this work is imperative to building power and building movements. RadComms is a vital part of the movement ecosystem that we need for victory.”
-Hermelinda Cortés, former RadComms Leadership Team member
Framing New Worlds: Resistance Narratives From 21st-Century Social Movements (working title)
In Framing New Worlds, Resistance Narratives From 21st-Century Social Movements, a forthcoming anthology, we will pull the curtain back on how social change communicators build narrative power for an inclusive vision of society by looking at some of the most impactful social movements and movement moments of the last 20 years. These include the struggle for immigrant rights, from DREAMers to #Not1More; the Movement for Black Lives and #BlackLivesMatter; ‘Me Too’ and the fight against sexual violence; queer and trans resistance; domestic worker organizing and transforming the narrative of care and so much more.
