Example Listening Model

This listening model pursued big listening. They developed their keywords used to search for relevant narratives to listen to, based on their consideration of the demographics, themes, platforms, date range, geography, of the spaces they wanted to listen to (outlined in the section “Listening to Narratives” of this module).

Overview: 

Indigenous Peoples are 6.2% of the world’s population but their territories contain almost 80% of the planet’s remaining biodiversity. In the heart of those diverse ways of knowing & being, beats resilience: for more than 500 years, indigenous nations around the world have dealt with systems of oppression that threaten bodies, territories and cultures. This project focuses on co-creating replicable and scalable narratives, tools and practices with indigenous peoples as an amplifier of movements in defense of cultural and ecological diversity in times of climate crisis, pandemics and war.

Objectives: 

1. To track communities (allies) that are already communicating these core ideas. The aim here will be to identify their frames and their impact in the narrative space.
2. To track the  ‘broad’ narrative landscape, that is defining the key narratives and themes that we have identified as important, or potentially ‘hackable’.

For our Indigenous futures case study, data collection began in August 2021 until October 2021. Our data collection captured a conversation dating back to May of 2021. We researched both English speaking and Spanish speaking in narrative spaces to ensure that our data did not only reflect a Global North perspective. In our choice of keywords, we sought to find whether the current public conversation connects Indigenous activism and struggles with climate change – both in Spanish and English speaking spaces. For this, we looked at two types of conversations:

1. Climate Change (General): We tracked conversations around key events of the summer of 2021 like the release of the IPCC report. We also wanted to track the perspective of people who are not necessarily activists or involved in the climate change conversation but who are living in its effects. So we looked for conversations related to recent climate disasters such as hurricanes, fires, floods, fires, droughts, and we cross referenced them with mentions of “climate change”, “global warming”, etc. 

2. Indigenous Climate Spaces: We also focused on Indigenous narrative spaces by looking at specific movements or current issues through keywords #Landback, #StopLine3, Indigenous people against carbon report, etc. We wanted to understand how Indigenous communities addressed climate change and/or connect it to their current problems or resistance. 

The data led us to spend some time on social media, reading posts, looking at comments to get a better understanding of the conversation.

The table below identifies our key search criteria, the date range of collection & related objectives:

	Narrative	Search Criteria (English)	Date Range	Objective
1	Cop 26	“COP26” + “COP 26” + “COP-26” + #COP26	Aug-Oct	2
2	Indigenous	“Indigenous” + “Indigenous Peoples”	Aug-Oct	1
3	Climate	“Climate change” + “climate Collapse” + “climate emergency” + “climate crisis” + #climatechange + #climatecrisis + #climateemergency + #climatecollapse	Aug-Oct	2
4	Indigenous + CC	“Indigenous” + ( ”climate change” OR “climate crisis” OR “climate emergency” OR “climate collapse”)	Aug-Oct	1
5	Land Defenders	“land defender” + “land defense” + “defenders of the land”	Aug-Oct	1
6	Indigenous day	#IndigenousDay #IndigenousPeoplesDay #IndigenousPeoples #IndigenousRights #WeAreIndigenous	Aug-Oct	1
7	IPCC	“IPCC” + #IPCC + #IPCCFindings + #ClimateReport	Aug-Oct	2