Step 4 – Reframing Narratives
After you have understood and mapped the narrative space, you have narrative objectives that you can apply into a reframing exercise.
What is narrative reframing? Narrative reframing is the process of transforming frames in the narrative communities you identified to support your narrative objectives.
Recall (from Module 2) that the narrative form has a visible, material layer and invisible, virtual layer. The process of reframing narratives entails making the virtual layer perceptible and changing them to better reflect the beliefs and ideas we seek to promote in this world.
The parts of the virtual layer we focus on in the reframing process are the metaphors, truth constructs and ideologies.
The easiest way for us to access this is by understanding frames, through understanding a frame we can surface the metaphors, truth constructs and ideologies.
If you need a refresher of the narrative form, refer to Module 2: Understanding Narratives.
Once we understand the narrative forms we are interested in, we can begin to find new frames that can both unify and move them toward a life-centric horizon.
If this seems complex, don’t worry, in the next video, we will walk you through a simple reframing exercise.
In sum, the reframing process in Module 7 contains 3 steps:
- Step 1: Analyze metaphor, truth & ideology
- Step 2: Change the metaphor, truth & Ideology
- Step 3: Create a new frame
Once these steps have been completed, you can create a narrative strategy.
Footnotes
- The material layer represents all your external actions, expressions and communications.
- The virtual layer represents everything inside of you, the sensations, your concepts, and intentions.
- Truth constructs are representations of the core beliefs that bind the narrative form together.
- Ideologies bring multiple frames into larger structured relationships. These frames are coordinated through a system of justification that contains internal logic.
- Frames are largely subconscious, narrative structures that allow us to immediately make sense of the world. Read more.
- Narrative forms are complex, adaptive, evolutionary systems that can converge with other narrative forms within a specific environment or cultural context and drive how we collectively make sense of our reality.
- Unifying narratives means uniting the communities you are targeting in order to increase the reach of your frames to a larger public (read more about our theory of change in Module 7). Moving narratives towards a life-centric horizon involves evolving narratives towards those in service of life in all of its forms – both human and more-than-human, seen and unseen, for example, animals, plants, fungi and rivers. Read more.