Belonging is a Story We Write Together
“The literature of resistance to authoritarianism returns, across every culture and century, to a single insight about the relationship between art and power: the stories a society tells about itself are not decorative. They are structural. They determine who is visible and who is erased, what is grievable and what is not, which experiences are recognized as belonging to the common human inheritance and which are treated as exceptional, peripheral, or dangerous. This is why every sustained authoritarian regime has moved against cultural expression, and why the quality and diversity of that expression is among the first casualties when democratic norms collapse.”
— Scot Nakagawa
Understanding the essential role of story is necessary to co-writing another story of the world we want to create. Stories that insist on our shared humanity offer an antidote to the pernicious strategies from actors who thrive on fracturing and isolation to drive antidemocratic agendas.
Stories of what is natural or essential, stories of a dystopian future, stories that rely on nostalgia and a simplified history, stories that the future or takeover of humanity by technology is inevitable… All have heavy currency in our current discourse.
As these over-simplified stories are being used to drive us apart or keep us from engaging, what are the stories of a collective “bigger “we? How might a better shared story help us claim and live a story that gets us to a new place in the next 250 years? In this session we will hear from storytellers stories that:
- Ground us in the place and region
- Acknowledge complexity and multiplicity: We are all more than a single story, how does embracing that connect us?
- Illuminate our shared humanity —and who benefits when we are divided
- What is the story we are living in now, and what story do we need to reject and resist to get to the future we want to live in?
- What is the “we” in me?
Let’s build together a story roadmap for the present and the future we want to live in.
