Remembering Through Narratives

Re-membering Through Narratives

A review by Durkhanai Ayubi1 and Dana Walrath2

Senior Atlantic Fellows

1 for Social Equity

2 for Brain Health Equity

2020

1 Introduction

“To all the stars covered in a blanket

The ones who fail to love their reflections because the world holds the mirror Hate disguised in indifference is testimony to your power

Your star will blind them all.”

Hadassah Lewis (pen name) AFSEE Fellow from Bow to Enter Heaven

We are born. We live. We die. As in a story, each individual life follows a narrative arc. This life unfolds in relation to others we have ancestors, and we will become ancestors. We inherit our story from those who precede us, and we leave stories open for shaping by those who follow us. We are each but a point in a perpetual conversation linking everything that has been with all that is yet to come.

Perhaps this accounts for the capacity of narrative to shape us. Narrative connects us to our histories, while generating the echoes of ourselves which will be felt in the future. It shapes our interiors and our social interactions. As we create and share meaning through story, we establish our values and our cultural norms our realities. Functioning on both the individual and collective levels as well as in conscious and subconscious realms, stories maintain and naturalise individual patterns as well as particular social orders, including those based in systemic and structural injustice. This same capacity of narrative to normalise and naturalise also lies at the heart of stories’ ability to create vast personal and social change once uncoupled from the prevailing dominant narratives that silence, oppress, and justify global inequities.

This capacity makes narrative integral to the Atlantic mission. Narratives determine whether our world will normalise equity or inequity. They are a construct based on the choices we make their direction is not inevitable. We believe that our world today and the challenges which riddle it, derive in large part upon the long, active, and powerful generation of narratives which have privileged notions of exclusion, categorisation, and undue acquisition. Often hidden, yet embedded systematically into all the structures of our lives, these narratives create social norms which marginalise and violate people the world over while benefiting an increasingly shrinking elite.

Influenced greatly by the norms embedded within the imperialist conquests of the last five to six centuries, these dominant narratives represent a largely singular voice which privileges only certain modes of knowledge and deems only particular experiences as legitimate. Their censoring and suppressing force has created a reality which denies the full spectrum of experiences and wisdom that constitutes our shared human story.

Today’s gaping global inequity demonstrates the inability of these falsified, but dominant, narratives to adequately reflect our societies, express our concerns or to capture our hopes and dreams. The tangible dissatisfaction with, and rejection of, the stringent and divisive systems such narratives have normalised, reverberates globally. In such a world, these fabricated and brittle confines can no longer contain the enormity of our multitudes and the breadth of our horizons. In many ways, the rupturing impact of COVID-19 and the systemic injustices it has plainly revealed, have amplified efforts towards unmasking the insidiousness of the censorship and denial long made possible by deeply engrained systems of inequity. With awakened lucidity, we see not only the sedating effects of the falsified narratives which dominate our world, but we can reject them for their inability to adequately buoy us into the futures we know are possible.

To navigate our way to our unbound possibilities, we emphasise of the notion of “remembering” a process of becoming unified and whole. Re-membering depends first upon the act of conjuring the intrinsic memories of ourselves beyond the distortions our histories would have us forget. Next, we reassemble the pieces of ourselves that were dismembered and forcibly removed, to generate a vision that is unified and whole.

In this moment in our collective human story, we have arrived at a precipice which beckons us to re-member into being a different world a world that, we posit, if long held at bay, has nonetheless always been known to us.

It is a world that is held within the multitudes of stories and unbridled acts of grace, interconnectedness, unity, and determination that constitute a significant portion of our shared histories, and which intends to reject dogma and to uphold our shared human dignity.

These ways and stories perhaps have never sought recognition or dominance with the same reckless and blunt force as authoritarian visions of power, and thus may be dismissed as less viable ways to imagine our world. But these precise traits not to conflate an untamed ego with power, not to encourage the atomisation of ourselves from our own ancestries and from one another, and not to laud hierarchical and controlling ways as necessary for maintaining order give these narratives an emancipatory and enduring vision of power aligned with our deeper natures. The time for narratives which allow our deepest selves to bloom, and for the connections of our communities by notions of dignity, is long overdue.

Re-excavating, re-membering, honouring and implementing ever-present (but long-negated) parts of our nature into the visions that form our societies is a home-coming that has the potential to transfigure our collective narratives, and thus our world, and the world of all those yet to come.

We acknowledge and emphasise that this review does not intend to be (and could never be) an account of every grievance endured by those who have been pushed to the margins through narratives designed to compartmentalise. We attempt to provide instead, an analysis

of the themes and patterns which have emerged in narratives over time that led to the unjust systems and norms known to many of us in our own deep and intimate ways. Understanding how these patterns unfold and how they connect to form a web of inequity, allows us to decode and contextualise where we sit in this moment in history and to broaden our appreciation of how, so often, seemingly disparate injustices are knitted together using the same narrative thread. This allows us to crystallise a clearer picture of ourselves and one another, enabling us to direct our energies into generating narrative norms which not only amplify the work we each carry out within our respective communities, but which simultaneously unravel the knots that stitch together the broader fabric of injustice.

In this review, we begin to posit how, as a community, we can harness narratives to enact what this moment requires. To us, narratives are not just a skill set to be mastered within an organisation, but a reflection of the deeper value systems and interpretations of power by which societies choose to abide. Through a critical assessment of academic and nonacademic literature, other communicative forms, and the use of narrative by other social justice organisations, this review seeks to articulate the particular strengths of an Atlantic approach to narrative. We take a long view, deeply cognisant of the histories which have brought us to this moment. We believe that such critical analyses of dominant narratives equip the Atlantic community to undertake the necessary work of generating sentiment, rather than forcibly reacting to the damaging sentiment set by others. Such re-membering makes a transformation of the values which underpin our present conceptualisation of power and systems of exchange, along with the injustices they maintain, possible.

We begin with unpacking the distorting impact of accounts of history recorded through a singular lens that has normalised narratives that essentialise and categorise the human experience. We move to explore how this history has created the inequitable systems and social norms which define our present. We then explore what we might approach differently to the already numerous and resounding approaches to social equity emphasising the need to stay alert to the potential trap of replicating sentiments of oppression even in narratives of liberation, and the opportunity to harness the unique and potentially powerful suite of traits already encoded within the Atlantic mission and its Fellowships. Finally, this review provides initial recommendations for further exploration on how we might use our knowledge and our position to carry out the necessary and timely work of shifting the detrimental dominant narratives that engulf our world.

We endeavour to open multiple pathways cognisant of the present toxicity of narratives that have generated a world which is hostile to our own humanness, to one that nurtures a reality that better reflects our experiences, and which is geared towards liberating our boundless human potential.

This report outlines the beginnings of why and how.

2 The problem of history

“Contrary to what the colonial project has intended, as Africans, we have a responsibility to shift our focus continentally to build solidarity with efforts to break silos and divides that exist across diverse African contexts and to re-orient African knowledge, realities and people as valuable and legitimate knowledge bearers.”

Shehnaz Munshi, Lance Louskieter

Kentse Radebe AFHESA Fellows

The problem of history is that it normalises an account of ourselves that is hierarchical, racist, gender biased and generally disembodied from the natural cycles of the universe we inhabit. This account of history and the narratives it has normalised has generated into existence a world that does not reflect the fullness and the depth of the experience of being human. From this schism this abyss generated by the incongruence between essentialised narratives which shape our world and our deeper, more interconnected nature mass inequities and injustice have unfolded in ways that place crippling limits on the lives of many across our globe.

2.1 Narratives generate our realities

We build our histories and accounts of ourselves through narrative. Pueblo Native American scholar, Gregory Cajete, writes “humans are story telling animals. Story is a primary structure through which humans think, relate and communicate. We make stories, tell stories, and live stories because it’s such an integral part of being human…myths, legends and folk tales have been cornerstones of teaching in every culture…the myths we live by actively shape and integrate our life experience. They inform us as well as form us, through our interaction with their symbols and images”.1,2

From the ancient creation stories and rites of Indigenous cultures, through to the notions of the duality of light and dark embedded in the millennia old Zoroastrianism and Taosim through to the countless stories told within societies, communities, and families, narratives drive the trajectory of the perpetually unfolding human experience.

1 Cajete, G. (1991). Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education, Durango: Kivaki Press, p 114

2 Given the importance of multiplicity of voices, we provide to the best of our ability, the cultural heritage of each of our sources along with their current country of citizenship. We recognise that all existing national borders were drawn by those with power as they came to dominate various parts of the earth.

These shared stories bind us to one another in continuity, and form the basis of our realities, acting in a way that is two-fold: firstly, by helping us to decode and understand our world, and secondly, as a means that we harness to build the ideologies that actively shape our world. This act of decoding and harnessing narratives works in unison to generate the basis which underpins our realities (Figure 1).

This two-fold capacity of narratives innately connects them to power: the values and the ideologies we arrive at through our stories and our sensemaking, then infuse the key decisions we make that span across our societies. Narratives position us collectively (in conscious and often subconscious ways) on fundamental issues, such as: how we locate our human experience within cycles of the overall cosmos; how we respond to differences between us particularly in a world where we live in closer contact than ever; and our relationship to death and the concept of our mortality. The values we arrive at through our narratives on timeless and pervasive issues such as these, then decide what our tangible world looks like determining the level of equity and justice embedded within our cultures, politics, institutions, and principles of resource distribution.

Image by Dana Walrath

Figure 1: Graphic representation of narratives as a means to decode and a means we harness, to build our world

But what happens when the narratives which shape our increasingly interconnected world become trapped in a reductive lens, distorting both how we understand and how we shape our world?

A brief analysis of the genealogy of narratives over time, brings us to this precise precipice: a world deeply troubled and dispirited by centuries, if not millennia, of narratives that devalue the multiplicity of voices and experiences which form our histories in favour of an essentialised view of what and who matters, driven most perhaps by an increased desire and ability to funnel resources to a centralised powerful elite.

2.2 The ‘single voice’ of history and the myth of inevitability

Welsh historian Amanda Rees, explains the tendency for ‘big histories’ towards “distilling the many voices of humanity’s past into a single human story”.3 Similarly, in his book The Archaeology of Knowledge, French philosopher Michel Foucault writes “in short, the history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to be seeking, and discovering, more and more discontinuities, whereas history itself appears to be abandoning the irruption of events in favour of stable structures.” In other words, a consequential discrepancy exists between our lived realities and the essentialised version which official accounts of history normalise into indisputable truths. These ‘indisputable truths’ gain undue gravitas and longevity through their means of transmission. Predominantly by preference given to the written word, these essentialised accounts dominate the narratives provided through the curriculum of prestigious learning institutions, global media, academic literature, voluminous books, and through a dogmatic reverence to rationalisation, codification and scientific research.

Throughout his works, Foucault establishes the connection between power and knowledge. Foucault recognised that power is based on knowledge and makes use of knowledge, and that simultaneously, power reproduces knowledge by shaping it in accordance with its own intentions. Similarly, education theorist and professor, Michael Apple, writes extensively about the implication of education (which includes formal curricula, but also media and other modes of knowledge transference) in the politics of culture, instead of viewing it as a neutral assemblage of knowledge. Apple writes “the decision to define some groups’ knowledge as the most legitimate, as official knowledge, while other groups’ knowledge hardly sees the light of day, says something extremely important about who has power in society”.4 Apple challenges even the notion of ‘common-sense’, itself filled with patriarchal language and void of acknowledging the marginalisation that people suffer. He argues that the use of particular narratives by “blocks of neoliberalists, neoconservatives, authoritative populist religious conservatives, and a professional and managerial class (who believe in measuring

3 Welsh, A. (2020). Are there Laws of History? [online] Aeon.co https://aeon.co/essays/if-history-was-morelike-science-would-it-predict-the-future

4 Apple, M. (1993). The Politics of Official Knowledge: Does a National Curriculum Make Sense? Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 14(1), pp 1-16

everything) pushes educational and cultural work in particular directions to transform societies”.5 The direction of these pushes, as we explore in this review, serve to normalise a world that privileges only certain experiences, based on the ‘common sense’ determined by those whose narratives are seen and heard.

Stratification arises from such an eclipse of the multiplicities of experiences that constitute the human story. This eclipse also renders the consequent prevalence of biases and inequities so tangibly manifest today, a natural human social condition. Throughout this review, we argue that these discrepancies do not inescapably derive from our innate natures and see the prevailing inequities as a consequence of our choices and our constructs of the narratives to which we subscribe.

The 2.5 million year archaeological record shows that inequity came to humans quite recently. Its earliest glimmers arrived well after the beginnings of the domestication of plants and animals and sedentism some twelve thousand years ago, the social changes that allowed humans to begin to store and produce goods. Early writing systems appearing five to eight thousand years ago functioned to maintain the first social stratifications distinctions of wealth and power by recording the exchanges of material. Inequities intensified with the first so-called civilizations which began as a form of human social organisation a mere three to five thousand years ago. This change set some human societies on paths that linked technological innovation with the ability to amass capital and to control others. Writing, a capacity of privilege, went on to document the glory of wealthy rulers. This stratified social form tainted even the beginning of democracy in Ancient Athens where only a distinguished group of property-owning men held sway.

While dominating civilizations appeared throughout the globe, much of the tone of the injustice that grips our world today traces its origins to the devastating and far reaching impact of centuries of Euro-American imperialism. Closely related to this imperial conquest, came advances in the science and technology of travel and warfare as well as the invention of the early printing press and the accompanying ability to widely disseminate the written word, carrying with it an unprecedented capacity to entrench a skewed balance of power. The distortions generated over these centuries not only persist to this day but have again, in many ways been compounded.

Part of the impact of this skewed world view stems from the creation of a symbiosis between authority and the indisputability of the narratives it espouses, so close, that we mistakenly assume these narratives to be preordained or inevitable. In his book Orientalism, Edward Said, Palestinian American scholar and founder of postcolonial studies, asserts “there is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is

5 Artsequal.fi (2018). Arts Equal website. [online] Available at: https://www.artsequal.fi/-/michael-applenstudia-generalia-luento-kansallismuseossa-22-10-/2.9

virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true and from traditions, perceptions, and judgements it forms, transmits, reproduces” (p 20).6

In Orientalism, and in his later expanded work Culture and Imperialism,7 Said’s central thesis explains how an entire world of ‘others’ was created as a necessary element for the justification of European conquest and acquisition of far flung lands. Beginning with the maritime expeditions from the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth century, along with those of the Dutch, British and French, through to the more recent American agenda of military expansionism, these imperial conquests unleashed grave injustices and violations of human dignity. They were, in turn, facilitated and normalised by a history of narratives that assumed ordinance over entire populations throughout Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia and beyond. Through the power of military and scientific accounts as well as through cultural and literary works, encountered populations were rigorously dehumanised to shadowy and subaltern figures, ripe for control and made for subservience.

The works of writers such as Flaubert, Kipling, Austen and even as far back as Homer, as well as the accounts of Egypt by conquerors such as Napoleon, act in concert to subordinate the rest of the world as a natural ‘appendage’ of the West. As such, Said writes in Orientalism, these accounts serve to “divide, deploy, schematize, tabulate, index and record everything in sight…to make out of every observable detail a generalisation and out of every generalisation an immutable law” (p 86). Critically, Said writes “the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism”.

The blocking of the narratives of others functions to normalise inequities in our world. This eclipsing is carried out in a number of ways associated with the control of narratives that normalise falsified realities, including, but not limited to: devaluing all knowledge not considered rigorously legitimate enough thereby discounting intuitive knowledge and dismissing the oral and expressive traditions which for millennia have powerfully transmitted culture from one generation to the next; providing consistent accounts of the non-Anglo world and its people as subservient and unable to resist being ruled; and normalising narratives of hierarchical worth in which a select group of people are privileged above all others, and also above the natural world. Encapsulating this normalised erasure of the multitudes of experiences that constitute our realities, in Culture and Imperialism Said affirms with clarity, “one of the canonical topics of modern intellectual history has been the development of dominant discourses and disciplinary traditions in the main fields of scientific, social, and cultural inquiry. Without exceptions I know of, the paradigms for this topic have been drawn from what are considered exclusively Western sources” (p 47).

Reflecting this single capture of history, Mohawk Native American scholar Michael Doxtater writes about the ‘Euro-master narrative’ that directs the cycles of knowledge and power that

6 Said, E. (1978). Orientalism, London: Penguin

7 Said, E. (1993). Culture and Imperialism, London: Chatto & Windus

regulate our world. This master narrative springs forth from the belief that, unlike all other narratives, Eurocentric knowledge leads towards progress. This Foucauldian ‘colonial-powerknowledge’ relationship, according to Doxtater, “communicates particular cultural presuppositions that elevate Western knowledge as real knowledge while ignoring other knowledge”.8 The tone of this singular narrative, and the quest for control it has normalised, is powerful enough to dictate the shape of our entire world. It generates an essentialised and sweeping views of the world developed and advocated for by British historians like Eric Hobsbawm as a ‘world-system’.

This world-system, Doxtater analyses, “was born from imperial and colonial progress and the rise of nation states in liberal modernity. The world-system of nation-states cut across geographic and cultural demarcations with political boundaries.”9 This demarcation of the world, which ignores long-standing cultural affiliations and relationships with the environment, in favour of Western political advances, helped to build capitalist empires, through redirection of resources from their localities to within the borders of ruling nations. This cutting across, this eclipse of all other knowledge and encirclement of people, created a single pervasive narrative structure that, through its persistent homogeneity, undermines and places limits on our true collective progress. To this effect, Doxtater writes “posing as the fiduciary of all knowledge exposes the limits of Western knowledge”.10 Similarly, Indigenous Bunurong, Tasmanian, Yuin heritage Australian writer Bruce Pascoe identifies this pernicious Euro-master narrative stating, “we should be wary of locking ourselves into the assumption that everything is driven by superior Western minds and tools on an inexorable march of conquest, as if that is the only way a species might evolve” (p 195).11

The pinnacle of Western knowledge itself is encapsulated historically by what is broadly known as The Enlightenment era, taking place from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. This era, known for progress driven by the separation of scientific thought from religious doctrine, shaped the work of philosophers like John Locke, and more broadly, set the cataclysmic shift towards espousing universal liberty and equality amongst humans into motion. But deeply entrenched within the ideas of progress driving many of these iconic thinkers and the tone of the era, was a paradoxical denial of the right to life and liberty of those being colonised and enslaved. Locke was himself a colonial administrator and an investor in the slave trade. Other key enlightenment thinkers, like German philosopher Immanuel Kant, still considered one of the most important Western philosophers, wrote about reason, ethics and virtue on the one hand, while sketching out some of the first and most detailed hierarchies of race on the other. Kant writes “humanity is at its greatest

8 Doxtater, MG. (2004) Indigenous Knowledge in the Decolonial Era, 28/3, American Indian Quarterly, pp 618633

9 Ibid

10 Ibid

11 Pascoe, B. (2014). Dark Emu, Broome, Western Australia: Magabala Books

perfection in the race of the whites. The yellow Indians do have a meagre talent. The Negroes are far below them and at the lowest point are a part of the American peoples”.12

This irony and the suffering it triggered was not lost on the many whose oppression was simultaneously being justified by a movement of thought supposedly dedicated to human liberation. Haitian writer Baron de Vastey (1781-1820), brought this perspective into his chronicles of the Haitian revolution and the era of French colonisation of Haiti (1659-1804). In a book titled Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism, African Diaspora historian Marlene L. Daut highlights Baron de Vastey’s awareness of how the Enlightenment era thinkers categorised all objects, including plants, birds, rocks, and flowers. This paved the way for the racial taxonomies that place White Europeans at the top of humanity and Black Africans at the bottom, justifying racial prejudices and practices such as slavery. In an interview on her book, Daut states, “the Black Atlantic humanists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of which Baron de Vastey was a distinct and important part, contested this so-called Enlightenment by revealing it to be utterly devoid of the humanity in whose name it was developed and proclaimed.”13

Similarly, providing one of the West’s first reckonings with Europe’s violent 20th century of war, genocide and racism, German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt observes in The Origins of Totalitarianism, that through the conquests across Asia, America and Africa, it was Europe which reordered “humanity into master and slave races”. Such ordering rooted in the science of classification which flourished in parallel with the colonial conquest thus granted scientific authority to the racist overlay when it appeared.

Reflecting on this connection between imperial power and its deliberate establishment of racially defined hierarchies, Indian author and essayist Pankaj Mishra writes “this debasing hierarchy of races was established because the promise of equality and liberty at home required imperial expansion abroad in order to be even partially fulfilled…Racism was and is more than an ugly prejudice, something to be eradicated through legal and social proscription. It involved real attempts to solve, through exclusion and degradation, the problems of establishing political order, and pacifying the disaffected, in societies roiled by rapid social and economic change.”14

Consistent with the ability to create narratives, but critically to also block narratives from emerging, Baron de Vastey’s work which chronicles the abuses of colonialism was not translated in full until 2014. Similarly, the words and thoughts of many throughout history

12 Kant, I. (1802). Physical Geography, [online] Available at: http://www.faculty.umb.edu/lawrence_blum/courses/465_11/readings/Race_and_Enlightenment.pdf

13 Gaffield, J. and Daut, ML. (2018). Haitian Writer Baron de Vastey and Black Atlantic Humanism https://www.aaihs.org/haitian-writer-baron-de-vastey-and-black-atlantic-humanism-an-interview-with-marlenel-daut/

14 Mishra, P. (2017). How Colonial Violence Came Home: the Ugly Truth of the First World War [online] The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/10/how-colonial-violence-came-homethe-ugly-truth-of-the-first-world-war

who fully resisted advances of the colonial world, have never been given the same platform or historical significance as the works of those who continued to perpetuate the master narratives necessary. Such platforms allowed the injustices of colonialism, and the lasting legacy that remains to this day, to avoid its full reckoning.

Seminal Caribbean writer and activist from Martinique, Frantz Fanon brought anti-colonialist perspectives to his work on French occupied Algeria. With blazing detail, he revealed methods of resistance as well as the intricate connections that make capitalism and colonialism intimate bedfellows. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon writes “the wealth of the imperial countries is our wealth too…for in a very concrete way Europe has stuffed herself inordinately with the gold and raw materials of the colonial countries: Latin America, China and Africa. From all these continents, under whose eyes Europe today raises up her tower of opulence, there has flowed out for centuries towards that same Europe diamonds and oil, silk and cotton, wood and exotic products. Europe is literally the creation of the Third World” (p 81).15

Works such as this, produced in opposition to imperialist expansion of Europe and the United States, receive little attention or analysis. As Said notes in Culture and Imperialism, “to read Austen, without also reading Fanon…is to disaffiliate modern culture from its engagements and attachments. That is a process that should be reversed.” (p 71). The negation of these (and countless other) voices of objectivity and resistance in the dominant narratives that shape our world, is not incidental but consistent with the idea of erasing, or at least attempting to secure the passivity of, those who fall outside the margins of the categorisations of worth.

To this effect, British historian and hotelier Peter Frankopan writes about this pervasive eradication of the multiplicities of experiences that constitute the history of our world. He details how the imperial conquests which ushered a ‘new dawn’, “propelled Europe to centrestage…its rise however, brought terrible suffering in newly discovered locations. There was a price for the magnificent cathedrals, the glorious art and the rising standards of living that blossomed from the sixteenth century onwards. It was paid by populations living across oceans: Europeans were able not only to explore the world but to dominate it. They did so thanks to the relentless advances in military and naval technology that provided an unassailable advantage over the populations they came into contact with. The age of empire and the rise of the West were built on the capacity to inflict violence on a major scale. The Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, the progression towards democracy, civil liberty and human rights, were not the result of an unseen chain linking back to Athens in antiquity or a natural state of affairs in Europe; they were the fruits of political, military and economic success in faraway continents” (p 202).16,17

15 Fanon, F. (1961). The Wretched of the Earth, France: Francois Maspero editeur

16 Frankopan, P. (2015). The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, London: Bloomsbury

17 We note Frankopan’s rockstar literary status, his extreme wealth, royal European lineage, boutique hotel and grocery store chain and accordingly put forward that this makes for good consideration regarding privilege and

Alongside this ‘new dawn’, sat the capacity to control global narratives and a means to ‘reinvent the past’ (p 219)18. Not only were the rich histories, knowledge, and cultures of others trivialised or erased, but Frankopan writes “history was twisted and manipulated to create an insistent narrative where the rise of the west was not only natural and inevitable but a continuation of what had gone before” (p xix).19

In his analysis Frankopan highlights the excessive levels of competition and warfare which defined the relationship within and between European nations. Noting this history and referencing Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), a text often attributed with explaining the rise of the West, in which Hobbes asserts that humans are in a constant state of war, Frankopan writes “only a European author could have concluded that the natural state of man was to be in a constant state of violence; and only a European author would have been right” (p 261).20 Likewise, in Dark Emu Pascoe, commenting on the eightythousand-year history of continual peace in pre-contact Australia, locates war mentality in European consciousness noting that “the idea to pour boiling oil on enemies seems to not have occurred to anyone in Australia.” (p 190)

positioning with respect to dominant narrative. Is it enough to write about injustice instead of taking the path of divesting all ill-gotten privilege, particularly when generating cash by writing about colonialist abuses?

18 Frankopan, P. (2015). The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, London: Bloomsbury

19 Ibid

20 Ibid

3 The impact of skewed narratives on our world today

The narratives and the modes of knowledge so far privileged in our world, as well as the omissions embedded within them, have compounded to create at least two connected patterns: first, to continue to promote the same principles of hierarchical segregation only in ways that are simultaneously more subversive and more amplified through powerful technologies; and second, to create solutions to increasingly gaping inequities which are either impotent or which contribute to further injustice.

In attempting to understand these patterns, the degree to which our present realities are connected inextricably and inseparable from the iterative and rolling histories which precede us, cannot be understated. To this end, Said writes “there is no just way in which the past can be quarantined from the present”(p. 2)21 However, the inequities which shape our present world, are too often considered without an account of the histories that generated them into

21 Said, E. (1993). Culture and Imperialism, London: Chatto & Windus

Image: Riot Police

Eliza Squibb

AFHE U.S. + Global

being. This creates a collective cognitive dissonance and an inability to address injustices in a systemic manner.

Making a point on the wilful exclusion within academia and in the public sphere, of the impact of imperial rule in shaping modernity not only societies that were colonised, but also the many European nations which have never fully reckoned with their histories, British scholar of Indian origin, Gurminder K. Bhambra writes “sociology’s self-understanding [is] brought about in the European production of modernity as distinct from its colonial entanglements”22 (p 2). This allows for the violence, racialisation and impact of authoritarian power that underpinned imperialism to be overlooked, and for ‘historical injustices [to be excluded] from any consideration of justice in “modern” societies’ (p 145) 23 Understanding the presence of this negation of the realities that shape our histories allows us to more thoroughly decode the narratives and attitudes that shape our present.

The very nature of our globalised world today and the borders drawn around nations, are themselves the legacy of imperial rule, and as explained by Said, “this pattern of dominions or possessions laid the ground-work for what is in effect now a fully global world” (p 4).24

Despite the official dismantling of the British Empire after World War II, not only was the mantle of imperialism passed to the United States who pursued (and continues to pursue) its agenda through militarisation across the world, the lasting legacies normalised through centuries of hierarchical norms and dehumanising practices, stubbornly persist. Further, as Bhambra raises by referencing the work of Siba Grovogui, the director of Africana studies at Cornell University, “even where the processes of decolonization and liberation have transferred political power to the formerly colonized, the institutional, economic, and cultural contexts of Western hegemony have largely remained in place.”

One distorting effect in the present of such an account of the past, has been the sweeping normalisation of the idea of identities that are atomised within national boundaries and defined according to the imposed categorisations of imperialism. Furthermore, segregations and disconnections continue to be made ‘legitimate’ and pervasive through the perpetuation of these narratives by increasingly connected and global superstructures.

In this section, we offer an overview of how persistent hierarchical attitudes embedded within the increasingly powerful and global scientific, technological and economic systems regulate our world. This allows for the further entrenchment and amplification of divisions and arising inequities in ways that are both unprecedentedly consequential and increasingly convoluted in origin.

Key to note for our work in the space of challenging social inequities, is the capacity for such entrenched systems to pervert the course of justice and to skew even our solutions, if arising

22 Bhambra, GK. (2014): Connected Sociologies, London: Bloomsbury Academic

23 Ibid

24 Said, E. (1993). Culture and Imperialism, London: Chatto & Windus

from within the veiled realms from which dominant narratives so often operate. This echoes the work of Bhambra who emphasises the trap of understanding our world through a simple binary of the West as the prototype for modernity upon which all other cultures have framed their own progress, and instead emphasises the importance of realising the “the histories of interconnection that have enabled the world to emerge as a global space” (p 155).25 Claiming a fuller picture of the emergence of our global world and our place in it, allows us to claim stories of ourselves, that if long negated, nonetheless resound within us, waiting to be reexcavated and re-membered into a more complete whole.

In maintaining our belief that the perception of the naturalness or inevitability of global inequities is itself an enabling part of the distorting and skewed historical narratives that shape our present, we here also seek to emphasise the degree to which these narratives are choices, and as such, can be superseded should the collective will and imagination to do so exist. In reformulating such skewed narratives in our world today, we seek to conscientise the necessity of being lucid to, and rejecting, the incomplete histories that taint so much of our identities, and claiming instead a deeper, and more interconnected lens upon which to build our sense of self and our societies.

3.1 The distortions embedded within science and the ‘progress narrative’ myth

The impact of the historically sanctioned hierarchies embedded within the narratives that shape our present, continue to be felt within the realm of the bodies of knowledge that today drive our world. Western dominated knowledge such as science, medicine, and economics continue to naturalise the Euro-American conquest narrative in ways that pervasively impact and skew our societies and our global culture.

For example, economists invoke a natural basis for human competition through the Darwinian narrative of survival of the fittest to justify market economies of winners and losers. A fuller engagement with evolutionary theory shows that natural selection is but one of four evolutionary forces at work to create balance on this earth. The only directional evolutionary force, it explains only the origins of species and new traits, not the balanced interactions between all living creatures and the environment. This oversimplification and emphasis on competition not only stops creative problem solving but it justifies reverting to cost as a bottom line. This partial application of one facet of biological theory makes competition seem like an immutable aspect of being human as opposed to the culturally specific worldview that it embodies.

‘Human nature’ predates market economies by at least tens of thousands, if not millions, of years. That human cultural continuity over the course of eighty thousand years on the Australian continent, did not result in a militaristic competitive social framework,

25 Bhambra, GK. (2014): Connected Sociologies, London: Bloomsbury Academic

demonstrates the multiplicity of so-called human natures (Pascoe 2014). As mentioned above, equity, instead of stratification, characterises the 2.5 million-year human archaeological record until five to eight thousand years ago. Likewise, experimental and observational studies of our closest animal relatives, the other primates (with whom we share a 65 million-year evolutionary history) show that humans are also hardwired to be fair and to cooperate. This sort of long view makes it clear that though technological innovation remains characteristically human, inequity is neither our biological nor our cultural baseline.

While some western scientists make the case for an inherently violent and hierarchical human nature (e.g. Wrangham)26 other scholars reveal this as the imposition of internalised thought patterns onto nature. American anthropologist Emily Martin describes this projection and naturalisation in narrative terms. She proposes that purportedly objective scientific writing contains a series of culturally specific “sleeping metaphors” which embody the EuroAmerican master narratives described above. “Waking up” these metaphors “is one way of robbing them of their power to naturalize our social conventions” (p 498).27 When scientists remain blind to the ways that dominant narratives shape aspects of their work, they limit the scope of scientific investigation and the capacity of science to contribute to a balanced and just global order.

Instead, today’s global order rests upon a naturalised narrative of conquest and progress to justify the deep inequities set into motion by imperialism. This progress narrative allowed individuals and individual states to amass vast wealth as they silenced alternative social forms, usurped land and resources through colonisation, committing ethnocide if not genocide, and certainly denying many peoples’ histories, beliefs, and practices in the process. Decoding this narrative as story, instead of biological destiny, allows us to re-member and to re-imagine and construct a different future.

Historical and archaeological evidence combined with cultural practices preserved despite colonialisms’ disruption, demonstrate the human capacity to live in balance with our ecosystems. Pre-contact Australia, for example, was characterised by a “subtle but comprehensive management of the land and its productivity” across the entire continent including its so-called dead heart” (Pascoe p 182).28 Destruction of this productive balanced ecosystem only came about when European colonisers’ practices stripped the land of its fertility as happened with the prairie lands in what is now the United States. Likewise, Amazonian farmers had the knowledge to create richly fertile sustainable soils (Mann 2004) and fisheries (Erikson 2006) without the destruction of the rainforest. Colonisation and land usurpation depended upon constructions of dominant narratives that deny such sophisticated land management. Surfacing known stories about ancient practices will not only restore justice but it will contribute to solving the current environmental crisis.

26 Wrangham, R and Peterson D. (1996). Demonic Males, New York: Houghton Mifflin

27 Martin, E. (1991). The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male- Female Roles, Signs,University of Chicago Press, (16)3, (pp. 485-501)

28 Pascoe, B. (2014). Dark Emu, Broome, Western Australia: Magabala Books

Technological innovation and scientific investigation fuel confidence in the progress narrative. We live in a time when fantastical innovations in science and technology allow instantaneous global communication along with rich scientific understanding of many of the physical, chemical and biological mechanisms at work in nature. We also live in a time of fragmentation during which the power of data to reveal truths a fundamental aspect of scientific investigation has diminished. A focus on increasingly massive data sets and machine learning to seek truth from these data, limits the kinds of discoveries possible through science while also amplifying the capital required to conduct research.

Spectacular in their capacity to produce, technological innovation and scientific research take place within market economies. Ultimately, these same markets limit access to the new bounty that innovations generate such that, all too often, the fruits of scientific investigation become mired in discussions about the unequal distribution of scarce resources. Likewise, potential profits define which paths of innovation get explored limiting our collective creativity.

Resulting innovations tend to seed divisions and disenfranchisement without addressing true root causes of inequity. Poverty alleviation models focus on closing the gap so that all peoples can receive the bounty without considering that the current market driven way of life is wholly unsustainable and fundamentally flawed. These various forms of disenfranchisement have led to polarisation, anger, and othering all of which stand in the way of finding our shared humanity, our hidden histories and our deep connection to the natural world. Narrative opens paths for re-connection.

Some might argue that science itself remains pure and free of pernicious market forces while simultaneously reaching across the globe. The truth is more complicated. The dominant narrative has naturalised an accelerating path of innovation harnessing discoveries designed to control and bend natural phenomena to serve human needs. While acknowledging the powerful capacities of scientific investigation and the noble dedication of so many health workers, we argue instead that science and medicine have become big business. As a result, they can sometimes serve to perpetuate the status quo while diminishing their generative capacity for both discovery and health.

This begs the question: what exactly can science discover? Science discovers mechanisms and ways things work. It neither engages with questions of why things happen nor of their meaning, just with how. With a world in a standstill to cope with COVID-19, with seasonal wildfires raging annually on at least two continents, ice caps melting, and rising sea levels infringing on coastal cities, this human manipulation of the environment has progressed well beyond the boundaries of sustainability. While ethical engaged scientists have marshalled evidence of this human made destruction, many individuals, corporations, and even governments choose to ignore these data. Further, scientists remain shackled by the dominant paradigms in their search for solutions. For example, this moment’s earnest search for a COVID-19 vaccine will solve only today’s most proximal immediate problem. Ultimate

solutions require shifts at the deepest structural levels at work in our world. This is the place of narrative.

Further, in its most authentic form, science can be seen as a quest for knowledge whose horizons continually shift: We are limited in our understanding of the world by knowledge we are yet to gain. Science is never complete, but always in pursuit. Instead, often pitted in opposition to story, to magic, to mystery, science becomes aligned fully with a ‘rational’ worldview and the progress narrative. The power of science and technology renders beliefs and practices of cultural frameworks with origins distinct from those of the progress narrative somehow as lesser. We argue that our very survival requires engaging with questions of meaning that lie at the heart of narrative. It requires broadening a definition of science that is trapped within the dominant narratives of the Eurocentric ‘progress’ narrative and embracing all forms of Indigenous and cultural sciences - many of which have long effectively grappled with questions of environmental sustainability, wellbeing and ecosystem balance. This requires looking outside of today’s dominant paradigms for solutions. Restoring balance and creating fairer, healthier, more equitable societies demands rebooting and redefining our deepest social structures including those that tie technological and scientific innovation to hierarchical market economies.

3.2 Fragmented identities

One of the most pernicious impacts of a centuries-long history of the creation of nation states and on the categorisation of people based on skin colour, race and creed, has been a resounding normalisation of an understanding of our identities that arise from within the confines set by these boundaries. This internalisation of a view of identity that rests on externalities and superficialities, threatens to diminish our ability to imagine into being a world based on the fullness and the interconnectedness of the human story. On precisely this matter, in Culture and Imperialism Said writes “no one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental. Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also make their cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about” (p 336).

In the same vein, in his book Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon writes with respect to the European colonisation of Madagascar, “a Malagasy is a Malagasy; or rather he is not a Malagasy, but he lives his ‘Malagasyhood’. If he is a Malagasy it is because of the white

man” (p 78).29 Fanon’s point is to demonstrate that identity becomes set in relation to ‘the other’ that is, being Malagasy, or black or brown, is established as a comparison to whiteness. Without being pegged against a standard of ‘the other’, that itself is never racialised, these identities do not exist in the same way. Similarly, he writes “inferiorisation is the native correlative to the European’s feeling of superiority. Let us have the courage to say: it is the racist who creates the inferiorised” (p 73).30 Fanon is amongst the first to highlight the psychological impacts of imperialism, and in his work he raises the danger of the internalisation of the ideologies of imperialism by colonised people. The adoption of these ideologies can result in the acceptance of inferiority and the emulation of the actions of oppressors.

Introducing the notion of ‘cultural imposition’, Fanon explains the distorting force of the weight of socially driven norms upon the individual identities of those who are largely oppressed and repressed by these collective norms. Underpinning ‘cultural imposition’, is Fanon’s central idea that our identities as individuals are created in relation to, and filtered through, society as a collective. The shared collective unconscious of a society at any given time, Fanon argues, is not derived from internally encoded instinct (as other prominent psychoanalysts like the Swiss Carl Jung argued at the time), but is acquired, and is “quite simply the repository of prejudices, myths and collective attitudes of a particular group” (p 164).31 In a world shaped by the dehumanising categorisations of colonialism, Fanon argues that this renders those who have been the object of repression and rejection amenable to cultural imposition, “a black man who has lived in France, breathed in and ingested the myths and prejudices of a racist Europe and assimilated its collective unconscious can, if he splits his personality, but assert his hatred of the black man” (p 165).32

It should be stated that given the deeply entrenched physical and psychological manifestations of identities that have long been shaped by divisive systems of power, it is not always a straightforward task to generate solutions to injustice which can ameliorate this historical impact. Similarly, Bhambra makes the point that “it is not so easy to overcome the institutionalised hierarchies of five hundred years of systematised discrimination on a global scale. Independence does not equate to justice, nor emancipation to equality.”33

In spite of the difficulties (and perhaps, because of them) we suggest that a critical part of claiming our true transformative potential, involves rejecting the narrowed vision of identity from which we are so often expected to operate. Instead, we may reach beyond these stilted and narrowed frames, to claim ourselves within the deepened and broadened frame which arises by recognising the connected histories which shape us.

29 Fanon, F. (1952) Black Skin, White Masks, Paris: Editions du Seuil

30 Ibid

31 Ibid

32 Ibid

33 Dawes, S. and Bhambra, GK. (2011) Interview with Gurminder Bhambra on Colonialism, Empire and Slavery, [online] Available at: https://theoryculturesociety.org/interview-with-gurminder-bhambra-on-colonialism-empire-and-slavery/

To understand this further, it is perhaps useful to assess examples of how identities of individuals, groups of people, and entire regions have been manoeuvred to accept the false and distorting narratives which arise from unreckoned and systemised histories of injustice.

The contemporary attitudes to sexuality in many previously colonised regions, are far more rigid and discriminatory today, than before colonisation, offering a stark example of the sustained disruptive impact of imposed historical narratives. The attitude towards sexuality normalised by Enlightenment and religious thinkers, was one which contributed further to the capacity to categorise and control those in the regions being colonised globally. Many African, Pacific Island and Indigenous people who were met by European colonisers had greater fluidity around the notion of sexuality than that which was present in Europe at the time. This was used to confirm the ideas of “native promiscuity” and to hyper-sexualise nonEuropean men and women, justifying the need for religiously inspired cleansing, with legacies whose impact continues till this day. Journalist and organiser Layla-Roxanne Hill writes “the regulation of women and/or sexuality in non-Western countries can be traced back to colonial legacies rooted in penal codes…In 1885, the British government introduced new penal codes that punished all homosexual behaviour. Of the more than 70 countries that criminalise homosexual acts today, over half are former British colonies.”34 Furthermore, the rules around marriage and the legitimacy of children which were introduced across colonised states, were closely related to property rights and to further enriching slave owners by allowing them to own the children of enslaved mothers.35

Such discriminatory attitudes towards sex and sexuality persist in ways that are now so deeply held and pervasive that they have come to scramble contemporary notions, and twist memories, of the matter across many previously colonised nations. Black British writer and activist Bernadine Evaristo writes about the myth now internalised across the African continent, of a “pre-colonial sexual innocence”, which maintains that homosexuality did not exist until white men imported it. This myth is used by political leaders across the continent to stir homophobia in order to increase their own popularity and power. Evaristo writes that, counter to this myth, “from the 16th century onwards, homosexuality has been recorded in Africa by European missionaries, adventurers and officials who used it to reinforce ideas of African societies in need of Christian cleansing…The truth is that, like everywhere else, African people have expressed a wide range of sexualities. Far from bringing homosexuality with them, Christian and Islamic forces fought to eradicate it. By challenging the continent's indigenous social and religious systems, they helped demonise and persecute homosexuality in Africa, paving the way for the taboos that prevail today.”36

34 Hill, L. (2019) Let’s Talk about Sex (and Race and Colonialism) [online] Bella Calledonia. Available at: https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2019/06/09/lets-talk-about-sex-and-race-and-colonialism/

35 Turner, S. (2018) Sexuality, History, and Britain’s Colonial Legacy [online] Black Perspectives. Available at: https://www.aaihs.org/sexuality-history-and-britains-colonial-legacy/

36 Evaristo, B. (2014) The idea that African homosexuality was a colonial import is a myth [online] The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/08/african-homosexuality-colonial-import-myth

Yet another example of the further contribution towards injustice on questions of identity generated by unreconciled histories, is how we perceive migrants and refugees in our world today. The number of displaced people in the world sits at unprecedented levels, with the UN reporting over 70 million people have left their homes, many of them forcibly. The reception that such refugees have met across the world at its worst, has been one of hostility and exclusion, with their plight used to justify the increasingly nationalistic rhetoric of demagogic leaders across the globe. At best, the argument forwarded by those who would seek a more sympathetic approach to migrants/refugees is laced with language of economic contributions or magnanimous notions of morality. However, if we move the narrative beyond the frame set by incomplete accounts of history and into the reality of the connections that link global stories together the international responsibility for having created displacement becomes clear.

The unreconciled histories underpinning the narrative around migrants/refugees, makes it possible to continue to categorise these predominantly black and brown refugees in the same manner perpetrated by historical colonial projects. On this matter Bhambra writes that the distinction between migrants/refugees on the one hand and citizens on the other, is based on a false distinction normalised by incomplete versions of history. The ability to exclude swathes of people from a right to a safe and dignified life, is justified by at least two myths: first, the widespread negation of the fact that European wealth and relatively high standards of living have been built upon the labour and wealth of others, thereby absolving richer countries of their complicity in generating refugees to begin with; and second, by internalising the very ideas of exclusionary identity and nationhood that are necessary in order for European power to remain undisturbed. Bhambra writes “our distinction between migrants/refugees on one hand and citizens on the other is based on a false version of history, one that draws a distinction between states and colonies whose histories are, in fact, inextricably entwined. We have to understand the contemporary crisis in the context of these connected histories, and to think of the histories of states and colonies as one and the same. The failure to properly account for Europe’s colonial past cements the political division between legitimate citizens with rights and migrants/refugees without rights as members of the political community.”37

Re-framing the narrative surrounding migrants/refugees in this way positions us to see that our histories are inseparable, and our identities far more connected than the narratives in our present world would have us conclude. The implications of this shift would lend itself to the generation of an entirely different premise from which our obligations and notions of justice towards those who are displaced arise. It would even lead to a different conscientisation of the factors that contribute to the creation of refugees and displaced people in the first place.

37 Bhambra, GK. (2015) Europe won’t resolve the ‘migrant crisis’ until it faces its own past, [online] The Conversation, Available at: https://theconversation.com/europe-wont-resolve-the-migrant-crisis-until-it-faces-its-own-past-46555

3.3 Persistent hierarchies of exclusion that underpin global systems of capital

Almost six decades ago, in his book The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon wrote “what counts today, the question which is looming on the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity must reply to this question, or be shaken to pieces by it.”38 Today, we are witnessing this convulsion of not having adequately reckoned with the question of the equitable distribution of wealth.

Infused through the global, and hugely stratified, world that we now inhabit, sits a dominant ideology which French economist Thomas Piketty describes in his book Capital and Ideology as “neo-proprietarianism”39 a worship of private property rights above all else. This modern ideology, argues Piketty, has normalised policies which drive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, often in opaque and hidden ways. Simultaneously, the economic burden of these cuts is transferred onto households driving the gaping wealth inequalities which define our era.

Piketty argues that such realities are not natural or predefined outcomes driven by capitalism. Instead, political and ideological choices drive this reality. In fact, Piketty’s main thesis is that all inequality depends entirely on the chosen ideology on narratives.

Many of these choices of the deep hierarchies of worth, and the structural and systemic inequities which have generated climate crises and the disproportionately non-Western profile of those who have been most affected find their genus in the very same narratives of segregation and racialisation that define our recent world history. Noting the same inseparability as raised by Said between skewed power structures and the creation of nationalist identities, Piketty concludes that the “only way to transcend capitalism and ownership society is to work out some way of transcending the nation-state”. Piketty espouses an ultimate view of the inevitable failure of schemes and systems underpinned by such gross inequity, citing that historically, all mass inequity does not remain sustained.

This problem of extreme wealth inequity driven by global systems of capitalism, sits alongside the increased capacity of technology for amplified mass surveillance. In her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, US scholar and writer Shoshana Zuboff argues that a new type of capitalism has taken hold. If in the industrial capitalism of the past, nature’s raw materials were transformed into commodities, in today’s digital age, we ourselves are claimed as the raw materials. Zuboff explains “surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims the human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data” (p 8) 40

38 Fanon, F. (1961). The Wretched of the Earth, France: Francois Maspero editeur

39 Piketty, T. (2020). Capital and Ideology, Belknap Press

40 Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, PublicAffairs

With surveillance capitalism, comes the dire capacity to entrench already resounding notions of hierarchy and exclusion in ways that are amplified and untraceable, through the power of algorithms and technology. The sheer scale of information transmitted from users to datadriven companies like Google, allows for the generation of a repository of data from which predictive behavioural analysis can be gleaned. Zuboff emphasises that the threat to the notion of equity arises because surveillance capitalism not only transgresses our privacy, but, disturbingly, it aims to control our behaviour for political gain and commercial profit. It decisively erodes any semblance of the idea of free choice on the market, and even our free will

In such an age, the Foucauldian knowledge-power cycle (and Doxtater’s colonial-knowledgepower cycle) takes on unprecedented significance the centralisation of disproportionate masses of knowledge into the control of a mere handful of companies. It also transfers power in ways that are severely disfiguring to the notion of equity. These power houses operate from behind a veil of secrecy. Zuboff notes that “theirs was an invisibility cloak woven in equal measure to the rhetoric of the empowering web, the ability to move swiftly, the confidence of vast revenue streams and the wild, undefended nature of the territory they would conquer and claim” (p 10).41

Importantly, Zuboff reminds us that “surveillance capitalism is not an accident of overzealous technologists, but rather a rogue capitalism that learned to cunningly exploit its historical conditions to ensure and defend its success” (p 17) Commercial surveillance is, Zuboff writes, “a specifically constructed human choice” (p 91).42 Again, we are reminded of the fallacy of the inevitability of such grossly skewed landscapes of inequity, with Zuboff ultimately determining such an overly-ordered, predictive reality to be a ‘utopia’ destined for failure.

3.4 Trapped Solutions

Disconcertingly, caught in the web of the intersecting strands of the persistent hierarchies of categorisation of human worth and the acute centralisation of power that wrap around our world, even many of the narratives that underpin our solutions are tainted and trapped.

An example of a pervasive way this plays out today is raised by Indian American writer Anand Giridharadas, in his book Winner Takes All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. Giridharadas critiques the ironic contemporary solution offered to so many of our global ails: the creation of ‘solutions’ to poverty driven problems by the world’s billionaires. Those creating the problem determine what constitutes social justice.

41

42

Giridharadas notes “all around us in America is the clank-clank-clank of the new in our companies and economy, our neighbourhoods and schools, our technologies and social fabric. But these novelties have failed to translate into broadly shared progress and the betterment of our overall civilisation (p 1).”43 Instead, all benefits and gains have been siphoned upwards, “such that the fortunes of the world’s billionaires now grow at more than double the pace of everyone else’s, and the top 10 percent of humanity have come to hold 90 percent of the planet’s wealth” (p 5).44 Giridharadas notes that, in response, voting publics around the world have, alongside becoming more susceptible to embracing fake news and populist movements, developed a growing anger and suspicion about the effectiveness of the systems that regulate our lives.

Faced with this rising tide, elites around the world have both barricaded themselves away on private estates emerging only to take more political power or to defend themselves. Recently, many have also taken ownership of the problems their funnelled wealth has created and declared themselves the partisans of change. While some may support ordinary people who are already working amongst their communities to generate social change, “more often, these elites start initiatives of their own, taking on social change as though it were just another stock in their portfolio…Because they are in charge of these attempts at social change, the attempts naturally reflect their biases” (p 5).45 Critically, these initiatives are often based on bypassing public regulation, and look to the market to solve problems.

Though the elite of today may be more socially minded, Giridharadas makes the point that many of these initiatives are designed to supplement the fact that the powerful do not want to sacrifice for the common good. Accordingly, they have developed a set of arrangements that monopolises the benefits of innovation and progress, while “giving scraps to the forsaken many of whom wouldn’t need the scraps if the society were working right” (p 7).46

Giridharadas makes the point that the singular act of multinational corporations and billionaires not evading their tax responsibilities would be more useful in allowing people to live dignified lives, than their setting up of philanthropic organisations made in their own image. Ultimately, these half-measures prevent real systemic change, and not only fail to allow things to evolve, but keeps them in a state of stasis. It boils down to whether elected and accountable governments or by wealthy elites claiming to have society’s best interests at heart lead the reform of our public lives. Giridharadas posits that even though today’s systems of democracy are failing in many ways, it generates even deeper problems to attempt to sideline democracy rather than work to improve it.

Evidence of a world driven by wealthy elites, already resounds. With so many of the world’s ultra-elite dependent on global business models with high carbon footprints, we are seeing anaemic responses (both corporate and political) to even some of the greatest challenges of our time climate change, and more recently, to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the United

43 Giridharadas, A. (2019). Winner Takes All: the Elite Charade of Changing the World, Penguin Books

44 Ibid

45 Ibid

46 Ibid

States, world renowned linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky states in a July 2020 interview with Democracy Now!47, that the United States is “a country run by the corporate sector which has overwhelming influence on the government…symbolised by the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, who made $13 billion in a single day…They’re using the cover of the pandemic to increase their dedication to enriching the very rich and the corporate sector”.

During the Trump era, Chomsky explains, “the corporate figures that have been placed in charge of agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, pass further legislation to smash the public in the face and enrich the rich, like cutting back pollution standards”.

This corporate driven response to the climate crisis follows a pattern across developed nations around the globe. In Australia, even at the height of the unprecedented bushfire season of summer of 2019/2020, both major political parties were reluctant to acknowledge the impact of climate change or commit to serious policy changes. Novelist and commentator Richard Flanagan writes, “incredibly, the response of Australia’s leaders to this unprecedented national crisis has been not to defend their country but to defend the fossil fuel industry, a big donor to both major parties as if they were willing the country to its doom. While the fires were exploding in mid-December, the leader of the opposition Labor Party went on a tour of coal mining communities expressing his unequivocal support for coal exports. The prime minister, the conservative Scott Morrison, went on vacation to Hawaii.”48

Noting the potential for the further trapping of solutions to global problems in favour of the elite during a time of pandemic, Indian writer and activist, Arundhati Roy considers the pandemic a portal to the world that is next coming. In an April 2020 interview, Roy states “right now what’s happening is that national authoritarianism is colluding with international disaster capital and data gatherers and they are preparing another world for us…if corporate globalisation was advanced capitalism, now they would like us to move into an even more advanced version of that, where you have the Gates foundation more or less owning the World Health Organisation, deciding public policy and how to make massive profits out of whatever protocol is going to be rolled out to deal with this epidemic. And that would involve data gathering and surveillance. If we were sleepwalking into a surveillance state, now we are panic running into it, because of a fear that is being cultivated within us.”49

In a few brief final examples amongst many, of ‘solutions’ which exacerbate problems, we include a feminism driven by a Western ideology of liberation (itself heavily tainted by imperialism and capitalism) that is transposed authoritatively onto women of colour. Labelled as ‘imperial feminism’ by British filmmaker of Indian origin Pratibha Parmar, because it posits that “other” women need saving by white women to attain this white version of liberation thus denying diverse forms of female agency and power. In the same vein, the

47 Chomsky, N. (2020) Trump Is Using Pandemic to Enrich Billionaires as Millions Lose Work & Face Eviction, [online] Available at: https://www.democracynow.org/2020/7/24/noam_chomsky_trump_is_using_pandemic

48 Flanagan, R. (2020) Australia is Committing Climate Suicide, NY Times [online] Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/opinion/australia-fires-climate-change.html

49 Roy, A. (2020) The Pandemic is a Portal, Haymarket Books [online] Available at: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/blogs/130-arundhati-roy-the-pandemic-is-a-portal

declaration of the war on terror in Afghanistan in 2001, was morally supported by the declaration by then President Bush that “today, women [in Afghanistan] are liberated”. Almost two decades later, countless (and uncounted) dead, and incessantly precarious conditions for all those in Afghanistan, this ruse of feminism enforced by military might and imperial occupation has unleashed only travesty.

And perhaps one of the greatest trapped solutions of our time is the Internet and associated digital technologies. Once heralded as a great democratic equaliser, the Internet is now an oligopoly tightly held by giant corporations like Google, Amazon and Facebook. Through their business models advocating sensationalist click bait, predictive behavioural analysis and monopolised advertising revenues these corporations have had far reaching and diminished implications for systems of democracy, and for diversity in news, politics and opinion. Similarly, the algorithms underpinning artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning that are synonymous with today’s narratives of progress continue to build in and amplify human biases. These algorithms (increasingly the measure being used to determine the outcome of significant issues such as mortgage approvals, job prospects, criminal prosecutions and policing tactics) have already been shown to build in significant racial and gender bias. One recent study showed that an IBM AI trained to recognise gender, could recognise with 99 percent accuracy the faces of white men, and plummeted to 35 per cent accuracy when faced with dark-skinned females.50 Such technologies require serious corrections and ethics-based scrutiny, as they pose an amplified threat to the question of justice and for the increased fortification of racial and gender driven biases.

50 Cossins, D. (2018) Discriminating algorithms: 5 times AI showed prejudice New Scientist [online] Available at: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2166207-discriminating-algorithms-5-times-ai-showed-prejudice/

4

What is being done?

“I imagine a world in which, if capitalism must exist, there is a safety net for everyone who lives under its umbrella, so that the most vulnerable are actually not that vulnerable because everyone has their basic needs met: suitable food, shelter, health care.

I imagine a post-COVID world in which our institutions for global good, the United Nations among them, are revitalized and valorized because of the critical work that they do to craft a global vision and a global strategy to address global issues. Where a global vision becomes as important as a local one.

I imagine a post-COVID world in which people after receiving much needed human interactions with one another; after braving possible exposure to the coronavirus in order to give care to others; and after recovering from managing remote-learning while also carrying out their own work go on to better cherish shared public spaces and institutions and community with renewed vigour so that we're able to build stronger commitments for the greater good.

In other words, we make actionable the lessons that we have learned.”

Cedric Brown AFRE Fellow

Just as the power of narratives has been systematically harnessed to generate norms that fracture our relationship to ourselves, one another, and the natural universe so too can they be used to re-member, to shift the tide of history towards the shores of justice and universal humanity.

Many within and beyond the Atlantic community already have begun to explore the capacity of narrative to address injustice. We believe that there is still much to conscientise around how narratives can be harnessed to realise our human potential. This includes unravelling how narratives that have been used to create a fractured world, how they may have filtered through into the work we carry out, and often seep into the identities we internalise as our own. Conscientising these hidden yet dominant narratives lets us reckon with their impact, liberate ourselves from their bind, and redirect the power of narratives to heal.

Here, we assess some of the ways that narratives are being used as a tool for social change so far, to build up to some recommendations for further developing the power of narratives as a means for re-membering and re-imagining what is possible in our world.

4.1 Existing Narrative Initiatives for Social Equity

Atlantic is not alone in recognising the place of narrative in social change. Increasingly social change makers turn to narrative, tapping into our deepest human capacity to make sense of

the world through story to create fairer, healthier, and more inclusive societies. For this review, we looked to other organisations focusing on narrative justice (such as The Narrative Initiative, The Othering and Belonging Institute, Harness, The Pop Culture Collaborative, Opportunity Agenda, Participant Media, Echoing Green, Color of Change and others), along with other philanthropic organisations with a narrative component (Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, Rockefeller Foundation, Open Society Foundations). We have also read and integrated the report “Narrative Landscape Analysis: Atlantic Fellows Programs + Atlantic Institute” prepared by The NI which compares Atlantic to other Social Change Fellowship Programs including Ashoka, the Global Health Corps, the Obama Foundation Fellowship, and the New Voices Fellowship; and the report “Perspectives on Equity in the Atlantic Fellows Programmes” by Mvuyo Tom, the inaugural Atlantic Institute Leader-inResidence.

Like Atlantic, these organisations and foundations turned to narrative because of a shared recognition that deficit models of closing knowledge gaps to bring us together often shut off dialogue while narratives open doors to conversations. Narrative training for Fellows and staff across these diverse organisations and foundations has honed narrative as a powerful tool to raise awareness, to activate support through touching hearts and minds, and to heal through validating voices and experiences previously silenced. We witnessed this power of narrative in AI’s Fellowship of Fellows webinar series when Obama Fellow Zarlasht Halaimzai used the words of displaced persons living in over-capacity camps during the pandemic to open her presentation.

Deeply rooted in the historical specificities of space and time, these activist initiatives surface specific hidden narratives and contribute effectively to restoring justice. Some of these initiatives already have deep ties to Atlantic. For example, in the United States, as embodied in its name Black Likes Matter, co-founders AFRE Fellows Opal Tometi and Alicia Garza use narrative to surface systems and structures that render black lives disposable. AFRE Fellow Michael Smith is rewriting the narrative for black youth to combat the impact mass incarceration of black men has on them, through My Brother’s Keeper. Among so many of their initiatives, Color of Change, led by AFRE Fellow Rashad Robinson, specifically sought to correct the exclusion of anti–black racism despite the inclusion of black people in films through their Hollywood initiative. Their approach to introducing diverse story lines was rooted in the inclusion of people of colour in Hollywood writer’s rooms who could speak to the reality of anti-black racism. The systemic anti-black racism revealed through these narrative initiatives undoubtedly contributed to activating and amplifying the global response to George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis Police officer. Through a multiplicity of voices, narratives reflect the broad range of human experience.

The same is true of the work of Fellows globally. For example, AFHESEA Fellow Lawrence Aritao champions recovery and opportunity for people who have experienced trafficking, rewriting the personal and public narrative into one of future possibility. Through music performance Bowinge Lusizi AFRE Fellow in South Africa heals and restores narrative that was stripped away and silenced by colonialism A broad range of AFBHE Fellows work to

rewrite the dominant dementia narrative in order to reduce stigma, improve lives and even reframe cognitive diversity as a potential strength. In this regard, this work approaches Jody Barney’s powerful strength-based activism indigenous peoples with disabilities in Australia.

Building coalitions across activist groups, other initiatives by Fellows have worked to surface representations of denied histories such as the takeover of lands from the first peoples of the Americas and of indigenous Australians and Torres Straight Islanders through the current From the Heart campaign seeking constitutional change to enable a Voice to Parliament of Indigenous peoples in the nation’s Constitution.

Working across Fellowship Programs, the Displacement Affinity group with members from across four Fellowships created a convening in Jordan and website to shift the narrative surrounding displacement today. The driver underpinning this work was a realisation of the interconnected nature of the drivers of displacement from climate issues, to conflict, to destroyed economies, and now increasingly because of the COVID-19 pandemic (intersecting with the race and gender biases that run across these drivers) while the narratives around displacement remain superficially captured in arguments of blame, vilification, scapegoating or high-minded morality. Shifting the narratives around displacement to acknowledge the intertwined nature of drivers at its roots, while re-humanising those who are displaced as the face of systems which have collapsed under the weight of incessant hierarchy and exclusion, was seen as a powerful tool in beginning to transform outcomes.

From its use in medicine and entertainment and in social justice initiatives, narrative has become the latest tool to advance various agendas ranging from profit to peace to compassion. Bringing narrative, an ancient human capacity, into the toolbox is not so much an innovation as it is something ‘(k)new’ that is, something not necessarily novel, but already known and deeply held within us.

At the same time, many narrative initiatives today remain fully embedded within the hidden narratives of ego, fear, and competition that constitute today’s dominant world view. For one, narratives have been commodified, turned into something that narrative experts can help an organisation or individual hone in order to accomplish a particular mission or to ‘influence’ an audience. Further, individuals and organisations alike rely upon market forms of both traditional media and social media to disseminate their narratives. At Atlantic we have the opportunity to take narrative initiatives beyond these market forces to realise its fullest potential.

In markets, quantitative measures such as “likes”, retweets, opportunistic advertising, and underlying sales, structure narrative’s financial base. Written and visual sequential narratives often in very short form dominate social media, limiting the depth of exchange possible therein. The digital base of social media also opens the door to a new wave of surveillance and manipulation through this form.

At the same time, in today’s globalised world, we recognise the need to communicate beyond one’s immediate community and accordingly leave the door wide open to taking a Machiavellian approach to social media. We recognise the profound positive outcomes of social media and current cell phone video technology to surface the reality of anti-black racism in the US. The video footage of George Floyd’s murder and of “birding while black” illustrated layers of institutional police brutality and undeniable white privilege. Still, we believe that questioning market underpinnings of digital communications will make space for (k)new narrative forms which can contribute to changing the shape of social engagement for the better.

In addition to giving voice and surfacing denied histories, organisations such as the Narrative Initiative (NI) speak specifically to challenging levels of deep narrative. To a certain degree this parallels our references in this review to internalised dominant narratives and ‘cultural imposition’: internalised subconscious narratives that reflect existing power structures. The NI, like many social justice organisations, tends to focus on issues one at a time showing the deep narrative underlying the issue at hand. This limits the focus to a particular place and time instead of excavating deeper narrative layers that dominate today’s global order.

The report the NI prepared to examine narrative within AFP/AI and other programs, breaks narrative strategy as a tool for harnessing into three distinct areas: 1) Storytelling & Leadership Development 2) Public Discourse & Advocacy and 3) Long-Term Change of Cultural Mindsets. While harnessing narratives as a tool for change is a vital aspect of social change work, as we have explored in this review, we view decoding the dominant (and internal) narratives that influence each of us individually and structurally as equally vital and, in many ways a necessary precursor (and ongoing accomplice), to how powerfully narratives can then be harnessed to create change. Decoding lets us reveal often hidden and distorting inequities, and to meet as equals even against a backdrop of differing histories, privileges, values, and traditions. As Atlantic Fellows working across the globe, we have an extraordinary chance to move beyond single issues and go deeper still to decode narratives in a way that differs from what appears largely to be today’s norm. Here we propose decoding the all-encompassing layer of master narrative established through systems of colonialism and imperialism, and their associated systems of value and exchange, which have come to dominate the world.

The global multidisciplinary nature of the Atlantic programs and the deep inclusion of indigenous, colonised, and activist communities as equals instead of simply as those to be helped allow us to move beyond traditional Euro-American knowledge bases and measures of value rooted in possessions, innovations, and capital. This facilitates the creation of narrative approaches that can uncouple from lingering injustice set in motion by colonialist and imperialist world orders. We can avoid the unintentional privileging of a suite of ideas related to capital, to a particular relationship with nature based on scarcity and competition for limited resources, and from a deeply embedded narrative of progress and civilisation with Euro-American/Western roots.

The diversity of Atlantic programs also facilitates the creation of a framework that does not blindly privilege Western science and other forms of knowledge, through recognising that all knowledge is shaped by cultures. In the process, the Atlantic approach to narrative can incorporate (k)new ways that make room for multiple cultural specificities and deeply held human knowledge on how to restore balance, to live lightly, and to reduce consumption and waste. Such (k)new ways step away from the dominant mind-set of extracting resources from nature and battling with nature in the name of progress while also opening the door to our shared humanity.

With health playing a central role in the Atlantic mission and serving as the specific focus of several of the individual programs, our approach to narrative also includes teasing apart the place of narrative within medicine. We are not so much concerned with the valuable contributions of the field of Narrative Medicine (Charon 2009), which uses story to build a more person oriented and humanistic medical practice. We focus instead on the hidden dominant narratives embedded within biomedicine, the dominant global medical system. Much health activism focuses on the need to bring basic health services to communities that lack them. We see this vital call as but one piece of the puzzle.

Through narrative we can take a hard look at this paradigm’s associations with a medical industrial complex, a history of human experimentation that continues into today, and a fundamental valuing of some lives more than others. This critical perspective also demands an examination of the injustices built into a system in which extraordinary resource consuming measures can be taken to save individual, generally privileged lives, while leaving out basic health needs of entire communities, if not entire regions of the globe.

The disproportionate sickness and death from the current COVID-19 pandemic of black and brown people across the globe has revealed direct health outcomes of inequity, of structural violence, of systemic racism and multiple other forms of othering. Implementation of various containment recommendations made by global health organisations for preventing the spread of the disease, such as hand washing, physical distancing and more depend ultimately on levels of privilege. When blindly applied, these health-promoting recommendations caused harm. On top of this, global mandates allowed unscrupulous leaders to use such measures to ratchet up human rights abuses. Health justice, and balance require more than the spread of biomedical expertise and supplies. It also requires taking into account biomedicine’s roots in the same military industrial complex of the societies that developed this particular medical system.

Biomedical treatments derive from culturally resonant militaristic models based on fighting disease instead of restoring balance and health. Further, markets drive medical innovation as well as treatment options making them inaccessible for most of the people of the planet. Meanwhile such treatments generate inordinate waste that impact all of us. They also require global flows of labour from south to north for essential workers to power the care industries of wealthy nations. Disciplines such as health economics reduce their subject matter to a conflict between insatiable human needs and finite capital resources. We reject this

conception of human nature as insatiable and view this insatiability instead as a component of privilege that can and must shift now. We believe that an equitable future will include (k)new approaches to health based in the restoration of balance and health promotion and social justice across the entire human life cycle.

Biomedicine and science in general search for technical solutions to the problems at hand. Many of these solutions have been spectacular if not miraculous. At the same time, these disciplines have become atomised much in the way that market economies have lost the wider social meanings traditionally embedded in exchanges. While individual scientists and health workers passionately devote their lives to health and other forms of equity they do so without challenging culture bound aspects of these disciplines at the root of health injustices.

In the turbulent 1960s, scientists recognised that some problems such as nuclear proliferation or ever-expanding population size defy technological solutions requiring instead changes in human values, ideas, and morality. At the same time, the possibility of this type of change was denied through the use of market style mathematical analyses resulting in “The Tragedy of the Commons”. We argue that such an argument, much like the “Selfish Gene” thesis of Dawkins, remains blindly culture bound and part of the Euro-American master narrative. The pandemic has brought us a moment to recognise that our collective future requires acknowledging our commonality and connectedness as vital human capacities that market analyses cannot capture. Many belief systems do not deny this human capacity. Nor does narrative. Instead narrative connects our hearts and minds at individual, community, and global levels.

4.2 The Atlantic Narrative

The story of the creation of the Atlantic Philanthropies (O’Clery 2007) provides uncanny scaffolding for the use of narrative by Atlantic Fellows and Programs to contribute to creating a (k)new global social order. Chuck Feeney’s fortune was amassed through legally redirecting tax monies from various state governments (through the invention of Duty Free Shopping) into social justice and health promotion initiatives in communities across the globe. The fortune derived from seeing opportunity to generate cash in the spaces between and among countries through variation in their laws regarding money and exchange. The actual cash came from purchase of luxury items by international travellers, a largely inherently privileged group.

Working in these margins and edges and avoiding taxes could simply seem a clever way to make money as it was for Chuck Feeney’s business partners, as it was perhaps for Feeney at the start of his career. The social justice initiatives the Atlantic fortune set into motion likewise could also seem a part of the phenomenon that Giridharadas identified in Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World described above. Would the US government, for example, have made good use of these tax dollars to solve the social injustices systemically built into American society? The pandemic has made the short-term

answer to this question impossible to ignore. Giridharadas’s point for the long term is well taken and will ultimately be answered in terms of the ways Atlantic Fellows contribute to bending the arc of social inequity.

The particular shape of both Feeney’s fortune and philanthropy step outside of the elite charade and resonate with genuine social change and global equity. First, the fortune derived from the separation of this world into the distinct countries, their borders a legacy of imperial imaginings. We see in this a fundamental recognition of state creation as a human act dependent upon drawing and maintaining international borders through the exercise of power.

Second, Feeney’s decision to fully divest himself of his earnings further resonates with the limitations of governments (as they are constituted today) to restore justice on account of the competitive market frameworks and power relations with which they function. That he chose to completely divest and to do so anonymously belies a community approach to tax avoidance instead of one oriented toward personal gain. That he directed the cash toward the purpose of individuals connecting across human made structural divisions likewise builds a global community. Further, the Fellowship is designed to empower local leaders, experts from their communities, instead of pushing a specified philanthropic agenda.

Feeney’s conception of money also stepped outside traditional market economies. His belief that “he did not own what he owned, as it were, that he was its custodian and that he saw himself as being lucky enough to have made money but it was not his money, he was just essentially recycling it” (p 122). Such recycling situates the Atlantic mission firmly within the framework of gift economies reflecting practices such as the Kula Ring of the Trobriand Islanders. In gift economies, exchanged objects knit communities together. The exchanges function across all realms of society moral, ethical, legal, aesthetic, and spiritual instead of as mere economic transactions. Objects’ value derives from meanings and stories societies confer upon them relating to all aspects of communal life. In a gift economy, objects must stay in motion to maintain connection and must never be amassed. Food must especially stay in motion. Always given freely, food never becomes the object of barter or cash exchange. Acts of giving assure individuals’ social status in a framework that preserves an entire suite of social values, meanings, and practices.

By contrast, today’s predatory capitalism rests upon amassing wealth measured solely in terms of disembodied cash and the objects it can purchase. The cash exchanges underlying markets lie outside of moral, ethical, spiritual, and aesthetic realms though laws exist to try and maintain a modicum of decency. Nevertheless, food scarcity, the most fundamental inequity, impacts people across the globe. Even when put to good use through aid, philanthropy, and the like, the act of amassing cash fundamentally separates us, breaking down community and connection and gives way to the unprecedentedly concentrated points of wealth and power, that, as we have seen in section 3.4 of this review, has had the impact of ripping through the notion of an equitable world. From the origins of the Atlantic fortune to Chuck Feeney’s decision to give it all away while living to create interconnected social

justice leaders, upends all the rules of both individual bounded national economies and of predatory capitalism.

The philanthropic philosophies of Andrew Carnegie and Maimonides no doubt influenced Feeney’s approach of total giving while living. His approach also presaged some of what Giridharadas critiques so well: the hoarding of opportunity and capital by plutocrats as they publicly fund and champion social justice causes. Instead, Chuck Feeney did his work quietly, sharing opportunity, and planting the seeds for a total rethinking of exchange systems. We see a vital and deeply differentiating aspect of the long-term Atlantic mission, to find ways to stay close to this initial spirit of unconditional giving for fear of a creeping hubris and elitism that is typically associated with such vast sums of money.

In this regard, the Atlantic creation story taps into a deeper root: something (k)new, a return to a fundamental human capacity to link ourselves and to connect through exchanges of objects and meaning as in the gift economies described above. In the Atlantic creation story we also see a road map and a call to action, to create social systems in which giving fully embedded in all aspects of society from moral, ethical, legal, aesthetic to spiritual becomes the norm of exchange. Dreaming big, we can imagine this ultimately leading to a fundamental redefinition of money and how it functions.

Our current way of life is neither just nor sustainable. We acknowledge that money or some form of it whether it be ancient shells, grains, bank notes, digital currencies has been in circulation for a significant part of the human story. However, we posit that the role of money as a proxy for trust and freedom that is, money as a pathway to choice and to securing our freedom to live with dignity has been severely diminished. Instead humans funnel money according to narratives and ideologies which deem most worthy to those who sit at the top of normalised categories of hierarchy and worth that further alienates many from living dignified lives. The distribution (and hoarding) of wealth in this way, alongside the use of cash as the sole currency by which to measure value and worth separates economic exchanges from other aspects of life, and has left a deep void, hunger, and dysfunction in its wake.

The current pandemic highlights the need for a complete social restructuring that embeds all exchanges in deep social meaning. Our world’s problems cannot be solved simply by throwing more money at them alone. Ultimately the existing unjust economic structures are destined to collapse. Through Atlantic, we have been given a gift that will allow us to reshape the world order while money still has this singular limited value. Keeping the gift that was given to us in motion requires that we dare to look beyond the dominant economic paradigms to create (k)new just, healthy, and more inclusive systems of exchange saturated with meaning.

In this regard, narrative has a critical role to play in the Atlantic mission. Both universal and a particular capacity for which some individuals possess a gift, narrative spans across artistic and humanistic realms to meet the scientific and technological. Everyone has a story.

Everyone and every discipline loves a good story. Similarly, Michael Apple asserts that using the arts in powerful ways leads to the increased possibility of making gains, restoring the memory of the power of forms of knowing and being that are absolutely crucial to the histories and identities of all of us.51 Yet storytelling and the arts lie at the edges of markets, sometimes commodified to make massive profits and other times leaving its makers to live on air.

In his book, The Gift, American poet and scholar Lewis Henry Hyde connects the dots between narrative and gift economies in contemporary contexts.52 Stories indeed all arts must stay in motion, must be given to others as part of knitting us together, much as food must always be kept in motion and never be denied to another. An Atlantic narrative initiative will gather and disseminate stories old and (k)new from across the globe to counter the void created from money, rooted in conquest, serving as the dominant and isolated focus of exchange. By returning to narratives, by exchanging stories, we open the door to multiple currencies, multiple histories, and a fairer more inclusive world. When viewed in this way, narratives themselves become a mode of exchange.

51 Artsequal.fi (2018). Arts Equal website. [online] Available at: https://www.artsequal.fi/-/michael-applenstudia-generalia-luento-kansallismuseossa-22-10-/2.9

52 Hyde, LH. (2004). The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World, Canongate PBS

5 Recommendations

“The call of our times is to find the narratives that fit the ones that reflect our potential for shared and boundless horizons…This, in turn, depends on our capacity to reorient away from the confining narratives of disconnection that have limited our collective human potential, and to acknowledge the degree to which we are, each and everyone, vestiges of the natural universe.

Realising we are all part of the same whole does not mean subsuming our unique or culturally defined identities into oblivion rather it means the opposite. It means acknowledging them, but in a far deeper way than that which presently resounds, unseduced by the exclusionary labels of identity that categorise people according to hierarchies of perceived worth, and driven instead by the ability to see the transcendent connections between things to recognise that the rivers of self, empty into the oceans of all, which lap against the shores of the universe”.

Durkhanai Ayubi

AFSE Fellow

Parwana: Recipes and Stories from an Afghan Kitchen

Before making recommendations aligned with this landscape review we acknowledge our own implicit limitations by virtue of our experiences such as our cultural background, our life story, and the particular lens which our ancestries and histories have afforded us. In acknowledging our bi-cultural histories as descendants of war and genocide and as citizens of wealthy colonising countries, we seek to both honour this, and to extend ourselves beyond this, by bringing in the voices and histories of our fellow Fellows. Such reflexivity the ability to see how what we bring to the table influences our perceptions and projections and actions lies at the heart of listening to and receiving the narratives of other individuals. We see the practice of reflexivity as a vital component of narrative which will empower all members of the diverse Atlantic community to share their own stories.

We also acknowledge that organisational structures impose limitations on an Atlantic approach to narrative and social change. Throughout the review and particularly in this section, we seek to model and explore potential solutions to these constraints. Issues we will engage with include: the varied emphases across programs; the inherent independence of each program yet the delicate mission of creating connections across Fellowships through the AI; the housing of the majority of programs in hierarchical competitive academic institutions and the ways this encodes a culture of striving and competition; the primacy of science and of the written word particularly when channelled into essay form above other methods of expression; and the hidden impact of prevailing hierarchies in kinds of knowledge rooted in the very dominant narratives we seek to expose.

5.1 The spirit with which we offer recommendations: Unleashing ourselves through a disalienated concept of liberation

We believe that Atlantic Fellows are (and can continue to be in even more powerful ways) those who conscientise the act of disalienating and emancipating themselves from the structures set by dominant narrative norms in the world today. This means a capacity to dissolve the limitations set by the boundaries of the concept of power that resounds today to dig deeper and to liberate a notion of power built in inclusivity, not exceptionalism, and built in honouring our humanness, not attempting to evade it.

To do this, we take the lessons of decoding the often hidden and pervasive impact of the narrative norms of dehumanisation and categorisation embedded into the structures, policies and institutions that shape our world today; and harness them to preference (k)new ways of being. We believe the essence with which Fellows approach the act of social change and redressing injustice can emphasise a spirit that has now in a world shaped by market norms and disconnections between our own humanness and that of others long been cast as the anti-thesis to common sense. In a world now deeply fractured and convulsing from the fissures created by such norms, the only possible approach to social change, if it is to be meaningful and not superficial, is one which is emancipatory on both an individual and collective social level. This does not, for example, mean simply increasing the diversity of faces sitting around the same corporate boardroom tables - but instead, we envisage, means a complete change of the materials that constitute the table. It means changing what we collectively honour and privilege as leadership and power within our societies - moving away from egocentric visions of aspiration, and towards a dispersive vision more closely aligned to the nature of our being human.

This, in turn, does not necessarily mean immediately grand or sweeping actions, but we proffer that it begins with claiming in its entirety the parts of our essence that have long been negated and erased claiming the depths of our narratives and infusing this into the empty chasms which now split our world. Approaching the challenges which riddle our world from a place of such fullness can push us to look at problems in atypical ways, not be confined to the limits set for us by narratives that are designed to keep us fractured and limited in the scope of our questioning, and ultimately, we imagine, to re-member as a precursor for shifted outcomes in our social change endeavours.

This could, no doubt, mean many different things to each of us. As an overall approach, here we adopt an essence put forward by Fanon, who wrote that for the birth of a genuine communication one that is necessary to create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world, “before embarking on a positive voice, freedom needs to make an effort at disalienation” (p 206) 53 As a starting point, to conscientise this process of disalienation

53 Fanon, F. (1952) Black Skin, White Masks, Paris: Editions du Seuil

necessary for freedom and for a positive voice, we offer the following overarching notions to carry across the recommendations we offer in this review:

● Embrace a deeper sense of empathy: the normalised sense of ‘empathy’ is one which tells us that we can “walk in another’s shoes”. But we challenge this notion, and ask how could we ever know exactly what it is to be someone else, even for a moment? With all the hues and complexities and memories that constitute their unique being all of which shape any one moment of consciousness? Instead, we suggest that a far more enduring sense of empathy, one which can never mutate into appropriation or assumption, arises from accessing our own depths. Through working towards a deeper sense of self awareness, we are more able to elicit an empathy that is based on the universality of the human experience the more rooted we are within our own essence, the more we are able to identify the unbroken commonalities that define our existence. From here, we are better able to develop narratives that are all-encompassing and open to the multiplicities of the human experience.

● Refute dogma: a recurring ailment of many ideologies and narratives, however wellmeaning, has been to presume to know what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’. We would argue that this is a remnant of the mirage of privileging ‘scientific’ and ‘rational’ thought, or else, a feature of overly zealous in-group/out-group mentality that is stoked and encouraged into being by a sense of power that depends upon fear and blame. We instead, embrace the idea that multiplicities of beliefs co-exist, and that frameworks and structures can be built to legitimise this. This is not to refute the need for careful and thoughtful analysis and application of knowledge, but simply to refute the idea that there are single universal truths that everyone must abide by. It is to say that similar thoughtful conclusions and values can be arrived at via various paths, and narratives that encourage and honour these multiplicities are a precursor for a more equitable world. Further, we suggest that we should be cognisant of the gaps in our knowledge, and acknowledge that this is an enduring feature of what it is to be human. The frontiers of knowledge are forever shifting, and there will always be unknown unknowns, that once discovered, will invalidate what had till then been held as ‘common sense’ or ideals. Dogmatic ideologies, even if steeped in utopian goodness, are by their nature uncompromising, and thus brittle and doomed to replicate the oppression they so often seek to circumvent. In the same vein, Foucault warns that we can rail against prevailing norms and narratives of our times, but must have a heightened awareness around what we are suggesting we replace those narratives with will they replicate the same depravities of power that we are seeking to counteract? We need to be wary of and to interrogate how ideals are made.

● Reject an untamed ego in order to rehumanise: a great deal of the trajectory of our lives at this moment in the human story is embedded in frameworks that unwittingly or otherwise, amplify the hierarchies and separations that scar our shared narratives. This is particularly foreshadowed in the technology which is shaping so many key facets of our lives it is by its very nature, impersonal, data driven and disconnecting. Similarly, the holy grail of science and the ‘progress’ narrative, is to secure immortality. Contrarily, so much of the restoration of human dignity and justice is embedded in reclaiming our

organic nature, our mortality, our propensity to make mistakes and to be flawed, our connections with one another and knowing that our histories and our fates are intertwined. An emphasis could be placed on rejecting the exceptionalisms (however seemingly slight) that allow us to elevate ourselves above another. Such exceptionalism can be the seemingly involuntary reaction to a barrage over generations of suppression and oppression but it is also the seed which enables ego to weaken and taint a truly emancipatory vision of power that transformative social change today requires. An approach which conscientises the innate flaws of being human, would be one which more readily allows us to gaze internally, rather than demanding complete answers and perfection, so that we may elicit the deeper sense of self-awareness necessary to develop systems and realities which are re-humanised by way of empathy.

● Re-member ourselves based on the knowledge that lives within each of us: we suggest that as a community we invite, note, and build upon all forms of knowledge brought forth by Fellows whether this is oral story, dance, arts, song, sciences, math, film, or any other form of expression. Expanding on this, we acknowledge and seek to elevate the idea already embedded in the Institute’s approach that so much of what we endeavour to uncover in the space of social justice and reform, is based on knowledge that is not new, but (k)new known to us, even if long rendered latent by a barrage of history (as noted in this review) which would seek to trivialise this tether we have to our own humanness, ancestry, stories and innate wisdoms. We maintain that as Fellows, we can emphasise the reclamation and re-membering of ourselves, by digging past the outer layers of dissonance and faux identities that have been created by structures and systems that depend on our forgetting.

It is carrying the spirit of all of the above that we offer the suggestions, no doubt still incomplete, which follow.

5.2 Our Suggestions

As part of this review, we were asked to integrate the findings already provided to the Atlantic Institute, established in “The Narrative Landscape Report” prepared by the NI. The report which compares narrative initiatives across Fellowships (Ashoka, the Global Health Corps, the Obama Foundation Fellowship, and the New Voices Fellowship), and across the distinct Atlantic Fellowships and AI, identified 4 areas for growth within Atlantic:

I. Narrative-Focused Staff Positions or Key Consultants

II. Cross-Program Learning and Curriculum Development

III. Piloting Narrative Projects with Senior Fellows

IV. Connecting Program Staff and Senior Fellows to Networks

Our suggestions and themes for further exploration and ongoing work, thus touch upon and expand these four areas.

Further, it is perhaps here useful to know, that our suggestions (as summarised in Table 1 at the end of this section) on how we can re-member through narratives to increase the potency of the social change endeavours of our Atlantic community, came to reflect four broad purposes:

I. Conscientising the importance of narratives amongst our Fellowship

II. Decoding a deeper sense of self

III. Shifting the idea of power/leadership

IV. Harnessing narrative as the thread that ties all Atlantic Fellows Programs (AFPs) and AI together ***

We recognise the important first steps in coordinating narrative work across Atlantic programs taken through the Narrative Landscape Report as well as Mvuyo Tom’s report “Perspectives on Equity in the Atlantic Fellows Programs”. They both contain rich content and a deep desire to integrate across Fellowships. They beautifully access the intentions of the Programs and their “talk” about their missions as well as their specific methodologies. At the same time, the absence of the direct voices of Fellows limits the findings of both of these reports. We believe only by closing the loop about how the program curricula lands with Fellows, can evaluators determine whether “talk” translates to “walk.”

In the current report, we have aimed to address some of these limitations through both our direct experience as Fellows as well through the rich conversations with other Fellows from across all the programs. In this regard, we are indebted to AI for its across Fellowship programming which has provided both in person and digital opportunities to connect across programs. It has been invaluable both in dealing with this historical moment and for writing this report. To form a cross-program network of leaders lies the heart of the Atlantic Mission and we appreciate the challenges this entails along with the honour of this Fellowship.

We also note limits and tensions imposed by the structure of the entire suite of Atlantic Fellowships. The seven distinct autonomous programs each possess their own mission, visions, culture, and structures that stand distinct from the overarching integrative mission of the Atlantic Institute. Individual program faculty, staff, and Fellows choose to what degree they embrace the cross-program experience. It is possible for individuals in a broad range of capacities to bypass joining with other Atlantic Fellowships. Individual programs tend to keep current Fellows apart from AI initiatives saving this for life as a Senior Fellow. This approach embedded in structural barriers can even cause individual Fellows to lose heart during the Fellowship year. The COVID-19 pandemic loosened this separated current/senior Fellow approach to good effect. We anticipate that a narrative thread would do the same and consider the Fellowship year as an ideal time to introduce this cross-Fellowship thread.

Until dominant narratives become thoroughly decoded and harnessed anew, we also acknowledge structural challenges to equity within the Fellowships and across Fellowships.

With most programs embedded within academic institutions many of which have medical emphases, value of individual Fellows can revert to the standards of the dominant social structures leaving some Fellows in a position of lower status (e.g. the worth of a medical doctor compared to a theatre artist in a health oriented Fellowship). This social positioning has resulted in different stipends for participating Fellows undercutting the premise of Fellows meeting as equals. Other asymmetries include those between activists compared to academics, languages spoken, a capacity to comprehend varied dialects of the English language, the privilege of the global north, the cross-cutting aspect of class in each Fellow’s home country, and more. We observe that within and across Fellowships, as happens in the world at large, often those in the subaltern positions carry the heavy load to open other creative possibilities and perspectives about existing injustices.

We believe that a comprehensive narrative thread will create more equity within and across Fellowships by providing an equalising force to counter prevailing structural hierarchies within individual programs. Philosophically and also within the context of this AI based externship, we are both fully committed to the mission of connecting across Fellowships with which the AI was tasked. Our recommendations below flow accordingly from that core Atlantic mission beginning with the items raised in the report prepared by the NI.

I. Narrative Focused Staff Positions or Key Consultants

We believe that developing a narrative component to its fullest expression within the Atlantic Fellowships requires Narrative Focused Staff/Faculty Positions. Ideally this would take place both within each Fellowship with an overarching position at AI to coordinate narrative across programs. Without such a presence, Fellows receive a tacit message of the second class status of narrative and the arts compared to clinical services, data driven approaches, and to social entrepreneurship. Reliance solely on key consultants would also signal that narrative is an “easy add-on” and would limit the integration of narrative at the deepest levels. Key consultants would have content expertise without a deep understanding of the collective Atlantic culture from which they would remain outsiders.

The presence of dedicated faculty and staff signals immediately the importance of narrative as well as elevating an appreciation for the skills narrative requires. Training in narrative by current faculty and staff might appeal to some, but building a deep program requires more than cursory training. Just as a quick course or workshop would be inadequate to make an individual an expert medical practitioner, so, too, for narrative. Likewise, because narrative is multifaceted and includes diverse media, we believe that a substantive narrative initiative requires more than a single individual.

The location of most Fellowship programs within academic settings and including academic medical settings raises additional issues that run in opposition to a narrative initiative. First, while this sort of writing is the bread and butter of academics, dense academic writing does not translate to accessible social change narrative forms. Second, “the see one, do one, teach one” approach to medical education if applied to narrative would work against the initiative

which requires time and depth. As well, the compartmentalisation of universities also creates structural obstacles for the inclusion of practitioners of other kinds of experts within some programs. For example, Fellowships based within scientific university settings cannot hire faculty with arts expertise. That academic hierarchies tend to value faculty more than staff deserves consideration as well.

We can imagine narrative focused faculty and staff based only at AI who support the narrative initiatives at each program as a second possibility. This could serve to integrate across Fellowships but would necessarily limit the narrative thread within each program. This leaves Fellows working in areas outside the mainstream focus, floating without direct ongoing support within their programs. With a solely AI based narrative platform, beginning the narrative thread during the fellowship year becomes ever more vital.

Other Fellowships compared with the Atlantic in the NI report often brought in key consultants to help Fellows develop specific media skills. We agree that this can support Fellows tremendously and recommend the use of highly skilled key consultants for this role. It is useful to note the variation across AF Programs with regard to media training. Some programs such as AFRE specifically tackle high-level media presence honing Fellows’ skills in public speaking, on-camera media interviews, working with journalists and so forth. While others focus on presentations at scientific meetings and rely upon faculty scientists to impart the skill. All seem to include some social media content. We see the potential for a narrative thread to align with the high-level media presence to convey the collective Atlantic mission.

The notion of media skills training also raises questions about individual as well as programmatic goals. Certainly, dissemination of (k)new ideas and actions remain central to all social change initiatives. Is the time of Fellows better spent generating such ideas and putting them into action or adding social media skills to their daily to do list? If the former, we recommend a staff support approach to social media leaving Fellows free to do the kind of deep work and daring action that lies at the heart of the Atlantic social change mission.

We also recommend that AI consider hiring an independent publicist to help Fellows get their work into the world. Publicists possess networks that allow them to get the attention of editors and producers for valuable work to make its way into the world. The current approach both within AI and within individual Fellowships is one of communications officers on staff. While people in communications have some network connections, their bread and butter involves creating stories on behalf of each Fellowship, not greasing the wheels for the dissemination of Fellows’ stories.

A dream narrative program would include a range of single practitioners of various narrative forms (e.g. poetry, spoken word, dance, comics, visual art, theatre, music, film) spread across the programs who would be accessible to current Fellows in every program. These narrative faculty/staff would provide a community of support to one another as they work embedded in wholly different realms. We particularly recommend an emphasis on full-time skilled practitioners of various narrative forms instead of practitioners who concentrate primarily on

the arts in service of health. The latter builds in a second-class status to narrative and can also reify dominant power structures.

II. Cross-Program Learning and Curriculum Development

We see cross-program learning as the core strength of the suite of Atlantic Fellowships and appreciate AI’s ongoing creativity, integrity, and depth for developing curricula to do this. A philosophy that “all the knowledge is in the room” lies at the heart of the AI approach to curriculum. This philosophy trusts that Fellows grow, gain, and learn through the exchanges they have with one another as they engage with specific content and activities curated for the convenings. It also makes ample space for Fellow designed and led workshops, discussions, and contributions.

The AI approach to curriculum differs tremendously from that which takes place in many of the Fellowships. In the latter context, a training program approach considers Fellows as “empty vessels” into whom expert faculty pour content during a limited number of interactions. As a result, the Fellowship year can become disjointed and so flooded with assignments that each content expert has deemed essential, that Fellows might forgo chances to experience one another’s work and even lives. Competition for scarce resources and recognition within the hierarchy also interferes with the real work of connecting and collectively re-imagining and re-building essential to creating fairer, healthier, more inclusive societies.

We envision instead developing a narrative curriculum based on AI philosophy that “all the knowledge is in the room”. Narrative faculty/staff will be involved longitudinally as practitioners of various forms of narrative, facilitators, and organisers who will build relationships and a community with individual Fellows within and across programs. We view the diverse life and work experience of Fellows as integral to shaping a series of both interactive workshop sessions and experiential narrative sessions. The interactive workshops will focus on decoding and conscientising the dominant narratives and acquiring various skills to facilitate re-membering. We envision an emphasis on small group-based learning in which the diversity of various aspects of Fellows’ identity will bring strengths to the exchanges.

The three curricular themes identified in the NI report for areas of collaborative curriculum [1) race and equity, 2) stigma/hope/fear, and 3) global south and global north context/colonial aftermath] all fit beautifully within the narrative framework. These topics have become ever more pressing through the systemic injustice revealed by the pandemic, the global uprising in response to systemic anti-black racism, and the hope we create through Fellowship. The experiential sessions will include a broad range of narrative performance from current and senior Fellows followed by discussions will also naturally touch upon these themes.

These experiential sessions followed by a more tailored approach to harnessing would meet each Fellow according to experience, interest, and strengths. Incoming Fellows may already

possess deep narrative expertise which they can share with fellow Fellows for whom this narrative might be an area of growth. Meeting across disciplines and programs as equals to engage with narrative will build it into the foundation that all Fellows will carry forward during their lives. We believe that trusting Fellows to lead and develop their engagements with one another would allow Atlantic to develop to its fullest potential. The Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, for example, leaves Fellows to explore their individual projects deeply against a backdrop of a single requirement: to attend the events of their fellow Fellows.

We recognise the constraint that some of the Fellowships such as AFSEE at LSE grant degrees and must accordingly meet accreditation requirements. We also recognise that with multidisciplinary cohorts Fellows come to their programs with various knowledge gaps. However as motivated adult learners, Fellows will naturally fill in gaps through engagement with one another and through certain unique learning opportunities that the Fellowships can offer. Overall the Fellowship experience would benefit from less university style classroom didactics. We also note that the digital curricular interface of Canvas builds in a structure and language inappropriate for Fellows as professional adult learners who come to the program with deep experience and knowledge. In the case of the Atlantic narrative thread, we see classroom lectures as counter to the kind of deep thinking, listening, and creation required. Instead we see a place for experiential learning (creation and receiving), mentorship and small critique groups to support individual Fellows as well as some specific technical skill learning if a Fellow is moving into a new medium (for example from dance or visual arts into film).

While some overlap exists between leadership skills and narrative, we recommend the separation of these two initiatives for several interconnected reasons. The vast majority of so-called leadership expertise comes directly from the world of business where it constitutes a 336 billion-dollar industry. In this regard, leadership is fully linked with the EuroAmerican master narrative and in opposition to the fundamental work of restoring justice. In the world of business, competition is naturalised as an essential human quality and accordingly selects for certain types of leadership over collaboration and fellowship. Narrative by contrast does not privilege or naturalise a particular way of being human. It relies upon giving and receiving in meaningful and reciprocal exchange as opposed to leading and following.

As noted in the NI report, the notion of leadership is “somewhat contested within the AFP/AI ecosystem.” They state that some AFPs fully embrace the Euro-American business model of leadership emphasising the roles of individual leaders while others (AFSE) say they concentrate on Fellowship, community, and collaboration instead. Without the voices of Fellows in the NI report, we cannot ascertain whether the goals of building community and collaboration were aspirational or effectively implemented. Nevertheless, we consider Fellowship, community, and collaboration as both essential to narrative and to the restoration of justice.

Because narrative creates community as we give and receive stories, (k)new forms of collaborative leadership will be modelled as Fellows tell their stories. This multiplicity of stories and voices in turn moves us beyond the constraints of Marshall Ganz’s Public Narrative approach. Though widely used and very effective in many contexts this approach still retains some solely Euro-American constructs and emphases despite its social change mission. Narrative emphasises community over leadership as stories gain their fullest expression when received as when two portions of a circle meet to form a whole. The giver and receiver of story mutually benefit through exchange and together generate something whole and (k)new. In a beautiful way, the narrative process and the act of storytelling parallel how care and love and compassion work. When viewed as a partnership, meeting as equals, sharing power, building teams, and honouring the diverse strengths of all individuals and all systems of thought, everyone gains.

Business leadership models include other limitations beyond their alignment with market economies. For example, though they tend to include reflection, they generally limit its focus to reflection on ego, personality, and modes of communication aligned again with EuroAmerican concepts of the individual self. Further, business models rarely move beyond reflection to decoding systems and structures. Nor do they include reflexivity the fundamental questioning of the assumptions we bring to all we do. Ultimately such deep reflexivity and decoding will open the door for diverse forms of leadership that move beyond individual actors and competition and gain to build social change in terms of collective growth.

With all of the above curricular thoughts in mind, we imagine that a narrative initiative that integrates from AI to all the other Fellowships could play a profound role in changing the cultural hierarchies that exist within some of the Fellowships in their academic homes. We believe this shift would ultimately potentiate the work carried out by Fellows. Above all, the capacity to decode and harness through narrative (as expressed in Figure 1 in this review) will empower individual Fellows to share their stories as equals. This narrative curriculum aims to create (k)new power/knowledge cycles through:

● Diversifying in impactful ways the multiplicity of voices that constitute knowledge, and changing what is considered ‘legitimate’ knowledge

● Finding ways to privilege and capture diversity of mediums through which narratives are expressed plays, poetry, visual, movement, sound, orally passed through ancestry, conversational, different languages.

● Developing at least one component of narrative curriculum coordinated by the AI Institute, for current Fellows, designed to create a (k)new narrative using the breadth and depth of knowledge/expertise/disciplines of Fellows across all seven programs and also harnessing the different geographical locations. A narrative thread will support Fellows working outside of the dominant scientific and economic paradigms of many of the AFPs while growing the cross-program community. The premise is that we can capture diverse knowledge and transform it into shifted value systems. We imagine that this narrative thread could weave across the programs and

tie in with the Atlantic Institute creating continuity, while allowing for full and unique expression amongst Fellows in each of the programs.

● Creating a workshop on narratives for all Senior Fellows which hones the capacity to decode and harness. As a narrative thread develops across all programs messages/themes that cut across all seven programs will naturally emerge.

● Create an ongoing affinity group to continue to capture emerging narratives, in the spirit of the ideas laid out here in section 5.1 and beyond. This affinity group will serve as a resource for participating Fellows providing an automatic network of support. It will also play a role in our recommendations on piloting narrative projects below. The AI philosophy that all the knowledge is in the room will encourage spectacular outcomes as Fellows curate and co-create within the group.

III. Piloting Narrative Projects with Senior Fellows

With this area defined by the NI report we would like to reframe it from “piloting narrative projects” to establishing a journal dedicated to Fellows’ narratives and visions. The dissemination of Fellows’ stories would tackle the dominance of authoritarian visions of leadership and power and bring forth a multiplicity of global voices. For this first issue we recommend a focus on this historical moment: The surfacing of systemic anti-black and brown racism revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic as it has unfolded for Fellows across the globe. Such a journal would honour this aching moment as well as the diversity of voices and experiences that today’s world demands. With Fellows everywhere, we can provide unique breadth in terms how the pandemic challenges us to rethink the current global social order and the systemic structural violence this pandemic has surfaced. We also seek to honour each Fellow as a conduit into their community who can speak truth to the power structures that stand in the way of fairer, more inclusive, healthier societies in both local and global contexts.

Interestingly, this historical moment knits together the recurring themes called out in the NI report for collaborative curriculum development: Race and Equity, Stigma/Hope/Fear, and Global South and Global North Context/Colonial Aftermath. Instead of developing curriculum we believe that the knowledge is in the room for each of these themes and they will emerge as Fellows share their stories across programs, geographies, disciplines and more. An overarching editorial eye can knit the stories together to allow each to shine.

We envision an online journal which would break out of the limits of print and thus allow for a variety of media. We envision this continuing as a quarterly, triannual, biannual or annual endeavour as resources permit. Unlike many of the Atlantic initiatives such as the hub and newsletter and convenings, we envision this journal reaching beyond the Atlantic community. And unlike the NI’s regular newsletter which highlights works published elsewhere we see this journal as providing a platform for Fellows while Atlantic builds its collective global presence. At the same time, this journal would also welcome content previously shown and published elsewhere as its digital format could send our community straight to the other sources and avoid copyright limitations. Interestingly, within creative realms individuals hold

onto the copyright of their own work and they can continue to let it circulate. While in academic, commercial, and scientific realms, institutions tend to hold the copyright.

We also envision an annual themed issue of the journal and propose that the first themed issue engage with (k)new leadership values (including how Fellows have been influenced by their AI experience, and beginning to collect how the Fellowship has helped them influence the spaces we occupy). This themed issue should also help to further develop the mission of the AI as it evolves, leaving room for things to change and grow, in the spirit of being nondogmatic. We envisage that at the end of each year a Fellow who curates the pieces can synthesise the emerging and important values of leadership.

This item piloting narrative projects was so named in part to envision a model of supporting Fellows in their work. Such support could happen in two ways. Fellows could pitch stories of some sort the way they might to a publication and receive support to complete it. Or in the case of something already written, filmed, composed, or installed, Fellows could receive compensation for the work to appear in the journal.

As well, journal editorial staff would be drawn from the pool of Fellows and provide another means of getting our (k)new narratives into circulation. The narrative affinity group could serve as an editorial or advisory board.

IV. Connecting Program Staff and Senior Fellows to Networks

We meet this final recommendation of the NI report to connect AFP/AI Fellows and staff to other Narrative networks with a resounding YES. We have experienced the power of everexpanding networks through the AI webinar series developed in response to the pandemic and the global uprising against systemic anti-black and brown racism. By collaborating with other Fellowships - in a fellowship of Fellowships - these virtual engagements have allowed Fellows to forge new connections both within and beyond the Atlantic over the course of this very tumultuous year.

As well, AI and various AFPs have already made productive connections with other social change and narrative organisations such as Othering and Belonging and Voices of Witness. In addition, Senior Fellows have been very generous with opening events that they have organised and sponsored such as when AFRE Fellow Michael Smith opened My Brother’s Keepers events to the Senior Fellow community. Likewise, the AFSEE Program invited Senior Fellows across programs to participate in the COVID-19 series which they organised both as speakers and as participants. This all demonstrates the power of networks especially those that are dispersed and of the Atlantic mission to connect Fellows across the globe

To facilitate the networking process, we suggest laying out easy paths regarding how to stay in touch and follow up. We especially appreciated the list of webinar attendees recently disseminated by AI. One of the obstacles within Atlantic is many Senior Fellows, rarely use the Hub or their atlanticfellows.org email addresses which blocks continued communications. Many Senior Fellows from the global south have also shared with us that data costs as well as

travel distance to reliable wifi interfere with their participation. To ensure the success of the narrative thread, if not the Atlantic mission we recommend that measures are put into place to support those for whom digital access imposes extra costs.

In terms of reaching out to other organisations with narrative emphases, we can see this as a phase two task for on-going construction of the Atlantic’s approach to narrative and social change. Up till now our connection with other organisations such as NI and Othering and Belonging has been limited to reading and participating in both collaborative convenings and the 2020 webinars. Were this externship to continue this would be one of the first tasks we would undertake.

As a final note here, we would say that the connections that have already arisen between Atlantic Fellows/staff to other networks and Fellowships has had the added benefit of revealing the extent to which the Atlantic Fellowship (by virtue of the global and grassroots profiles of its Fellows and the emphasis on (k)new knowledge already being expressed) is unique and potent in its approach to social change through an express emphasis on the power of re-membering through narratives. We believe this should be further harnessed and amplified, and shared with all other networks who too are interested in bending the arc of social inequity.

V. Other ideas

In addition to our elaboration of the areas outlined in the NI report, our landscape review has revealed a series of related needs that will serve the continual growth of the narrative thread within Atlantic. We believe that narrative more than leadership constitutes a means to fully integrate diverse Fellows across programs. Being linked through narrative will empower this community to decode dominant narratives and harness their own in order to move toward fairer, healthier more inclusive societies. These recommendations include the following:

• As outlined above in our discussion of surveillance capitalism, of gift economies, and of the deep need for global communication and connection especially in light of the uprising and the pandemic we see a vital need to break free of surveillance. Atlantic could explore and fund alternatives to data collecting platforms. In terms of markets, these could be sliding scale subscription based so that wealthy individuals and organisations underwrite the subscription of those without the capital to participate. We see this as a step toward a gift economy where exchange networks have greater visible meaning in a variety of realms without contributing to profits of an already elite. This could also include Fellow driven projects which assess in detail: the ethics being built into technologies (for example, looking at ways to redirect residual digital data to provide free broadband in the global south); challenging the current notion of boundaries – will these same boundaries (national and internal) be valid in the world of our future, where increasingly all sorts of horizons are being shattered?; and the possibility of economies which embed and elevate the importance of social/environmental safeguards and which does so in a way that restores our

humanity. The reason this is tied in with social justice narratives, is because the limits of such narratives are set by wealth distribution. Further, any other particularly pertinent ideas as raised by Fellows could be identified through workshops and the affinity groups that were earlier suggested in this review

• We observe a cognitive dissonance between the Atlantic creation narrative of complete divestment to the focus by AFPs and (perhaps) the AI to concentrate on finding ways to sustain themselves. We recommend some time spent on high level decoding here so that daily function of the various programs can function more in the sphere of fully integrated gift economies instead of competitive hierarchical market style organisations. We believe that the nature of the gifts which started the Atlantic, set it apart from other organisations.

• We see this historic moment as one that requires real divestment of power and of capital. We believe that Atlantic has the capacity to move beyond the hoarding mentality outlined by Giridharadas in which elites use social justice causes as a cover. From discussions with colleagues working within large Foundations, we understand that 2020 has brought in debates about whether to “touch the endowment” for the benefit of the uprising. We believe that systemic change requires touching the endowment, rethinking capital, and creating new systems of exchange on personal and institutional levels. Touching and decoding then harnessing this level of deep narrative is essential for restructuring a (k)new global order. We believe that the Atlantic Narrative and Atlantic Fellows possess the capacities to contribute to such drastic restructuring.

Area See pages

I. NarrativeFocused Staff Positions or Key Consultants

42-44

Table 1: Summary of Suggestions Offered

Overarching spirit of suggestions (see section 5.1)

“Disalienating as a precursor to freedom” (Fanon)

Embracing a deeper sense of empathy

Refuting dogma

Rejecting an untamed ego

Re-membering ourselves to construct (k)new ways

Suggestion Intent

• Have narrative dedicated faculty and staff (not just consultants), across AFP and AI levels

• Hire an independent publicist to disseminate Fellows’ work

• Recognise and elevate the dual role of narratives as a tool for decoding our world, and also as a tool harnessed to construct and imagine a more equitable world – and use this tool as a potent aid in challenging global inequity

• Develop this focus on narratives as the thread which weaves together the work of all AFPs and AI

II. Cross-Program Learning and Curriculum Development

44-48

• Build the AI philosophy that “all the knowledge is in the room” into curricula and programming across all AFPs

• Encourage a trust within our own selves, and our own knowledge, and explore the revelation of our unsuppressed identities

III. Piloting Narrative Projects with Senior Fellows 49-50

• Develop Fellow led experiential sessions, such as small critique groups or workshops

• Separate out traditional “leadership” skills from “narrative”, to elevate narratives as a more equalised basis from which to approach social change, and to challenge the definition of leadership

• Capture, elevate and share different modes of knowledge (i.e. not always written/scientific/academic work)

• Develop an AI coordinated element of narrative curriculum which focuses on (k)new narratives

• Create a workshop for all Senior Fellows which focuses on importance of narratives, and using narrative decoding/harnessing as a means for social change

• Create an affinity group which captures and shapes narratives and their importance to AI and the work of our community

• Develop a Fellows’ journal, curated by Fellows, dedicated to capturing narratives and visions, which reaches out beyond only the Atlantic community

• Socialise the concept of narratives as a tool for re-membering across all AFPs in order to bring in the different voices and experiences of all Fellows, thereby strengthening the notion of remembering through narratives

• Increase the multiplicity of voices in the narratives that shape our world, and privilege different modes of knowledge

• Allow a Fellows’ developed vision of narrative to emerge as the thread that connects across AFPs and AI

• Broaden the idea of what constitutes ‘legitimate’ knowledge

• Shift the narratives and thus practice of power/leadership through introducing a multiplicity of voices

IV. Connecting Program Staff and Senior Fellows to Networks 50-51

• Continue cultivating the practice of fellowship of Fellowships

• Support Fellows with barriers to data access

• Continue to build connections with other narrative focused organisations

• Position the Atlantic Fellowship as the Fellowship which approaches social change through the power of re-membering through narratives

V. Other suggestions 51-52

• Provide the opportunity for Fellows to explore particular themes which today seem especially critical for narratives/social change, such as:

o Embedding ethics into technology

o The nature of boundaries

o Interrogating wealth distribution

o Any other ideas identified by Fellows as vital

• Challenge the instances of dissonance between AI mission and AFP operations

• Rethink capital and endowments through the actions taken by this Fellowship

• Place the Atlantic Fellowship at the forefront of bending the arc of social inequity, by privileging and steering a narrative focused approach

• Change the idea of power/leadership which governs our world, in order to deliver greater equitability

• Unify the AFPs and the AI through a narrative thread

“Transmuting Transgenerational Trauma: Dementia, Storytelling, and Healing” (p 13): Alice, a daughter of genocide, makes peace during dementia with the shame she carried from having rejected her disabled brother as a little girl.

“Story. We think through story. We connect through story. But most of all, we remember through story.” These are words that one of us spoke when telling the story of healing, laughter, and magic in her mother’s dementia journey as part of re-writing the dominant dementia narrative. When the other one of us explained her conception of the term “to remember” to put back together, after trauma, war, genocide, racism, sexism and the multitude of systemic structural violence with which we live today the resonance was immediate. It is a resonance born of possibility and a belief in the transformative powers of story to potentiate dignity and justice in our world.

Dana Walrath

As defined in our introduction, re-membering, a process of becoming unified and whole allows us individually, collectively, and globally to navigate our way to our unbound possibilities. A two-fold endeavour, it depends first upon the act of conjuring the intrinsic memories of ourselves beyond the distortions our histories would have us forget. Next, we reassemble the pieces of ourselves that were dismembered and forcibly removed. Through narrative we embrace our vulnerability and our pain. Through narrative we re-member.

Narrative unites us. It lives in our deepest cores, a well spring that connects us to what has come before and to the futures we imagine. Narrative contains multitudes, is ever changing, and never just one way. Yet when aligned with power it creates the boundaries, structures, and systems of the world we negotiate through stories so deeply engrained and hidden below the surface that they have become naturalised, internalised, and damaging. These dominating stories or master narratives created to justify systems of power, privilege the forms of knowledge that support it. They separate us from ourselves and separate us from one another. They have selectively silenced ways of being, knowing and doing required to restore justice and balance to this earth. Decoding such hidden narratives liberates and lets us harness the power of (k)new stories the ones stripped away through injustice but that we have always truly known. Together decoding and harnessing narrative’s own two-fold process create connection and necessary change for all of us.

Throughout this review we have gone deep, wide, and inclusive. Our time frame has extended back millions of years to show that competition, stratification, and inequity are human constructions that we can undo. We engage with histories on personal, institutional, colonial, imperial, and meta levels. We engage with ways we might, despite our best intentions, be complicit in reifying power structures. We cross disciplines and even enter into realms that have very little respect in so-called institutions of higher learning. Our breadth has ranged from individual reflexivity to global connection, from ancestors to technology. We believe that every act is connected.

Through our fellowship we have the chance to challenge systemic inequities and dominant narratives. Deeper excavation of narratives, and the use of emancipatory narratives as the concepts from which we operationalise the reclamation of our fullest selves, can be the thread that weaves all of our programs and all of our Fellows together. Regardless of discipline or theme, we all face the challenge of skewed and distorting narratives and the weight of the continually reinforced ‘legitimising’ power that underpins them. Harnessing narratives as a tool that both allows us to understand our world (and ourselves) with more depth, while also actioning into reality a more emancipatory world, can weave us together. This simultaneously allows for individual truths and visions to be honoured and expressed, while also being tethered to a common and universally valid experience that arises from the capacity to empathise deeply based on claiming our own unmasked truths.

We believe that Atlantic Fellows already are those who identify and dissolve boundaries alongside others within the many communities to which they contribute. We believe that

through the power of a global, non-dogmatic narrative, which recognises the multiplicity of beliefs we each hold and which acknowledges the human capacity to be flawed, we can compound our collective impact in ways hitherto unseen. We believe in the emancipatory effect of shared narratives rooted in a deep sense of uncompromised justice a sense of justice that is synonymous with a deep sense of a commitment to an examined and unbound self.

We believe that our times are calling for an emancipatory view of ourselves, based on a return home. This return requires us to re-member ourselves and begin to normalise (k)new narratives, so that we hope will grow into a deep awareness and practice throughout the Atlantic community, of conscientising and harnessing the role of narratives to shift the very foundations that form the values and norms that define power and govern our societies. It is, we argue, only from this shifted basis that we can truly bend the arc of social inequity to generate the metamorphosis required for our times. It is the basis from which the Atlantic community can undertake the necessary work of generating sentiment, rather than forcibly reacting to the damaging sentiment set by others.

Our times require nothing less than an emancipatory unleashing of ourselves, in order to liberate meaningful collective social change. It depends upon a reimagining of ourselves (and thus our idea of power), a deep excavation and re-surfacing of the connected nature of our histories, a reclamation of our identities – past the trappings of the superficial layers determined by the power structures which presently resound, and a non-exceptionalist realisation of the degree to which our fates are inextricably linked. We have outlined in these pages why we believe that re-membering through narratives forges a path for just such a vision to be activated and amplified to form our realities.

We believe in the power and potential of our Fellows and the Atlantic Community as a conduit to the realisation of this call back home.

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