Accurate Rural Narrative

Evidence suggests this building block is important because narratives play multiple roles in social change,¹ including the words we use and in guiding action.² Reports featuring interviews with journalists and community members offer strategies for representing rural communities with accuracy, nuance, and consistency in media (for example, see Hattaway 2020)³. Policy actors and citizens can also use narrative strategically to influence policy outcomes or decisions⁴ and to engage with stories in the public sphere.

Experts explain that narratives can influence social change by changing frames, forming identity and guiding action¹ and by offering counter-narratives.^5,p25 Changing frames can entail efforts to shift mindsets—the “deep, assumed patterns of thinking that shape how we make sense of the world and what we do”.⁶ Relatedly, narratives with depth can provide a foundation for our collective and individual understanding of history and current events.⁷ 

Narratives also help to shape our personal identities and grow our sense of agency through the connection of our personal stories with broader narratives and our values and expectations.^5,8,9 Narratives can also shape collective identity¹⁰ and contribute to the creation of a shared sense of belonging and community identity—around which people make meaning and take action.¹¹ Narratives are part of the diffusion of ideas and practices, which people borrow and modify locally, often to promote cultural change.¹² 

Narrative in public media and dialogue represents an opportunity to accurately reflect a community’s priorities. Research on the inclusion of “lived experience,” which can mean local leadership and voices, suggests this perspective can serve as a critique, challenge existing impressions, and provide “empathetic immersion”.¹³ A report on narrative infrastructure-building work explains that diverse, aligned coalitions can “advance narratives using authentic language in ways that reflects the unique experience of their members across race, place, religion, and immigration status,” and suggests basing these coalitions in rural areas to ensure rural communities’ “values, ideas, vision, and experiences are fully inscribed in the shared narratives” elevated by the coalition (for more, see Swenson-Lengyel 2019¹⁴).

1. Wittmayer 2019
2. Jarva 2014b in Wittmayer 2019
3. Hattaway 2020
4. Crow 2018
5. Davies, 2002, p. 25
6. Frameworks 2020
7. Narrative Initiative-What is Narrative? in Frameworks 2020
8. Rappaport 1995
9. Riessman, 2008  in Wittmayer 2019
10. Somers & Gibson, 1994 in Wittmayer 201
11. Pfotenhauer & Jasanoff 2017 in Wittmayer 2019
12. Malets 2014
13. McIntosh 2018
14. Swenson-Lengyel 2019