Top 10 Social Change Communications Favorites 2021
Season’s greetings,
Every December, I like to send an update to friends, connections, and clients as a way of expressing appreciation and reflecting on the year. In 2021, I had the pleasure of supporting clients to advance COVID vaccines as a human right, gender justice, fair and affordable housing, addiction recovery, violence prevention, interrupting dominant narratives on poverty, and more.
I wanted to share some of my 2020 and 2021 social change communications favorites—essays, research, podcasts, toolkits, books, films, etc. I spent a lot of time this year thinking about culture change, post-oppositionality, and interdependence. You’ll see this throughout the favorites.
Looking forward to collaborating in 2022,
Trina
"The effects of being socialized into white dominance: it disconnects us from our body. It disconnects us from our emotions. It makes it difficult to empathize with others...That damages our relationships with our family members, with our intimate partners, with our children. And it’s part of how we maintain dominance. You have to deaden a person in multiple ways in order for them to be a dominant group that participates in the oppression of others, because that is not how the human animal is evolved. We are evolved where if we see somebody getting hurt, it’s as if it’s happening to us, and our whole being experiences that as trauma." - Eleanor Hancock of White Awake (see #2; emphasis mine)
2021 Top 10: Social Change Communications Favorites
The below were new to me in 2020-2021, not necessarily published in the last two years:
Nonviolent Communication (NVC) - Marshall Rosenberg & others. NVC is, in part, a way of listening and expressing ourselves where the goal is for everyone’s needs to be met. My introduction to NVC was this 3-hour video, which I watched in 20-minute chunks. NVC has transformed how I interact with people, as well as the stories I tell myself.
Roots Deeper than Whiteness - White Awake. A 6-week online anti-racism course that I worried might be navel-gazing turned out to be transformative popular education in the Highlander School vein. Rather than an allyship approach to racial justice, which has always seemed paternalistic and lacking to me (white people do things “for” people of color and can easily opt out), the course brings a your-liberation-is-bound-up-with-mine approach, clearly articulating the steep price of white supremacy for white folks: it costs us our relationships, happiness, and humanity. I believe this kind of analysis—and the durable belief/attitude change it fosters—is key to helping white people both understand white supremacy for the insidious long-con it is, and take action to dismantle it.
Culture Hacking Toolkit - The Rules’ method and toolkit to help social movements bring about narrative and structural change in support of the transition to a post-capitalist world.
Life, Interdependence, and the Pursuit of Meeting Needs - Miki Kashtan, on “restoring our capacity to know what is enough, and to release anything beyond that.” See also Resource Generation’s redistribution guidelines.
Caliban and the Witch - Silvia Federici’s book examining the systematic violence against women required for the rise of capitalism—from witch burnings to confinement in the home to banning midwifery to criminalizing female friendship.
Narrative & Belonging - from Building Belonging’s Conversations on Transformation. Bridgit Antoinette Evans, Martin Kirk, and john a. powell in conversation on transforming narrative environments, the role of narrative archetypes and mental models, and the difference between messaging/communications vs. cultural/narrative work.
How to Support Harm Doers in Accountability - Building Accountable Communities Project, a video series on transformative justice featuring adrienne maree brown, Mia Mingus, and more.
What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat - Aubrey Gordon’s book on the cultural attitudes and social systems that have led to people being denied basic needs just because they are fat.
The Wisdom of Trauma - Gabor Mate’s documentary on how the interconnected epidemics of anxiety, chronic illness, and substance abuse all stem from trauma—and societies/cultures designed to inflict it.
The Serviceberry - Robin Wall Kimmerer, on Indigenous wisdom and the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy.
Bonus: Culture Study - Anne Helen Petersen’s brilliant newsletter. “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.” and The Millennial Vernacular of Fatphobia resonated in particular.
Top 5 Podcasts
I love podcasts, so much that they get their own special section. During the pandemic I found it difficult to concentrate on reading, and instead listened to a lot of podcasts. Here are some series/episodes that stood out:
Finding Our Way - Prentis Hemphill, a series exploring the skills we need to create and embody the world we want. I especially enjoyed the AMA on boundaries.
The Trap - Victorian Women’s Trust. An intense podcast series diving deep on, Why does domestic abuse persist? Why do people become abusive? And what can we do to prevent it?
ALOK on Unruly Beauty - For the Wild. ALOK (they/them) in a breathtaking dialogue that ranges from the connection between a lack of embodiment and the conditions for violence, to how the false mind/body Cartesian dualism impacts wellbeing, to the role of a poet in resurrecting hope. (Transcript)
Prof. Cass Sunstein on How Social Change Happens - 80,000 Hours, on the three phenomena that together form a recipe for abrupt social shifts.
The Land That Never Has Been Yet - Scene on Radio’s series retelling the story of the United States from its beginnings up to the present. An excellent follow-on to their previous seasons: MEN on gender and patriarchy, and Seeing White on race and white supremacy.
There is so much out there. What were your favorites of 2021?
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