[Music] A pleasure to be here with everyone today thank you so much for having me as Liz says this I’m here in this capacity of representing the Peabody Awards but we’re gonna dig in a little and talking a little more of a scholarly vein the Peabody Awards are the the oldest award The Peabody Awards but it’s a board of 18 individuals showrunners producers journalists scholars TV critics that choose and you can see both the issues that we deal with and some of the titles that have won in recent years and an important thing to recognize about the Peabody’s is to win a Peabody Award is a unanimous vote of 18 people meeting face to face which is very different than other types of awards but we get 1,200 submissions and we select 30 winners and 30 nominees but the key thing I want to deal with today is this across platforms and across genres very different from other things so television radio web entertainment documentary news children’s programming public service and that’s where the power of this is so when we give an award it’s not for the best in television it’s for the best story and in particular we say it’s stories that matter to us as citizens which is very different from other Awards which are usually more craft awards or they rewards that go for you know best screenwriting best acting etc so how does narrative shape our citizenship and the board is very intentional about selecting these things and what I want to talk today is I’ve been at Peabody’s for five and a half years and what we’ve noticed is that these stories accumulate and we realize when we look across certain areas in a period of time say 20 15 to 18 in the area of race and criminal justice reform we’re giving out a lot of awards so in documentaries some of these titles may be familiar with including Ava Duvernay 13th in news local news stations from around the country are handling or MSNBC in the case of crisp what’s-his-name Different Genres Chris Hayes in entertainment even shows like black-ish and atlanta take up these issues of race and criminal justice reform and podcast if you’ve never heard ear hustle that was actually done in a prison but all of these when you put them together this is 19 moments of recognition by this curatorial board winners and nominees on race and criminal justice reform so so so what and I’m not going to show this video because there’s no time so we will use it that was Eric Duggan’s our board chair you’ve heard him on NPR but what and if you go to our website the Peabody Media Center you’ll see about a four minute sizzle on that and that that brings these stories to life but what happens in these stories is that these are the themes that come forward and I won’t recite them all for you but you can see and and and the power here is precisely because they’re different genres that is to say an entertainment show like blackish or Atlanta is gonna deal with these issues in very different ways than a documentary or a podcast but as media students and scholars we all know actually the most important is that audiences attend to these things in different ways we’re attracted to different media we if you’re a podcast aficionado and loved it you know your relationship to that medium is different and that’s precisely the point when we have 19 stories and these are just Peabody winners the the the folks on and the media center actually studying how many of these submissions do we get across these many years so the winners themselves are articulating these very important about race and criminal justice so the Narratives Add Up point here is that narratives do add up and that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts or at least that’s what I’m trying to advocate here and you’ll see from these graphics we’ve given 14 winners to rape and sexual assault in four years as well and so the me2 movement stands upon these narratives that have been that have been done and found receptivity so the the title of my talk today is the power of narrative accretion for reform movements what we’re talking about here is that cultural change needs narrative change we’ve seen that with LGBT rights acceptance of gay marriage and frankly we’ve seen this in the first important step a passage by and Trump signed it amazingly of a criminal justice reform very recently so what what one thing I want to make a point I want to make here is is the relationship but between art so I’m gonna how storytelling across these genres as what artists do and and in particular want to call out the difference between recognition and seeing one author wrote we once read once we recognize an object we stop really seeing it so we recognize Latinos as gangsters and thugs we recognize Muslims portrayed as terrorists but what art does as art leads us to estrangement from such habitual representations art lets us see things and new art helps make things strange and and that’s precisely what I would argue is the power of storytelling is to bring that moment of estrangement so to say that narrative accumulation story accumulation I’m not saying anything really new local history is based upon multiple legends and tales gathered across time by multiple authors and speakers newspapers are in the art of gathering facts those facts add up they become the story right and they also create our reality as a product of that but I’m Narrative Accumulation using the five-dollar word here instead of accumulation accretion precisely because of this the the italicized words here it’s a process of growth that occurs through gradual accumulation and I think that that what’s important here is that it is a process we’re not going to change quickly or immediately and that in that process of telling story Society learns new things new knowledge as new ways of talking new ways of thinking and that process leads to this gradual accumulation of kind of a common sense and so these are three images from Ava Duvernay 13th and and what this narrative accumulation adds up to for me is the breadth depth and variety of stories that allow us new understandings new language new ways of thinking language such as mass incarceration or the Thirteenth Amendment and our understanding of that which I would argue many of us didn’t until such a such a narrative appeared so narrative accretion then is this process of societal growth and change through storytelling and and and a couple things I’ve picked up here at the conference this week the the first the person from the Ad Council said one of the most important things is iteration and I’m arguing here reiteration the story has to be told again and the other thing that I thought was very powerful was that social change is achieved through the speed of trust someone said and that’s exactly what narratives can do well precisely because they’re appearing in different genres and in different media and in media that we often trust it’s easier to trust certain types of stories than others so Recommendations this actually stands on a body for the those want to put on our scholarly hat on the research of George Lakoff a cognitive scientist the communication scholar george gerbner philosopher Martha Nussbaum all of them would if we had more than 18 seconds the types of things we could talk about of how and why this theory stands on established scholarship so the stories in our head are the motivators for social action policy and reform these become a common reservoir from which to speak and to advocate and it shapes how we talk and think and becomes our kind of language for dialogue so I’ll leave you then with these five recommendations or strategies and I liked how frank they’re specifically asking for us what do we do with these presentations where do we go number one if you’re a funder keep funding these stories I talked to Sally Joe Pfeiffer runs itvs you all know who she is amazing human being and Sally is like we we’ve done that story before we guess what we’re gonna do it again we’re gonna fund that again you want to know why because we have to keep telling that story about women and girls and that’s a specific conversation you can read about it later number two circulate these in areas the video that I was going to show you is a sizzle that we put together from this programming what we want is for social justice groups working in these areas to take these materials and circulate them precisely by sharing it through your social networks is how these these narratives will will take root third different audiences respond to different narratives straight up comm 101 but the more these stories populate different areas of our media ecosystem the more it will be easy for us to take up these narratives as common sense number for appropriate best arguments and language from these stories again Ava thought did the best job of taking four blocks of historical citizenship that we’ve known and put them together into a narrative that you can re articulate in a damn elevator speech tell somebody here’s why it is wrong and that language and those arguments can be very effective and then finally measure the impact these stories are having there are ways to do that and that’s another conversation for another day thank you so much for having me at the target [Music]