Media Justice: Building Movement through Building Meaning

The United States Social Forum presents a unique opportunity to integrate collaborative, creative, and strategic storytelling as a core movement building strategy for political, cultural, and social change. It simultaneously offers a key convergence of movement leaders to define the media justice policy and organizing framework needed to produce the structural change and media platforms narrative change demands. Several movement support & communications strategy organizations have come together to conduct some participatory research through the USSF process and track how our movements are framing our work. We want to hear about both about the opposition frames––the destructive stories organizers are working to challenge––and the frames that our movements are using to communicate our vision of a better world. Together, we seek to answer the question, “How can we transform the current political and cultural terrain through cross-sector framing, coordinated storytelling, new forms of journalism, and collaborative media policy campaigns that create the conditions for systemic and narrative changes that increase racial justice, economic equity, and human rights and dignity for all communities?”