While waiting for the results of the 2016 presidential election in a hotel room, communications strategist Shanelle Matthews drafted two statements for the Black Lives Matter Global Network where she served as communications director. One addressed the Democratic Party’s historic role in mass incarceration, the other acknowledged Donald Trump’s victory. However, she realized that neither statement—no matter who won the presidential election—truly served the interests of those exploited by imperialism and colonization, both in the U.S. and globally.

That realization birthed the Radical Communications Network (RadComms), a 5,000-member network of communicators who “cross-pollinate” conversations across movements, backgrounds, levels of experience, geographies, languages, and political associations in an effort to build narrative power that puts the people closest to oppression at the center of stories. They regularly offer peer-to-peer political education sessions, organize an annual Narrative Power Summit, and lead a 12-week seminar on narrative power called RadSchool. 

More recently, the network led to the creation of “Liberation Stories: Building Narrative Power for 21st-Century Social Movements,” a RadComms anthology co-edited by Matthews and longtime activist and communications strategist Marzena Zukowska, the former media director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA). The book compiles firsthand accounts from today’s foremost progressive and leftist radical communicators, organizers, artists, journalists, and academics on successful theories, strategies, and tactics for anyone wanting to understand and participate in the cultural dialogue that shapes society. A hardcover edition of the anthology was published on June 17 by The New Press.

Prism recently interviewed Matthews and Zukowska about the ways that stories shape people’s worldviews and the power of counternarratives, among other issues. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Adryan Corcione: Why publish a print anthology in this political moment? 

Marzena Zukowska: Shanelle and I wanted this project as an anthology, rather than just a book on narrative power authored by us. We wanted it to represent a wide variety of movements. That’s why there’s over 31 chapters, 62 contributors, and 24 years of movement history. We recognize that narrative power—and how it’s built—is both a radical concept and something that is so different and embodied, depending on where it’s being deployed.

When we started, we did not imagine that it would develop into this large body of work. We were just searching for more contemporary case studies [of narrative strategy] because having a blueprint to work off of instead of constantly reinventing the wheel can be so impactful. As we started to do the first callouts for proposals [and] commission the first chapters, the interest was overwhelming, especially from people who are used to doing behind-the-scenes work for movement organizations, like Shanelle and I do. There was hunger to have even the mental space and the freedom to step back and reflect on your work. 

Shanelle Matthews: Alicia Garza, one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, worked at NDWA and started the We Dream in Black program there [that centers the voices and experiences of Black, Afro-Latina, and Afro-descended domestic workers]. Marzena and I would have to be in communication because Alicia [had] press requests from both of our organizations. When RadComms started, Marzena led our first political education session as a network, and over time, our relationship grew.

We’ve gotten tens of thousands of dollars in discretionary funding from our network members who work in philanthropy, plus a $10,000 grant from Borealis Philanthropy and a $15,000 grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. That’s what started the anthology. We met every Friday for six years to work on this anthology.

Corcione: Why is it important for movement organizers to be intentional about their messaging and storytelling? How does narrative strategy build social power?

Matthews: We often like to study thinkers who understand the role of hegemony in our society. I often return to an idea from Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci: Ideas and opinions are not spontaneously born in each individual brain; they had a center of formation that developed them and helped shape their political reality. Nothing is neutral. Power is maintained through force, through policing, through the military, through Child Protective Services. It’s also sustained through ideas and through culture and through the stories that we tell and the norms that we accept.

If we understand narrative power as who has the ability to tell stories and to determine how those stories are interpreted, it really has the ability to shape people’s worldviews, their belief systems, [then] we have to contest for that type of power. We’re trying to make sure we reach people en masse, and also have a large tent coalition that advances a progressive or revolutionary or radical vision of the world.

It’s important for us to understand how we exploit the contemporary means of communication to do that. The right has used meme farms, bots, and very deep dehumanizing propaganda to advance a fascist and authoritarian vision. We have to contest for that ideological power by making the ideology visible for people.

Corcione: Storytelling is often associated with writing, which can often be a solitary act. But radical communication happens in community. How do you shape narratives collectively?

Matthews: We offer a narrative power framework in the book with six interconnected elements. The first is a narrative power analysis. It’s important to understand the narrative terrain under which you’re doing your narrative organizing. The second element of the narrative power framework provides values-based guardrails for how we communicate about people, places, and ideas. The third is tradition, something I never saw in the kind of large, corporate-like nonprofits that I worked at. The movements that we belong to have foundations; they foster collective identity and they connect us to our predecessors who did this before. The historical reach of our movements allows us to stay grounded. The last three [principles] go together: narrative possibilities, opportunities, and interventions. Narrative possibilities refer to the potential within the political system that you believe, but we have to be prepared to act on those possibilities. 

Narrative power is built the same way that social movements are built: through everyday people standing up against injustice.

Marzena Zukowska, co-editor of “liberation stories”

Zukowska: It comes down to organizing. [Narrative power] is not something theoretical that communication strategists like Shanelle and I cook up behind the scenes in an office. Narrative power is built the same way that social movements are built: through everyday people standing up against injustice. [They’re] parents who are right now standing up in these school board fights, against book bans; they’re neighbors who don’t want to see their community members kidnapped by ICE; they’re everyday workers who are banding together to say, “I’m tired of billionaires and millionaires stealing our wages.” It’s people coming together and shaping stories at a very grassroots level. It’s the collections of those stories that make up the counternarratives that we ultimately put out into the world. 

I’m a community organizer first, a narrative practitioner second. I co-founded an organization called POMOC, which builds power among Eastern Europeans living in the U.K. around progressive and leftist politics. A crucial part of our work is redefining the story of what it means to be Eastern European and reshaping this identity as a political tool of solidarity. For example, the Polish abortion rights movement succeeded in changing public opinion on abortion because they built connections with feminists in Northern Ireland, the United States, and in Argentina.

Corcione: In your interview with human rights attorney Noura Erakat, she describes how the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah served as a narrative lens, illustrating Israeli settler colonialism in a way that broadened understanding and garnered more widespread public support of the Palestinian struggle. However, after Oct. 7, mainstream media coverage amplified Zionist narratives and erased that hard-won context. How do you understand the role of narrative power in moments of backlash when dominant institutions seem to double down on propaganda?

Matthews: We have to understand the way that mainstream media operates from an ideological perspective. They weaponize nuance to manipulate and deceive us. A lot of these institutions have very specific political goals [and] are owned by people whose ideological underpinnings are Zionist or white supremacist. They use selective framing to deliberately emphasize or de-emphasize certain aspects of multifaceted issues; they present particular facts or use half-truths or shape the narrative that serves their particular agenda. Guardian data editor Mona Chalabi created a useful visual to illustrate how The New York Times consistently mentioned Israeli deaths more often than Palestinian deaths. She argues that their coverage of Israeli deaths increases as more Palestinians die. 

Another way [mainstream media operates] is that they use a divide-and-conquer approach to exploit differences between oppressed groups to sow discord and to weaken collective action. My circles are pretty radical. I don’t see a lot of the propaganda that attempts to pit Black people against Palestinians, but I have received a lot of direct messages about the way that Black Americans and Palestinian people are pitted against each other. 

Zukowska: Just after Trump got elected, journalist Lewis Raven Wallace published a piece independently, “Objectivity is dead and I’m okay with it.” He was fired from NPR for that piece. I think about Alec Karakatsanis’s recent book, “Copaganda,” where he states that there is no neutrality in mainstream media. If we must look at [media] from a Marxist lens, the reproduction of certain stories serves certain political and economic interests. Until we’re able to grapple with [media] that has been used since the Enlightenment to propagate vested capitalist interests—in addition to patriarchal and white supremacist [interests]—it’s going to be difficult for us to constantly contend within the system.

What we ultimately need to do is have that battle at the mainstream media level. At the same time, we need to create our own means of production. Our own ways of being able to elevate stories of marginalized voices from the grassroots in order to shape our social movements. If Lewis couldn’t depend on NPR back in 2017, we certainly in 2025—at this grand resurgence of fascism in [the United States] and beyond—cannot depend on mainstream media to save us.

Corcione: What do you hope readers walk away with after engaging with stories from the anthology, whether they’re organizers or simply trying to make sense of this political moment?

Matthews: We’re hoping that people use “Liberation Stories” as a guidebook to build narrative power in a progressive era. It’s chock full of case studies on narrative strategy, tactics, and behind-the-scenes content that exposes how we do our work. Every discipline across social movements—whether it’s legal, strategy, organizing, policy advocacy, or fundraising—all use storytelling. This is a love letter to them.

Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor