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Progress: research methods

Source (1): Beautiful Trouble’s principles

A. Choose your target wisely

“... social change comes through struggle, which involves articulating clear demands and applying targeted pressure on those in power to comply with those demands.”

B. Choose tactics that support your strategy

Developing a strategy requires: • analyzing the problem:

population’s escapism/ avoidance/ numbing/ desensitization.

• identifying your goal (formulation of demands):

• understanding your target (= who holds the power to meet your demands):

people

• identifying specific forms of power you have over your target and how to concentrate that power to maximal effect:

Within that framework, tactics are specific activities that: • mobilize a specific type and amount of power; • are directed at a specific target; • are intended to achieve a specific objective.

“What is the power behind the tactic?” In other words, how does the tactic give you leverage over your target?

“We use tactics to demonstrate (or imply) a certain form of power. For example, when we carry out an action against a particular company, our underlying power is economic — it must cost them time or customers. That’s why disruption matters. If we target an elected official, our underlying power is political — our tactic must cost them contributions or votes. (The power to “embarrass” is only effective if embarrassing your target costs them money or votes by making voters or donors question their moral legitimacy. Embarrassment in and of itself isn’t a form of power.)”

Tactical power = power that can move you along toward a goal and help you gain ground, but is itself not decisive.

A campaign = a series of tactics deployed over a specified period of time. A campaign is not endless; it has a beginning, middle and end. It ends, ideally, in a specific victory: people get something they wanted or needed, and/or the target agrees to do something they previously refused to do.

C. Make your actions both concrete and communicative

A tactic is concrete to the degree that it seeks to achieve a specific, quantifiable objective. There is (1) a specific goal, (2) a tangible cost for the target, and (3) a way to evaluate success.

A tactic is communicative insomuch as it communicates a political position, set of values or worldview. Communicative tactics can be useful for (1) exciting our base, (2) building networks, (3) seeking to sway public opinion, or (4) scaring a target, but often do not have a specific, measurable, activating, realistic, time-bound (S.M.A.R.T.) goal. Success is more qualitative. Communicative tactics might have a target, but can also work without one -- a symbolic act to amplify a message. Furthermore, a communicative action might have a powerful expressive outcome by building the resolve, connection and commitment of participants by offering them a cathartic, transformative experience.

D. The real action is your target’s reaction

“When applying this principle, it’s important to understand that you can’t just hope the target reacts in a way that spotlights the injustice. Wherever possible, plan for your target’s reactions, encourage them, and incorporate them into the action. If it doesn’t work the first time, adjust and try again.”

A good way to ensure you get a strategically useful reaction from your target is to force them into a “Decision Dilemma” (see PRINCIPLE: Put your target in a decision dilemma), where all of their available options play to your advantage.

E. Think narratively

“Thinking narratively means we’re also strategizing narratively and listening narratively. When designing our actions and campaigns we need to step outside our own perspective to analyze how the issue is perceived by others who don’t share our assumptions.”

(!) People respond to a story not so much because it is true, but because they find it meaningful.

Build campaign narrative out of the core building blocks that make for a good story:

- Conflict: What is the problem or conflict being addressed? How is it framed, and what does that frame leave out?

- Characters: Who are “we”? Who are the other characters in the story? Do the characters speak for themselves or is someone speaking on their behalf?

- Imagery: What powerful images can help convey the story? Is there a metaphor or analogy that could describe the issue? A good story uses imagery and evocative language to show us what’s at stake rather than tell the audience what to think (see PRINCIPLE: Show, don’t tell.)

- Foreshadowing: What is our vision of resolution to the conflict? What is our solution to the problem? How do we evoke that desired resolution without, as it were, giving the end away? see TACTIC: Prefigurative intervention.

- Assumptions: Every story is built on unstated assumptions. Sometimes the best way to challenge a competing story is to expose and challenge its unstated assumptions see PRINCIPLE: Make the invisible visible.

F. Show, don’t tell

“Use powerful metaphors. With metaphor you can show something for what it is, rather than have to explain it. To find your compelling metaphor, look for something that embodies what you are trying to communicate.”

“Speak with actions. Instead of telling, act out what it is that you want to say.”

“A well-designed action explains itself, and ideally offers multiple ways into the issue. You want your audience to reach their own conclusion, rather than feeling like they are being told what to think.”

“Preachy isn’t persuasive. Whether we’re telling a story, conjuring a scene, offering up a metaphor, leading by example, or letting our actions speak volumes, there are millions of ways to convey our message and values without launching into a political diatribe.”

G. Consider your audience

“Protesting solely for the sake of self-expression and self-gratification? That’s the political equivalent of masturbation. Political action that is carefully and thoughtfully designed and executed to cause a reaction or response from a targeted audience? Now that is making love!”

“If you’ve already thought up some awesome, off-the-wall action and are now trying to figure out who you want to reach with it, you’re doing it backwards. The point of creative political action isn’t simply to be creative, but to have a desired impact on a particular audience. First identify your target audience and then brainstorm actions to effectively convey your message.”

“If your core tactics and actions aren’t explicitly and strategically designed to get the desired impact on your target audience, you’re not being strategic.”

“The purpose of political art is the reaction of those who experience it. When you push over your tree in a grand act of theatrics, make sure the right people are watching, and that they hear one heckuva loud noise.”

H. Prefigurative intervention

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

“Many of us spend so much time trying to stop bad things from happening that we rarely take the time to sketch out how things could be better, let alone actually go out and create a little slice of the future we want to live in. Prefigurative interventions seek to address that imbalance.”

Pranks, art interventions, tactical media, alternative festivals and temporary communities, even electoral guerrilla theater, can also be effective ways to prefigure the world we want to live in.

Prefigurative interventions are direct actions sited at the point of assumption — where beliefs are made and unmade, and the limits of the possible can be stretched see THEORY: Points of intervention. The goal of a prefigurative intervention is twofold: to offer a compelling glimpse of a possible, and better, future, and also — slyly or baldly — to point up the poverty of imagination of the world we actually do live in.

When playing with utopian visions, it’s easy to get all squishy-Kumbaya or run off into esoteric fantasyland. The idea is not to paint a pretty picture full of rainbows and unicorns, but to put forward a fragment of something visionary, desirable, and just beyond the realm of the possible — and in such a way that your action calls out the vested interests making it impossible.

I. Points of intervention

“Truly effective interventions go beyond simply disrupting a system to pose a deeper challenge to its underlying assumptions and basic legitimacy. This holds true whether the intervention targets a physical system like a sweatshop or an ideological system like racism, sexism, or market fundamentalism.”

The five types of points of intervention are [1] points of production (for instance, a factory), [2] points of destruction (where harm is actually occuring), [3] points of consumption (a retail store), [4] points of decision (a corporate headquarters) and [5] points of assumption (a foundational narrative or a place of symbolic importance).

Point of assumption: Assumptions are the building blocks of ideology, the DNA of political belief systems. They operate best when they remain unexamined. If basic assumptions can be exposed as contrary to people’s lived experience or core values, entire belief systems can be shifted. Point-of-assumption actions can take many different forms, such as exposing hypocrisy, reframing the issue, amplifying the voices of previously silenced characters in the story, or offering an alternative vision see TACTIC: Prefigurative intervention.

J. Make the invisible visible

“We who in engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.”

- Distance that obscures: People with privilege often have the luxury of putting distance between themselves and the consequences of their actions. When tackling an issue that seems distant, it helps to bring the issue home see PRINCIPLE: Bring the issue home by highlighting the human cost.

- Ideology that obscures: Injustices made invisible by ideology can be brought to light by judicious reframing see PRINCIPLE: Reframe. A frame defines what is part of the story and, more importantly, what is not. Actions that target the point of assumption (the simple question of who can sit where on a bus, for instance) can focus attention on what was previously “outside the frame.”

K. Narrative power analysis

“...what makes a story powerful is not necessarily facts, but how the story creates meaning in the hearts and minds of the listeners. Therefore, the obstacle to convincing people is often not what they don’t yet know but actually what they already do know.”

“ In short, the group challenges not just the economic and political forces they face, but also the narratives that back those forces up, that legitimate them and allow those forces to threaten their community. Current realities are often rooted in oppressive narratives. Our role as change agents is to undermine these narratives and replace them with new stories that help build a fairer, freer world.”

L. Balance art and message

“If I could tell you what it meant,” Martha Graham once said, “there would be no point in dancing it.” Unlike politics, which tends toward plain prose in endless repetition, art goes beyond explicit meanings to connect with that more elusive, soulful dimension of being human — a realm which must be engaged if we are to truly change the world.

“Art invites us to think rather than telling us what to think. This is one of its great powers, and if you make your art accessible and beautiful enough, people will want to follow where the thought goes. And because they’re deciding where to go with it, they’ll more easily connect it to their own experience.”

What do you want your art to achieve? Do you want to evoke sympathy? Provoke deep soul-searching on a given issue? Get people to call their Senator? Art can help you do all of these things, but only when art and message are in balance. You know you’ve struck gold when you’re able to say something so clearly that it hardly needs to be said at all, but is instead embodied in the way you say it.

M. No one wants to watch a drum circle

One way to reach your audience is to entice them to become participants by expanding the creative part of the action to include as many as possible. Come up with ways for observers to meaningfully involve themselves, instead of expecting them to stand mute before your expressive outbursts of creativity.

Instead of strictly planning an action, think of creating rules to a game — one that is rewarding and fun to play see PRINCIPLE: Simple rules can have grand results. How can you create parameters within which large numbers of participants can meaningfully contribute, act, and create? An open framework that allows participants the freedom to bring in their own ideas and solutions?

In any case, whatever the nature of your action, it’s worth looking for ways to make passersby feel that it’s more about them than about you.

N. Simple rules can have grand results

If you’re trying to organize a participatory art piece, a mass action or a viral campaign, you don’t need to script it all out — even if you could. All you need are a few simple rules that participants can sign on to. If you hit on the right rules, they can lead to a surprisingly robust, effective and beautiful happening.

HOW THE OPPOSITE IS EQUALLY TRUE: Simple rules, no matter how well chosen, won’t magically do all the work on their own. Often, conveners (folks who make the invitation and set the rules) have to stage manage all along the way to keep the seemingly organic process going.

O. Use the power of ritual

#week 3 #progress

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