19th annual Allied Media Conference

A moment of uprising can become a story that lights up whole movements for social transformation; those movements in turn become stories passed across generations and continents, fueling the belief that reality is shapeable. A story from one place and time may be enough to lead one or two, or a million people to act in another place and time, sparking new uprisings, which in turn, become new stories. Rebecca Solnit describes this cyclical, yet unpredictable relationship between movements and stories as grounds for hope. She writes, “Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen. And in that spaciousness of uncertainty there is room to act.” This plenary will explore how stories became movements, then became stories in the context of Standing Rock, the Movement for Black Lives, the movement to end caste-based sexual violence in India, and why we need to save the Internet to keep our stories alive and circulating.