Liberation Stories: A Conversation with Shanelle Matthews and Marzena Zukowska

Truth to Power is a regular series of conversations with writers about the promises and pitfalls of movements for social justice. From the roots of racial capitalism to the psychic toll of poverty, from resource wars to popular uprisings, the interviews in this column focus on how to write about the myriad causes of oppression and the organized desire for a better world.

Shanelle Matthews, former communications director at Black Lives Matter, and Marzena Zukowska, former media director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance, have coedited the new anthology Liberation Stories: Building Narrative Power for 21st Century Social Movements. They spoke with NPQ’s Steve Dubb about the book, created with the organization they cofounded, the Radical Communicators Network (RadComms).

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Steve Dubb: What do you hope readers will take home from the essays assembled in Liberation Stories? 

Rarely do we have the space to discuss our [communications] work and reflect on it and analyze it….So, I think this [book] offered a really unique opportunity.

Shanelle Matthews: In developing this collection, we looked for case studies and ways that people had built power for big, bold, radical ideas. We had a few books we referenced often—Re:Imagining Change by Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Canning, The Politics of Common Sense by Deva Woodly, Don’t Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff. But we didn’t see anything that was a cumulative study in how narrative power was built for the left in the 21st century. And we had a lot of ideas for what that could look like.

Marzena Zukowska: The gap in terms of resources that were available was pretty stark. Many of the case studies in Re:Imagining Change were reaching back to the protests against the World Trade Organization convening in 1999. We really wanted to have more contemporary case studies. And especially ones that were written by and for social justice communicators.

Rarely do we have the space to discuss our work and reflect on it and analyze it, because we are usually behind the scenes. So, I think this offered a really unique opportunity for communicators to have the time and space and the support from us as editors to reflect on their successes, but also their challenges and losses. We really challenged a lot the contributors to be open and honest about what went well and what didn’t go so well. Because if we want our movements to win, we have to bring that level of rigor to the reflection process.

SD: The Radical Communicators Network (RadComms) is listed as a third editor of the volume. Could you talk a little bit about the network, your vision, and your values?

SM: When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, there was so much we were contending with, including the North Carolina bathroom bill and the systemic violence at the hands of the police. M4BL (Movement for Black Lives) had just put out their Vision for Black Lives and was blacklisted for naming genocide in Palestine.

I had written on Facebook, asking communication workers, “Hey, what is our role over the next four years to keep him from getting reelected?” About 100 people showed up to that call. I saw that as an opportunity.

So RadComms is really a community of practice for emerging and experienced movement communications workers. The network does a few things: We strengthen and politicize communications workers. We connect and convene people across movements and regions. We build power through rapid crisis response. And we practice narrative power building collectively.

Creating this anthology is part of developing a body of work about how narrative power is built in the contemporary context, and who is actually building narrative power.

MZ: What made RadComms so unique and why it has now grown to a membership of thousands from that small group of 100 at that first meeting is that ultimately RadComms is a base building organization. People feel a sense of ownership over the network. It functions in a very decentralized way.

It was also really courageous to say that this is a space for radical thought, that this is a space for radical praxis. That was unique. For that reason radicalism has continued to be one of RadComms’s main values, alongside liberation, principled struggle, mutual aid, and interdependence.

I think the way RadComms operates is reflected in how the anthology has been structured. It is not a single author or coauthored book, but a coedited volume between Shanelle, me, and the Radical Communicators Network—featuring 62 authors.

All of the authors have different approaches to how narrative power has been implemented in their work, depending on the kind of movements that they are a part of—from trying to raise funds during the COVID-19 pandemic for undocumented workers to seeking survivor justice at a moment that #MeToo became a common hashtag across the globe. All of them are bringing a different lens and perspective, and we really wanted to honor that.

SD: In the book’s foreword, Malkia Devich-Cyril and Jen Soriano call for a movement-wide strategy to “shift common sense­ narratives” to support better material conditions and advance alternatives to capitalism. What does that move look like?

SM: That is a big question. Admittedly, although we have had many successes with experiments like universal basic income and community public safety efforts, as a movement, we haven’t made an express commitment to an alternative model. But there are a lot of experiments happening. For example, the Washington Dream Coalition built out a mutual aid model in Washington state to support undocumented migrants who were left out of the COVID aid distributed by the state. We have also seen a significant rise in cooperatives and cooperative economics from a narrative perspective from the New Economy Coalition and organizations like ACRE (Action Center for Race and the Economy), advocating for and illustrating different experiments locally and statewide.

I don’t think we have a movement-backed model, but we have examples of what that model could look like.

MZ: If we said we had the answer, it would be hubris. I do dream of a day when we can be debating the merits of socialism versus anarchism as opposed to neoliberalism versus fascism. That’s a day we could live to.

I would add that what many of the authors do really brilliantly is discuss how to advance pragmatic projects that change people’s material conditions without losing sight of the more revolutionary vision that we are aiming for.

Movements ebb and flow…often people who don’t understand them will [erroneously] assert that a movement has ended or is over.

And when we talk about material conditions, there’s an assumption the focus is on people’s day-to-day livelihoods. There are so many chapters in the book that talk about not just bread but roses.

Fresco Steez’s chapter on the aesthetics of belonging, and the chapters on influencers and visual media—there is such a strong link and connection between everyday people being able to have access to shape the narratives of their existence.

It doesn’t have to just be the basics. Every single person can be the architect of the narratives we want to build, which ultimately reflect the kind of world we want to create.

SD: In your coauthored introduction, you begin in 2020, with the police murder of George Floyd and the racial justice uprising that followed. Five years later, it’s clear we’re in a period of backlash. But from a narrative change perspective, what went well?

SM: As [historian] Robin D.G. Kelley says, there are no utopias. Because the way movements work is often through [political scientist Sidney Tarrow’s concept of] cycles of contention. Movements ebb and flow, and often people who don’t understand them will assert that a movement has ended or is over.

Stokely Carmichael [civil rights organizer and activist] would argue that what is happening right now isn’t a backlash, it is simply how the state works—any time that there are advances, the state is going to react.

When we asserted the “defund the police” frame in 2020—that was an intentional strategy by Black Visions in Minneapolis, who used to be Black Lives Matter (BLM) Minneapolis, to create an incendiary derivative of the divest/invest frame—something that climate organizers use to talk about fossil fuels.

That was an interesting experiment. We saw a huge reaction to that. We had presidential candidates and members of Congress responding. The media was talking about it. And whether they were affirming or rejecting it, we were still having the conversation about moving money from police departments to alternative mechanisms for public safety.

We would argue from a narrative power perspective—this is discussed in the chapter on the Occupy movement by Dorian Warren and Katherine Ollenburger—the first thing you have to do is get the issue to be debated. Our job then is to make that idea salient and resonant to the broader public.

That was the meaning making that was happening when pundits were on television explaining that “defund” did not actually mean eliminating the police department—that it was about moving money from police to different kinds of services, which was precisely what we were talking about, although many of our comrades were talking about abolishing the police completely.

Even having those conversations, we would think, is a sign of success. But more than that, we saw the Republican Party spend more than $33 million on attack ads related to “defund the police” in 2022, which let us know that there was a level of persistence to this conversation. And in 2022, when the children and teachers were murdered in Uvalde, TX, we watched the discourse online as people started to question the size, scope, and function of police departments, who were outside while this happened.

We understand that not all our ideas are going to have an immediate uptake. But every movement cycle, as Tarrow says, we can create an impact that primes people, so when they face a crisis in their own community or when there is an opportunity to consider another way, they will have this information in front of them.

Where we could have done better was providing more examples of what alternatives to police look like. There are plenty of experiments, including the Dream Defenders mobile health unit in Miami, and a mental health program mutually supported by the ACLU and Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, a base building organization, in Washington, DC. So, we need to provide more examples and socialize that right now, because all that people are getting is information about police.

MZ: The book is mostly focused on US examples, but we do have chapters from Brazil, Nigeria, and the chapter I wrote with my colleague Chantelle Lunt on Poland and the United Kingdom.

In the past five years Brazil, Poland, and the United Kingdom had pretty substantial regime change. In Brazil, we saw [president] Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva win back power from Jair Bolsonaro. In Poland, we had the Law and Justice Party, after an eight-year reign, similarly lose power. In the United Kingdom, the Tories lost power after 14 years.

We know a lot of narrative practitioners and organizers who worked on those electoral fights. They were working on them for a very long time. In the case of Poland, ousting the governing far-right Catholic religious party required some pretty significant narrative building. For a lot of the abortion-rights feminists, what they were able to do is really tie the issue of abortion to a very specific and common enemy, which is the Law and Justice Party, but they were also able to normalize it for everyday people and destigmatize it.

We are seeing over the last decade a massive resurgence of fascism, cloaked in the language of populism and reclaiming democracy; I think what we are actually seeing is that many of these narrative fights are potentially still a decade or two away from having the impact that we like to see.

SD: Marzena, in that chapter you coauthored, what lessons might be applicable for activists in the United States today?

MZ: One of the big lessons is the importance of broad-based coalition building. This has made a big impact in Poland—being able to bring together the people at the helm of the pro-democracy movement, people making sure the independence of the judiciary is maintained, people fighting for abortion rights, people fighting for queer and trans liberation.

Then, as different cycles of crisis came up—for example, the crisis at the Poland-Belarus border, where migrants were being pushed back and Poland basically just refused to let people in—there were some really strategic moments where those links between all of those movements were made.

And I think being able to pull back the curtain of what the Law and Justice Party was doing was key. During the COVID-19 pandemic, instead of supporting the entire population, the Law and Justice Party was trying to sneakily ban abortion and change the constitution to do so, and at the same time ban sex education and limit the rights of protests. Activists were able to use those moments of crisis really strategically.

I think the United Kingdom provides a counterbalance. A lot of the momentum that came about during the COVID-19 pandemic and BLM uprisings in 2020 ended up fizzling out. In the United Kingdom, there is, to quite a shocking degree, a pretty powerful far-right and fascist presence. We have two years in a row of far-right riots happening across cities.

There was a missed opportunity to tie the BLM uprisings in the United Kingdom to the broader fight against the far right and its resurgence. Instead, some of the asks and demands were narrowed to focus on decolonizing the curriculum.

SD: Shanelle, in your chapter on the Movement for Black Lives with coauthor Miski Noor, you write about solidification. Could you describe what the term means and the role cultural tools, such as music, play in movement building?

SM: We wanted to write about narrative power in the Black radical tradition. It was something that was introduced by Cedric Robinson in his book Black Marxism.

Solidification is the process of using rhetoric, iconography, symbolism, and clothing (like our uniforms) to build cohesion among movement members. Song is also a big part of that.

Narrative power is only one discipline…it has to go hand in hand with organizing, governance structures, and putting people into office.

When you think about the Black radical tradition, you look at somebody like Billie Holiday, who was given this poem by the [Jewish teacher and] Communist organizer Abel Meeropol called “Strange Fruit” (originally “Bitter Fruit”). Holiday was a contemporary influencer of her time.

Meeropol saw this as a strategic opportunity to create an intervention during a time of extreme anti-Black violence, inspired by his poem on the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in 1930 in Indiana. Holiday’s singing this song really is part of the Black radical tradition, because she was hounded by the state—not just for this music but for other things, like being a drug user. But she helped infuse among Black people during a time of fear a desire to name something that was so ghastly and brutal, and have people organize around anti-lynching politics.

In the collection, Steez writes on the aesthetics of Black liberation. There is the tradition of Black organizers being in solidarity with labor organizers by wearing denim, and of Black Panthers wearing berets and long leather jackets. Part of being in a movement is feeling and looking the part. We sing songs. We chant. From the diasporic tradition, [dance and martial art form] capoeira in Brazil was a way for people who were enslaved to communicate with each other, unbeknownst to their enslavers. These traditions flourish beyond borders.

SD: In their chapter on the War on Terror, Maha Hilal and Khury Petersen-Smith contend that when Barack Obama was president, the shift in rhetoric was “not about curbing violence but, instead, obfuscating it.” A similar observation surely could be made about Joe Biden and Gaza, as in both cases, US empire and colonial legacies are omitted. How can narrative change work interrupt this pattern?

SM: We’re constantly reminded that the apparatus of empire’s propaganda is massive. We are contending with propaganda on all platforms and all fronts. We have had to exploit the contemporary means of communications to expose these obfuscations. That’s been a real challenge.

Some of these strategies are outlined in the book. For example, we look at Palestinian liberation: We have been asserting a moral argument for many years about Palestinian liberation. And we are finally seeing an uptake right now with the global consensus that what is happening is genocide and people must be held accountable for that.

Still, narrative power is only one discipline within the social movement ecosystem, and it has to go hand in hand with organizing, governance structures, and putting people into office.

And even when people align with us, there are wedges. So, we assert Palestinian liberation, and oppositional forces assert that there is antisemitism inside of the organizing camps. And now we are having a conversation about antisemitism and higher education rather than talking about Palestinian liberation.

We are trying to, at the very least, not be driven backward, to maintain a drumbeat on what we believe is the truth about what is happening in places like Palestine. But we are up against a colossal and formidable opponent. And that means we must be more strategic and thoughtful about platforms and building our own media infrastructure that allows us to reach people without the intervention of state forces or billionaires who own the media industry.

Ultimately, we need to be better resourced to do that. And I think philanthropy has a major role to play in that.

MZ: On the question around imperialism, we are in a multipolar, multi-imperialist world where, yes, the United States may be the enemy in many cases, but we have growing visions of empire from Russia and China.

I have had a lot of conversations over the last few years around missed opportunities for solidarity building. I’m the codirector of POMOC, which is organizing Eastern European immigrants around progressive politics in the United Kingdom. When Russia’s full-scale invasion in Ukraine started in 2022, I remember being quite shocked at the discourse at that time on the British left, also in the United States, that was completely decentering the people at the grassroots level who were closest to the oppression and facing this invasion.

What a missed opportunity to actually organize a lot of Eastern Europeans and start conversations—to use anti-imperialism as an issue to bring together communities that hadn’t had the opportunity to work together before.

We have to be OK with complexity. The point is around belonging: It is better to make spaces of belonging, to make liberation feel accessible to people, than to operate from the standpoint that everyone is an intersectional feminist. That is simply not what organizing is.

I think anti-imperialism movements, antifascist movements, offer some incredible opportunities for us in the years and decades ahead, if we do it right.

SD: What are those opportunities?

MZ: The scale of the problems ahead cannot be solved by country-level or national-level solutions or movements. The right and far-right, they are already building across borders.

As movement activists, we need to challenge ourselves to do the same thing, to build our own leftist playbooks that are rooted in the kind of organizing that Marshall Ganz proliferates—namely, organizing that is already rooted in narrative, but that centers the people who are closest to the oppression and who are most likely to have the interesting solutions that many of us cannot even imagine yet, because we are not the ones who are closest to the problem.

SD: Your collection was completed in September 2024, two months before the US elections. Obviously, the threat of rising authoritarianism was already evident, but if you were assembling the collection today, are there any changes that you would make?

SM: I don’t think so. I think case study books like this should be written every several years, because the organizing, political, social, and economic terrains are changing so quickly.

Grace Lee Boggs, Chinese American civil rights and labor rights activist, argued that we need to always assess if our strategies are turning into traps. And that’s true for narrative strategy as well. We have to be assessing the narrative conditions, diagnosing the problems, and offering solutions as often as possible to keep up with how oppositional forces are moving and how the political, social, and economic terrains are changing.

SD: Is there anything else that you would like to add?

MZ: We have a book tour this summer in 12 US cities. You can meet us and some of our coauthors there.