Movement building and mobilisation - using narrative work to connect and activate your audiences | Perspectives with Isabel Crabtree-Condor (Oxfam)
Perspectives with Isabel Crabtree-Condor
Knowledge Broker Governance, Active Citizenship & Narratives at Oxfam International
Isabel Crabtree Condor is a cultural connector, narrative expert, and official knowledge broker at Oxfam for whom building bridges is second nature. Her role at Oxfam sees her traverse different cultures, languages, and backgrounds empowering individuals and communities to recognise their knowledge and put it towards good causes. She is the curator of Narrative Power & Collective Action, an anthology jam-packed with diverse stories of people engaging with narrative work for social good.
That Isabel has long valued collaboration, sharing perspectives, and shifting narratives can be traced back to her roots as a British-Peruvian raised in an activist household where human rights were in the spotlight:
“From a quite young age I was made aware of the fact that there are differences in what people can access in the world. I was brought up with a mantra of - if you don’t like the way something is, you should do something to change it.”
This mantra, hailing from her mother, is becoming enmeshed in Isabel’s professional legacy. She has worked her way to the heart of social and civic change, actively learning lessons along the way about the importance of narratives to effect change.
As Isabel explains, narratives have immense power, frequently acting as the invisible web or below-the-surface rubric that colour our perceptions of the world. Narratives are an integral part of our identities as individuals and communities.
“We’re all reinforcing or reshaping narratives every day whether we’re aware of it or not.”
We begin to unpack just what narrative power entails, learning it’s important not to give it a value judgement or reduce it to a binary:
“It just is. It can be used positively. It can be used negatively. It can be used to activate people using ‘us versus them’ narratives, instilling fear, but it can also be used to encourage people to feel like change is possible and they can be part of it.”
Our conversation is a lesson on shaping narratives, and we learn some of the tools that work to change paradigms. Isabel is fascinated by movement building and mobilization, something that is evident from the cases presented in the Narrative Power & Collective Activism anthology. However, she is quick to remind us not to understate the importance of cultural currencies such as satire, music, art, memes - things which may not necessarily have the power to change someone’s perspective, but can ‘create a question mark in their mind’.
It is through these question marks, and through interrogating our inner biases and blind spots, that we can begin to feel the ground shift beneath us. Isabel is at the very intersection of change. Tune into the full conversation to gain more insights about narratives, changing power dynamics, and breaking out of echo chambers.