And we're at the very start of the narrative and storytelling month of our conference. If you're here, then you've probably already registered for this conference, which is great. But if you become a member for very low cost membership, you're able to access all of the recordings online through the PDSA website and also benefit from many of the other great offerings at the Association gives two members, which include job opportunities, fellowship opportunities, funding opportunities, conferences, proposal opportunities to, to submit your writing for awards and our publication. So if you haven't already checked out the PDSA website, please do. My name is Amanda Smith Byron, and I'm the Research Chair for the peace and justice studies association. And I'm also one of the presenters at this session. You'll note that we started recording the session. This session can be available online. And if you're uncomfortable with having your face showing, you're welcome to turn off your camera. But if you're able to turn on your camera, it makes it easier for us as presenters to, to know that we have an audience instead of just sneaking into the ether, is going to share my screen. So the title of today's presentation is evolving narratives, expanding imagination and mobilizing voices for change. And this is a panel presentation, and I will be one of the presenters. All three of us are from Portland State University and I am from I'm from the conflict resolution program and we have Sally EC with us who's from Women's Studies and rubber to hunt who's from child and family studies in the School of Social Work. So I'm really excited. This is a great opportunity for us to come together and talk about our collective interest in storytelling. And also use it in this case, to really expand our imagination about what storytelling can and does accomplish. And how we can use that understanding of storytelling as a means to mobilize our voices to be part of the change process that I think all of us are interested in within our discipline, a peace and justice studies and within the work that we do in conflict resolution and in fact, in all of the different intersecting roads of social justice work. And I think that we provide a really good representation of at least three of those roads, Although I guess many of us represent multiple threads. So let me just double-check the chat and see. Great. Super. So to get started. Okay. On the agenda for today is that we're going to do a little bit of introduction. We're going to cover some of the big concepts that we think are important to the storytelling process, especially storytelling as a mechanism for social change. We're going to have an experiential activity wherever we won't have a chance to weigh in on some of these concepts that we're talking about. And we'll have a little demonstration before we do that. Before we move into breakout rooms. We'll come back and do some sharing and meaning making together and conclusions and Q and a. So our presentation will be about an hour, and then we have a half hour for, for answering questions and your input. So I think that's pretty much what we're gonna do. The objectives that we bring into this is to for us to explore the power of story. One of the, my, my dissertation, a lot of my research and publications have been focused on storytelling as a means for social change. And understanding how this power of story gives us greater capacity to make a difference in the world. We also want to demonstrate that the personal is political and that telling stories is not just a soft congratulation process, but allows us to contextualize and understand how stories build perspective and understanding and also inspire one another to take action towards the things that we want to make a difference. And we also want to open the doors to understanding the nature of systemic injustice. Because while the personal is political, the collective is where we can understand how, how oppression works and also what opportunities there might leave your liberation. And then we're going to specifically look at action steps forward. So before we go into our presentation for today, we'd like to just sort of pass the baton and introduce ourselves tone as I've introduced myself, I'm Amanda Smith Byron. And if we want to just pass the baton around and each tell us who you are, what institution are, regional area, geographic area are you from? And anything that you think is relevant to us in this conversation. I'll pass to Sally. Okay. I am Amanda abbey for I began doing this work with I'm sorry, I forgot. We just mat and I'm already so familiar. I'm happy to be here. I am. I'm from Portland State University. I worked in Portland for 24 years before that. From rural aida. So I'm kinda a difference there back Pacific Northwest my whole life. I love any opportunity to think about how we can come together to think through and kind of put Oliver ideas around, around injustice and Justice on the table so that we can figure out how we might better Hugh. Together. I love the notion of justice as an opportunity for all of us to heal. So to kind of keep that at the center of things. As we kind of try to discovering and consider the ways power is operationalized, feels really important to me. Any opportunity to be with my favorite colleagues, errands. Ingenuity around this topic is, is a gift. So I thank you for inviting me. Long means add and Roberta. And thank you all for coming along to do this work and advocate for the tech. Yes. I'm always super big challenge for me. I'm like really an app and you wanted to give you a magic. Thank you. Roberta. So thank Sally and Amanda. Roberta, she her pronouns and I'm glad to be here. And I met a in Portland. I've been here for 17 years. And so it's just good to be at Pj essay. My doctorate was an Peace and Conflict Studies at University of Manitoba. And when a peg. And yeah, it's just really good to be with you all. So are you a former board member? Two. I am. I am. I am a former board member. So and I I I haven't gotten to participate over the last few years and so I love that we're doing less. So how about I'll pass to how about Matt, since that is Adi and saying, Hey there, my name is Matt. I and II, current board member as of last week. And I am a student at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Fransisco. I lived a little south of there. Did live in core Vallis for a little bit. So it's fun to see the Pacific Northwest and my partner is from San Diego, so she could not handle the rain, but being from San Francisco quite loved it. So anyway, I'm happy to be seeing you all here. I think storytelling is critical. I love the relationship of storytelling to imagination, to nature in general. So I got very much interested in ecological resistance movements, sort of going to some classes and Eugene and, and the folklore department. So anyway, I'm just happy to see what you have to say. Thank you so much. And I will pass it over to Max. Haha IMAP, left-hand working or buy a car. I'm all for shift in. Select my bulge, bottom up all study protocol called blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah on our coal. Hello. My name is Caleb Chewbacca. I'm a student at Vermont Law School. I'm getting my masters degree in restorative justice. But I'm also taking a course right now in theology and conflict transformation at Boston University School of Theology. And I actually wrote my bachelor's senior thesis on post-colonial literature and storytelling as a form of resistance. And I approach that through an anthropological perspective. So I'm very interested to see what you'll have to say today. And I will pass 20k. Hey guys, I'm Zeke Adler. Sorry, I'm keeping the video off just because it gets a little laggy and I have it on my end. I am a junior at State University studying conflict resolution. And I'm just here to learn and take it all in and go from there. Thank you. So I think that surpass to Abby. So I'm Abby. I'm a junior at UNC g, and I'm majoring in social work with a minor in peace and conflict studies and anthropology. I don't know what I really want to do yet, but I do know that I either want to get my master's degree in social work or go to law school. I'm kind of interested in policy level stuff. And I really like storytelling in it's a big theme in social work as well. So interested to hear how powerful it can be in all the good stuff about it. Wonderful. Thank you. Over introducing is nice to know who's in her room. And we'll go ahead and get started with our presentation. So to begin with, we wanted to lay out some big concepts that underlie what it is we're going to be talking about, about how we work with story to expand imagination and to mobilize our sense of voice and agency in the world. And I'm going to ask Sally to start us off and talking about oppression x, Amanda. And so nice to meet you all. You. I was writing down everything everyone's doing and I'm so excited about your work em off. It's really wonderful things that can happen from it. I'm sure. At whenever people are in the same room, at the same time discussing injustice and experience in telling their stories, it's really important to have a common frame for analysis. And one of those frames is to understand oppression, who we are within that construct, and how that may affect our lives. Because it does affect all of our lives quite deeply. So, so kind of creating common ground is, is a really important piece of the work. That way when we are kind of having a conflict or a question or curiosity around things. What kind of drawing from the same well can kind of elevate the conversation and keep it from being in the place where people really don't know the kinds of things we're talking about. So, so understand oppression is a, is a huge piece of that. A really good definition for oppression is that it's an institutionalized power imbalance. That's part of our socialized consciousness. The, the way that oppression functions is that it's always, there's always a power group and a power up group and a power down group. Dominant group. And the dominant group would be called the agent group. And the, the subordinated group or the systemically oppressed group, would, would be called the target group. Targets and agents are not kind of monolithic one time kind of group. We all have both target and each an identity that is part of our, part of our makeup as socialized beings in society. When we talk about oppression being systemic, it's really valuable to understand which, what that means and where the systems are, what the systems are. So it's kind of kind of our social 100 kind of notion. The seven institutions of society. Our family, education, government, economy, religion, Madison, Media, and health. And each of us plays a part with each part of our identity within those, within those institutions. So we always say that oppression is systemic and systematic. So it runs through all seven institutions of society. Systematic, systematically is in a pattern over and over and over again. So those, those target, target, an agent identities don't tend to change within those, within those identity categories. So that kind of always the agent and always target except for a few. Like perhaps age is one. So h For the oppression, call it autism. All of us have no, not because we've all been too young. Too young. And all of us will know, well, if we're lucky, we'll know the other side of that, which would be two old, which is ageism. So, so, but most, most farms or oppression or kind of, um, our agent and identity categories to which we belong kind of stay the same. And the more we understand them, the more deeply we understand them, the more we understand power, where we have access and where we have been denied access, and how privileged functions within that. Ok. I think that's that's good for that part. And, and a piece of, a piece of the identity constructs the oppression that we're going to be thinking about. The most threatened center is, is racism. And we can't really think about racism very well without understanding white supremacy culture and how that affects the ways that we, we relate to each other and the ways that we kind of put certain power dynamics ahead of other. And the way that we kind of can use that power, unfortunately against other people and even against herself. So some of those, some of those dynamics than a form all of us at, because it is part of the socialized consciousness. When I say it's part of the socialist consciousness as oppression, it is part of the ways that we have been socialized. And so it's assumptions that we make and we see it's the thing we know before we know the thing, you know, you know. So it's like before we've done the deep critical thinking, before we've gotten past kind of the assumptions that these are just the ways that things are we, we, we are, are kind of in this place where we're being trained into an, into these assumptions and, and this white supremacy culture as part of the training of the assumptions that we get. So some of those, some of those assumptions are that things need to be perfect. And, you know, I have a daughter right now who is really stressed out about school. And she kind of can't do anything if it's not perfect. And I'm just like, wow, that is I don't know. I don't feel like I made that her think that way, but I do know that that is part of the story about how, how we engage. And so that perfection is I'm definitely informs how we, how we direct our story and the things that we have before us. Either we're thinking, so it's either this or it's that and there's no gray area. Which is not very sophisticated way of thinking about things. That is definitely a part of the dominant culture. Some of my device sadness that we have in our culture right now can be directly connected to West premises culture at very much so fear of open conflict. So making nice instead of just having the real conversation, really doing that, that work a consideration, and doing the work of curiosity around what is happening with power here. Individualism. So sense of my stories. The only story we're talking about oppression, what we're talking about as systems. And we're talking about again that systematic. So systems of power. So all of those institutions that were connected to and the fact that there are systematic power imbalance. So in a pattern over and over again. So individualism is, goes in direct conflict to the notion of the ways that these patterns are repeating themselves. If we think that we're the only one in that story than we don't. Then we can kind of understand across our identities, how these things are working against us. The right to comfort. So kind of keeping it nice. Power hoarding. So trying to be competitive and having been the one, being the best, being above being defensive. So when we're invited to consider other identities or validate their experiences, feeling like leaning on some of those notions of power, hoarding and individualism and really be becoming defensive around not quantity over quality. So the idea that more is better than more words, more work, whatever we have is better than, than just the sinks and the good. Paternalism. So thinking that we also know better is part of a white supremacist. Framework. So not inviting additional ideas into the, into the story, not letting those in to inform our practice, worship of the written word. So if it's not written down and there's not a and an expert didn't say it, then it must not be true. Which really denies lots and lots of voices that could be informing the ways that we think about things. Again, progress is bigger. It means that there's that bigger and that it's more, which is something that we're all going to be thinking about if we haven't already been thinking about it. In terms of environmental change and climate crisis and that kind of thing. We really do need to think about the way that, the way that that's been part of our socialization and a sense of urgency. So the idea then everything has to be in a hurry and we have to get that and we have to do it now. And which changes our ability to prioritize and, and kind of go slowly and rest, for instance, this kinds of things. So, so why is the promises culture is a part of and kind of the ways that oppression is indoctrinating us and the way that we think about the world. And some of these norms that are part of our socialization can help us to understand the ways that we're kind of enacting and being complicit and oppressive systems. If we have some tendencies toward these things, we can be, we can start to reveal our relationship to oppression in a way and hopefully start to figure out what we can change. I always say that the very best thing about oppression, that if there could be anything good about it at all, is that it's a social construction. And because it's a social construction, it means that it doesn't actually have to be constructed this way. It could be constructed differently. But it will take all this kind of understanding what it is that we're working with and what we are working against so that we can transform it into something that will serve AS that'll serve all of us. We feel like an auctioneer talking real fast over here. Next slide. Oh, in support of what you're saying, Sally, I want to put in the H hat a, a link to surge showing up for racial justice. They have a white supremacy culture characteristic sheet that can help you think about this a bit more. And so we have a slide here, internalized capitalism. And at this, crossed my path recently. And so internalize capitalism is feeling guilty for resting. Your self-worth is largely based on doing well in your career. Placing productivity before health. Believing that hard work is happiness. And feeling lazy even when you're experiencing pain, trauma or adversity. And using busy-ness as a way to avoid your needs. So I saw this and I felt like I saw myself. And in many ways, what internalized capitalism is also internalized white supremacist thinking. And I get to think about what would it look like to flip this right to to, to not feel guilty for resting, but to embrace rest as necessary and vital. That to think of myself worth is not based on my career, but myself worth is based on my connection to all beings. That instead of thinking of productivity before health, I think, I think of health and wellbeing as critical for productivity and a precursor, precursor for action. That instead of thinking of hard work as happiness. But maybe thinking of happiness coming from many areas. Hard work being one. But that happiness is a overarching opportunity. In my right. Instead of feeling lazy when even when experiencing pain or trauma or adversity. To embrace pain. Trauma and adversity to listen, to witness and to seek to address need. Rather than dismissing it. And using business as a way to avoid your needs. Again, addressing needs and being still before we act. So I think what what I really hold on to. And even as I say this, I'm like, whoa, I begin to breathe a little bit. Rate. As we live in this covert life where we keep trying to act like we're business as usual, in the middle of a pandemic. And I think of what Sally said around we, that Oppression is a social construct and we can envision something else. And the opportunity and the invitation is always there. Next slide. So we're zipping through these slides. And, but our intention is to slow down and to kind of engage with what we're putting down. But we wanted to bring up this idea of dog whistles. Dog whistles or dog whistle politics are coded racial appeals that carefully manipulate hostility toward non-whites. It's often subtle and it favors whites. Examples of dog whistles include repeated blast about criminals and welfare cheats. Illegal aliens, and Sharia law in the heartland. Superficially, these provocations have nothing to do with race, yet they nevertheless powerfully communicate messages about threatening non-whites. One dog whistle that's in the media right now. I mean, really all of these are in the media, but one that is very much in the media is this idea of tough on crime. And tough on crime has meant in the nineties, that idea of tough on crime meant heavy policing of black and brown communities and black or brown bodies. And we think about this is being use now as coded language for suppressing Black Lives Matter protest. In the last 50 years, dog whistle politics have driven broad swaths of white voters to adopt a self-defeating hostility toward government. And in the process has remade the very nature of race and racism. So what one thing that I always think about with dog whistles Is that if you are not a member of that targeted group, you may not hear the whistle. But if you are a member of that group, you know that they're coming for you. Right? And and that, that for those who want to do harm or to suppress another group, they also hear the dog whistle because that means that they have alle ship in oppression. So 11 dog whistle in Portland. We we're in Portland. And Portland is the most I actually, I don't know what Portland is the most diverse. It's not, no. But but a lot of people of color live here in Portland. We also have a lot of people that are houseless. And every time we talk about expanding the public transit system to other outside of Portland, there's a lot of push back to public transit. And one political candidate in our community just outside of ours. One of the things she ran on was she said, we're going to keep out Portland's problems. Right. And when she was talking about Portland's problems, she never said people of color are houseless people. But those were the problems that she is trying to evoke. Right next side. Okay. I'm gonna turn it over to him. And so the exercises that we're going to do as a group is to, or to look at the stories that we tell about ourselves and try and find these dog whistles that, that that give a that help us understand how we're either colluding with or challenging systems of oppression and, or how we might challenge systems of oppression. And we're going to specifically be looking at white supremacy culture because, because that's so alive for us right now in the United States and so relevant to what it is that we're looking at. So to do that, we're going to tell stories of our own. And so want to talk a little bit about the story, the strategies and skill sets that are important for storytelling. And I think that we often, I sort of think about storytelling is something nice as an icebreaker or a warm up or something, as opposed to seeing it as a substantive process that can be really part of the change, part of the part of activism around change. So there's many different perspectives and benefits that we get from sharing our stories. We expand our own perspective to incorporate other ways of seeing things. We build understanding about people who occupy different social locations than our own. And we can extend our empathy to people who we might not otherwise be empathetic toward. But the process, a story sharing also has pitfalls. And one of the ones that I think is most important to name is that the stakes are really different for people based on their vulnerability. So some people because of their social location, have much more to lose by being vulnerable in a group. And some people who have more privilege are able to sort of peel back the veneer and show their vulnerability with much less risk or social cost. And this is important in situations. Classrooms in particular where you have a group of people and there's an expectation may be that the people who are the most vulnerable are going to be expected to do the emotional work to create that change. So for example, we could be talking about racism and we could put the emotional labor on the back of roberta as a woman of color. Or we could talk about white supremacy culture and engage the rest of us perhaps in exploring what white supremacy culture looks like. And by doing so, we're sharing in the work of unpacking a system that disadvantages people of color and advantages. People who identify are perceived as white. So recognizing that we don't all have the same vulnerability and that we have, some of us have more latitude to, to be vulnerable as an important part, important awareness to have when we start to invite story sharing. So one of the other things that's important about stories is that they reveal patterns of experience and help us understand how those patterns connect to systems of privilege and systems of oppression. Understanding these relationships is essential to building effective coalitions, directing, activism, distributing emotional labor, and also changing the world for the better. So individual stories of experience are only as valuable as they are, as they fit within the collective. So for example, as a white woman, I might feel, I might feel that I don't wield a lot of privilege in the world. So I may not believe in the story of white supremacy. But if I look at the larger story of white supremacy than my own story is seen as not, as, you know, one of many stories and not necessarily the one that, that dictates whether or not white supremacy exists. So this personal is political, is not about politicizing ourselves as much as recognizing that our story fits within this pattern of systemic processes that, that either afford or deny power. And so part of the storytelling process is bringing people into connection and into conversation so that we can understand the larger scheme of, of identities. And I work with Lee and bells storytelling project model, Leanne bells from Brandeis University. And she uses storytelling to work on racism. And what are the stories that she centers is the story of the American dream. Then how much coded white supremacy is in that? And one of the, one of the principles of white supremacy that we looked at in the slide previously was this notion of individualism. And when we review the world from the, when we look at the world from the unit of individual, we see it very differently than when, than when we look at the world as the unit of the collective. And this is never more true than in the mask wearing debates that probably many of you have. I had in your, in your families, communities, and world where if I'm just thinking about my own comfort, then I'm probably less inclined to wear a mask. But what I'm thinking about the collective as the unit of analysis, then I'm going to do everything in my power to keep the collective safe. And, and so this is a, this is a story that again, we probably all have stories about mask wearing or refusal to wear masks that illustrate some of these principles. Meritocracy the same way like how we are able to leverage our effort to yield success is not based exclusively in the effort as the internalized. Capitalism's slide indicated, there's this larger milieu that influences how much our effort is rewarded. It's not just that we were able to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps or anyone else was or wasn't. There's a lot of different factors that contribute to that. And so we want to give us an opportunity to start unpacking that to see how how our stories can be understood better and used more strategically to try and facilitate deeper understanding and ultimately social change. So I don't remember who is going to look at this slide. Maybe, maybe let me set it up and then Roberta, you can jump in. So what we want to do in our small groups, and maybe even dyads given the size of our group here, is to do some re-framing. And this is in the spirit of, and the tradition of anti-racist storytelling where we look at some story again, I can give you the mask story as a, as a starting point to try and unpack it. Using these white supremacist traits as a way to see what characteristics are dog whistles are playing out in the course of my story. So, so if I tell my story about wearing a mask or not wearing a mask or refusal to wear a mask. I can start to see that again, individualism, power hoarding instead of power sharing. Either or thinking, it's either my cover or your safety. These are white supremacists, traits that influence my willingness to wear a mask or, or someone else's willingness to wear a mask. As we bring tools of analysis to our stories, we can, we can see who is present in whose absent from our story are we acknowledging people who may be invisible to us in the course of things? So for example, Abigail and I were talking about food service and how there's a lot of invisibility about who's impacted in restaurants and food service in terms of who, who's willing to wear a mask and who doesn't. How are circles of influence intersect, right? So I might be very careful about who I have contact with or how I'm using masks or hand sanitizer or protection of whatever kind. But coming into contact with someone in food service who isn't being careful or I mean, if I'm in food service and a customer comes in who hasn't taken any precautions, then who does that put at risk? And of course that is, that's an example of socioeconomic disparity as well, right? Because people who are continuing to work, essential workers are typically people who have the economic need to be in harm's way or to risk there. And wellbeing for the, for the comfort of others who want to eat out. So other questions we can ask in an unsettling are deconstructing our stories to understand the way that white supremacy or racism works in those stories, is to look at how power is engaged. Who has power? Who's wielding power? Who's sharing power? Who's hurting power? What opportunities do we see to mobilize power or to transform it? What are the challenges? What dog whistles might be present? Whose stories are, who's to tau? What does anti rate it racist practice look like in storytelling? And how do we bring the anti-racist story into the room? And how do we use story responsibly, as I said, so that it's not asking, it's not putting the labor onto people who don't have the power to be vulnerable in a given situation, right? So as we start thinking about story sharing as a means to unpack these anti-racist or white supremacist aspects to it. We wanted to ask Roberta to share a story that she has and sort of demonstrate what That's what we're asking people to do in terms of deconstruction. Great, great. Do you mind bringing back the white supremacist culture, rights, purity culture, slide? Perfect. So one of the areas that I research is about black women in black women and maternal health, or black people who can become pregnant and maternal health. And, and so I'll just share a little bit about some of the I did some focus groups, excuse me. And I talked to different people and listen to what they shared in some of the things that they shared was that when they went to the doctor and said, these are my symptoms, this is what I'm concerned about. The doctor would dismiss it and say it wasn't that it wasn't a big deal. People said that they wanted their doctor to give them options. They felt that went that they weren't getting the attention that they needed around their birth plans and that that they were invalidated. For for asking for attention. People said that they often had to like jump up and down to get heard. And that it made them afraid that when they went to a medical birth, that they would be invalidated and that they would lose any control over their bodies. They also found that sometimes they would say to their doctors, like, do you recognize that people, that black people in particular have a, in some states, eight times greater chance of dying in birth than a white person. And that when they raise their concerns, these concerns were dismissed. So no. Going back to so thinking about the things I've talked about, what elements of white supremacy culture are present in my story. And that's really something I'm asking our group. What are some elements of white supremacy culture that you see or that you hear in my story. Started everyone off and then we're going to have bids. Or I was thinking about paternalism in this sense that doctors are parents too. People who don't have adequate voice to advocate for themselves. And that happens across the board with doctors, but I think it happens more with marginalized communities. That paternalism. Yes, yes. People also feel free to use the chat. I would say the notion of individualism as well as the notion defensiveness. So I'm kind of AM, and those connected the printer paternalism too. So the idea that somebody, if somebody is receiving that feedback from their, from their patient, that there are concerns to kind of to get defensive and to kind of say, well, I'm sure that there were individual instances where those things are, those things are happening that are causing those particular moments. So kind of kind of re, replay, replacing the blame for the health disparity onto the people who are experiencing the bat disparity. Must Craig wise sound right? The pink, yeah, forwarding is what jumps out at me every time and it's, it's hard to talk about another person's story. And in this context for me, because it's so, so vivid, my own experiences where you're watching a loved one in excruciating pain. And you're like pleading for people like, what do you do anything to make the pain go away. And it's almost like lack lackadaisical that somebody can just have that much power over another body that they could decide when you're allowed to have comfort or not. And we will get to when we want to get to you and we will believe you when we have the evidence that supports our decisions about your body and, and, and so I don't know where the story stops being. The story of white supremacist culture. The experience of being marginalized in that same kind of space as my own experience where that's not happening to me and my experience of watching that happened to my brother because of skin pigment. But the experience of powerlessness that I think is very much the same. Woo, woo, so high them. Today's up. We went to grad school together. I apologize. Wo I do. I thought really bad that I made it late, but I was very excited to see all of my Portland people totally rock on. But one of the, so yes, yay. And you know, white supremacy culture harms as all right, so what happens for people of color is that we tend to feel that downward pressure of it. More often in our day-to-day lives, many of us do. But the reality is that if they don't have to listen to me as a black person, they also don't have to listen to you as a white person. And that the system has baked in it a sense of who can hold power and what they do with that power. So in many ways, what is the opportunity which is exciting for us in the storytelling, is that we can bring these conversations into conversation with each other, right? So when I'm talking about black women in and birth, that we can still, we can keep that on the table. And we can also talk about how the power hoarding. That deeply impacts black women's lives, also impacts other people, white people, and others as they engage with that system. Right? And so when we, so something that we can also listen for is how do these experiences, what did they teach us about white supremacy culture? Right? And that's where we move the personal to the systemic, the personal to the political. Caleb shared claiming to know more about black physical experience and pain than people who are actually black. Sounds like phenomenological racism or something like that. There's so much power in being able to decide who gets care and how they should receive care. Yes. And as we think about the construction of blackness within this country, the notion of black people as not fully human during slavery. And ideas about, about black people having less, experiencing less pain. Also translates into today, where black people are received less pain medication when going to the hospital. Right? And so we think about what, what are some of the assumptions underneath our stories? And for the black women who go who have shared their stories with me. This piece around their pain not being recognized and not being taken seriously. There's a huge one. What I also find with white women when I've talked with them about challenge, challenges in birth loss, fetal loss, maternal morbidity. When I share some of my findings from the people I work with, I hear from them. I had an experience to add my feeling. And what I say to them is one, tell me more. And two. Your experience. Like, let's get mad together. Right? Let's, let's change this system together. Because for them, often it is a personal experience. Simply, this is happening to me and it was awful. As opposed to this is a political and a systemic experience that needs to be changed. Matt shared, I was intrigued when the Smithsonian Museum of African history and culture had to pull a similar infographic because it was called racist by whites who felt unsettled. Proving the point innocence. So Matt has given us this resource to check out, which I'm excited to do. They found that it was deeply insulting. The African-American Museum was accused of racism over whiteness chart linking hard work and nuclear family to white culture. Yeah, I think there's also the reality of the ways that white supremacy culture fights back to be maintained and to validate, to be validated as normal. And these stories are very powerful in there. Disruption. And Matt brings forward that there is quite a backlash against critical theory at the moment. Absolutely. And against unpacking our stories. Because the more we unpack our stories and understand the systems of oppression that are driving those stories are impacting those stories. The more we question the power that is holding them together, and the more we work against that power. Socialism. Socialism, anything that questions capitalism is working fine for psalm is seen as revolutionary or radical. Yeah. Alright, I'm gonna turn it back to you. And so I'm just wondering Sally and Roberta if how to make the best use of our time. If we should consider just dyads or we should work in a large group, just dyads maybe. And I see nodding, okay, so what we're going to ask people to do is I'll break you into breakout rooms. Since it's dyads will give you ten minutes to do a sharing about a story. Again, you could use something like masks, which is, I think first and foremost in a lot of our daily experiences right now, tell a story about that. And then collectively and your dyad, See if you can find, See if you can name some of the white supremacy traits that, that influence that story and that influence the nature of, of that story. And so I will put you into breakout rooms. And as I say, we'll give you ten minutes to have that conversation. Let me just remember how to do breakout rooms, okay. Okay. Okay. Here. Oops. That's not what I meant. I wanted to I invite people to. Click on the link for from surge as well. With the characteristics of white supremacy culture. To click on that link and just have it open in your browser. So that when you go to the breakout rooms, you still have that too. As a reference. Do you? I'm going to move back to that slide. Is that what you were saying? I wasn't paying attention. Sorry. We can't they can't take that slide with them into video, but I can you can take a picture of it with your phone. They could do that. Cash aids every bad here. Hey everybody. So since we're all here, okay, take us away. Or Greg is given tickets away. It's good. It's good. We wanted to give everyone a chance to weigh in on what they discovered in that process and any insights that they can share with the larger group. I need to go turn off the power tool outside, so Roberta, I'd take it over for a second. Yeah. So how about you? What was that experience like for people? No need to rush. I think for me it's it's a kind of, you know, it's, it's being so insulated in one narrative, one story that you can't even tell what's different. What's different is basically what's wrong or it sort of becomes what's wrong, right? And so, you know, connecting to that, that link they shared, that was kinda my story. So it was, it was fascinating to me because it seemed to encompass this right to comfort and this idea of either or thinking, right? It's not, both of these cultures can't exist. That's just this Euro-centric one. That is right, right, and everything else is not just different, but it's it's wrong. And so going to that only one right way and yeah, it's just very it seemed like kind of myopic and not exposed to those other perspectives. And one, and when, when finally is really, really having a kind of Anxiety or, or not knowing how to translate from one paradigm to another almost so. Yeah, I didn't know how to really kind of change that other than to, to sort of normalize the idea that Euro centric epistemologies aren't necessarily wrong. But they are kind of culturally bounded and it should be brought into dialogue with other culturally grounded epistemologies. And anyway, so that came up for me and I'm just gonna leave it there. Well, you know, I think that that is a conscious shift in the storytelling. Right? Like the, your way of your, your expanded way of interpreting it is that is the anti-racist work. Right? And and that you're not just a, you know, I might even go further in kind of the, and really in addressing some of the power that is embedded in white supremacy culture, that kind of says that if you challenge the dominant narrative, that you know, where, where the white supremacy culture really works to maintain the dominant narrative as the narrative. And that the African-American Museum is really, is challenging that, right? It is bringing forward hidden narratives. Yeah. How about another? I was really interested in the ways that storytelling reflects patterns of experiences that are systemic. So in the, in the culture of white supremacy, we think about, we can think about individualism as a, as an expression of white supremacy in that we look at personal experiences and narratives, particularly of black, indigenous, and people of color as, Oh, that was just your experience. And I see this a lot with our our discussions of police brutality. Like, Oh, you just had one bad experience with a cop that's not reflective of the culture and militarism of like the Carswell system. But really I think we need to start looking at how one bad apple, you know, you can't just pull out the Apple. One bad apple does spoil the barrel won. One experience. Someone talking about their personal experience is reflective of things that they have seen in the outer world. We cannot isolate it from collective experience. Yeah, huge, huge blinky painted. One more comment and literary get a ramp. Won't hang an awful Caleb said, count with my takeaway, came onto the group activities was, you know, when you're reading, like the reading the slides, it's easy to be disassociated with the situation. And as an individual, it's like oh, like that saw me. Oh, that's maybe a little me. Well, that's not me. That as we cast aren't going into the storytelling. And it's just going over, you start to realize just how much discounting wake up in the matrix slope it, how much joy you are part of it and whether you want to be or not. And just like how much of the Hamas you've kind of normalize in your life. So yeah, it's kind of it's kind of a really cool exercise for me was really awesome. Thank you. Seek. So what I'd like to do is wrap up. I mean, I hope hopefully you can know for amid the learning from that processor, grow it into your own thoughts and process as you go forward. But I wanted to close with talking about a little bit around action steps like how do we bring this into our lives? How do we not just look at it in the slides, but how do we bring it forth into our lives? And one of the things it sounds like most of us are in academia, which makes sense in some fashion. And I think that in fact, for my dissertation, I interviewed celiac as part of my research. I'm allowed to say a human subjects violation to name her Agnew. And one of my favorite things that she said that I still think about every time I step up to teach classes that she said that she spends the first few minutes of class shuffling papers at her desk to just kind of create a distraction so that the people in her classroom have to talk to one another. And that her greatest goal is that relationships are built and her classrooms now, in a zoom era, we're in a slightly different sort of milieu in terms of how to facilitate those connections. But even still that notion of creating space in the spaces that we exist in where people can share story and share critical story. Not just hacking, but like bringing new eyes to old stories in a way to develop insight into take these concepts out of their academic form and internalize them as part of how we think about things as they happen and how we support one another in the telling of a story in a critical way. With that, with that, with those fresh eyes of engagement. So terms of action steps, that's one of the things that Sally taught me. So I'll start with that. Do you like do you want to connect to that? I think you should. Yes. To relationship every time. I think yeah, I think that's so important to Amanda. And as we're building relationship, I'm building comfortability with each other to to always be considering how we are kind of a part of a system that hot, that is distributing power and equitably. And what that means for us. And what it means to be able to use the power that we do have for good, not letting things slide. Having important conversations with all the people that we are in relationship with and building relationship on that, on that sense of, of commitment to taking care of each other and taking care of the world. And knowing that those things are inextricably linked, I think is really important. So I would say interrupt oppression every chance I get. I really feel like they have to take that to heart and have those conversations wherever we can. So I, I, I think I've been thinking a lot about the idea, the concept of othering and belonging from the Haas Institute. And they have a video about othering and belonging. And I've just put the link in the chat. And, but the thing that, that they talk a lot about is that systems of oppression are about breaking, right there. We're about breaking relationship. In many ways also about breaking people. And shifting towards systems of belonging is about bridging and bridging our differences. And bridging that which divides us both from each other and from ourselves. And so as we think about our storytelling, we get to point towards what are the systems that are othering and that are breaking people. And we get two imagined futures where we have belonging. And the radical work of making that happen. Perfect. That's a perfect note to end on as we slide into our ending time. I want to thank everyone for participating in this session and also encourage you to attend some of the other sessions that are happening and PDSA, there's some wonderful events happening during this month of storytelling and narratives. And next month, we'll be talking about polarization, or more effectively, depolarization. But we'll, there'll be lots of sessions on the process of polarization and how we begin to unpack that, which I think regardless of what happens on November third, is going to be the focus of November, not just at PDSA. We're just attempting to mirror what's happening in the world, in our, in our emphasis areas. So please join us for another session. And thank you for being part of today. Thanks to Sally and Roberta for being part of this conversation. And I hope you're all taking something away for your own research and thinking. So thanks everyone for participating and see you in another session. Thanks Abby for your help.