Our Narrative Strategy

We are inspired by the work of the Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategy, especially paying attention to their narrative design toolkit. We strive to design our storytelling projects in alignment with their framework of narratives and deep narratives, as well as analyzing our place in the narrative ecosystem and where we can best position ourselves to make narrative change.

Pan-Asian communities have rich storytelling traditions that are crucial to how we keep memory and continue to thrive despite histories of colonization, mass displacement, and xenophobia. Storytelling is something that ties us together. We have always imagined worlds and possibilities outside of the ones we live in now. By empowering our members to develop their own workshops and methods of storytelling, we are honoring our rich storytelling traditions and approaching storytelling from the grassroots.

Secondly, we recognize that there are many hierarchies of power and histories of harm within our communities that must be addressed in order to be in solidarity with one another, as well as all communities of color. We want to prioritize the role of witnessing work in storytelling as a tool of accountability in service of cross-community building, and cross-movement narrative strategy more specifically. We aim to create people-centric story spaces that encourage vulnerability, repair, and redefinitions of belonging that do not uphold global white supremacy, imperialism, and Brahmanical cisheteropatriarchy. We believe storytelling allows us to see the resonances between pan-Asian communities while also moving with our differences toward a politics of solidarity and interdependence.

Why workshops?

We intentionally prioritized in person community spaces in order to bring an aliveness to our project. We also prioritized workshops in order to platform our community members to share their own knowledges of caregiving practices. We gave the deep narrative of caregiving as a political practice, and our workshop facilitators presented their own visions of community care. We then went back to analyze the narratives that came out of the workshops.

Why the QTAPI community?

In this time of legislative and political attack on our queer and (particularly) trans communities, we believe that the queer/trans community has been actively practicing care for each other and should be given space to share their knowledges of care with each other. We are also a queer/trans led organization, and have a large base of queer/trans members. We want to provide healing spaces for our membership, while also providing space for storytelling.

Explore the workshops below!