| Description |
Stories are living systems of interconnected power relationships that intertwine all aspects of our lives, our communities, and our futures. The significance of stories is that they hold power that we can allow a dominant hegemony to control us with their stories or we follow our own counter-stories that empower progressive change through ourselves, our communities, and social and environmental justice organizations. My Art-based research (ABR) methods of artstorming, a combination of qualitative methods to engage creatively and critically, with several social and environmental justice organization representative participants, examining community artifacts for narrative power analysis, and mosaic mapping, a method of visualizing knowledge, provided a lot of findings. Local dominant hegemonic stories impact Salt Lake City (SLC) social and environmental justice organizations in seven tactics (1) Justifying Dominant Hegemony, (2) Marginalizing Voices, (3) Money Problem-Solving, (4) Offering Desires, (5) Tempting A Development is Great! Mindset, (6) Fear Mongering, and (7) Discriminating against Specific Backgrounds. Salt Lake City social and environmental justice organizations are not defenseless against these local dominant hegemonic stories' impacts. My ABR identified six counter-storytelling tactics implemented by local social and environmental justice organizations from (1) Creating Mosaics, (2) Adapting to the Crisis, (3) Empowering New Realities, (4) Inspiring Knowledge is Power, (5) Molding Activism as Living Art, and (6) Encouraging Democracy in Action. From my ABR, I would recommend that Salt Lake City social and environmental organizations implement parts of my Capstone, such as narrative power analysis, artstorming, and mosaic mapping, as community-building tools. |
