Welcome to the third and final article in this three-part series co-published between Occupy.com and Transnational Institute. Read Part 1 here…. and read Part II here….
Culture Hacking: A New Approach to Change
“We advocate for an approach to social change that we call culture design or culture hacking. Addressing the systemic threats for humanity in the 21st century will require an intentional, open, and collaborative ‘design science’ for social change. The elements of this approach include a variety of perspectives that will need to be integrated in both theory and practice.
“This was built on a Theory of Change informed by the science of cultural evolution, which has observed that people live within stories that make sense of their social world. These stories become entrenched as institutional structures and practices, making them difficult to dislodge and change. Telling a ‘better story’ is therefore a process of making the dominant stories less coherent and more difficult to understand, which opens up space for new meanings to fill in where they have broken down. Our Theory of Change is to challenge the logic of the problematic narratives while facilitating a learning process that helps people craft their own new stories that make sense of the knowledge and insights gained along the way.
“Culture hacking requires an expanded field of vision that includes a broad range of perspectives not traditionally found around the activism table, and that revels in the non-linear complexity that is the defining characteristic of culture. In order for us to achieve lasting, structural change, a new generation of activists armed with the tools of culture hacking will have to deconstruct and de-program the dominant modes of action and analysis. As we bear witness to all the changes that we are seeing in the outside world, a critical battleground will be our own conceptions of how activism works.”
Read the full story by Martin Kirk, Jason Hickel and Joe Brewer….
Post a Comment