Azra Tugce Sungu, Weslynne Ashton, and Laura Forlano
Narratives influence our collective capacity to conceive and contend with systemic transitions. In this paper, we reflect on the narrative agency of design in the collective articulation of systemic issues, as it shapes how we listen for and tell the stories of systemic transitions. We present an ethnographic investigation of the narrative landscape of food system transformation efforts in Chicago, where organisations and communities construct diverse narratives of systemic change and form coalitions around shared narratives.
We discuss how the prevailing structures and practices that collectively articulate systemic issues, such as policy papers or quantifiable impact metrics, inscribe what stories can be told, and what ways of knowing are legitimised. When these structures reinforce representations with a God’s eye view, and are grounded in Western modernist ideals of progress, control and objectivity, then tending to alternative ways of seeing and knowing becomes a space of resistance, as exemplified in affective, embodied, and relational narratives of the food sovereignty movement.
Drawing from this tension, we question the prevailing narrative traditions in systemic design and speculate on directions for cultivating narrative resistance in the collective articulation of systems change.
KEYWORDS: systemic design, narrative resistance, Feminist STS, food