In this workshop, participants will actively engage in discussions and exercises regarding the significance of narrative in understanding client and community issues; the impact of dominant narratives in legal context; the significance of narrative in people’s lives; and possibilities for using narrative to undermine the dominant scripts that affect justice systems.
The problems of dominant scripts will be explored using the Chronicle of Milkweed Park, a fictional community developed for the forthcoming textbook, Community Economic Development: A Text for Engaged Learning. The chronicle of Milkweed Park, complete with a cast of characters and a city map, provides a narrative that traverses over a century of social and economic thought and policy that has affected development and wealth in the fictional urban community; it provides a meta script that helps to explain why we, our clients, and our students find ourselves in our particular places at this particular time, facing today’s problems and choices.
Next, the ability and process for changing the dominant script will be addressed and participants will focus on organic narrative outside the teleological confines of institutional and systemic boundaries. We will discuss possible strategies for the collection, narrative development, and dissemination of stories of, by, and for populations underserved by the justice system. Participants are asked to bring a narrative relating to lawyering work or client experiences (in or out of the legal system) that may be shared. Workshop time will be allocated to develop the narrative into any of a variety of literary forms, including poem, short story, journal, or creative nonfiction.
Discussion and problem-solving about how to guide students’ understandings of dominant scripts around race, class, geography, and economic policy will follow, with emphasis on and examples of classroom strategies. Finally, participants will receive and share ideas about publication outlets for various forms of narratives.