…narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative.
ROLAND BARTHES
(“Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” 1966)
You can’t think about a meaningful future without narrative, and we want to help you to tell your own stories better, rather than letting them tell you.
Narrative is a word for the patterns that emerge when we impose a shape on the events that matter to us. Narrative is what reveals the causes, relationships, meaning, context, and purpose of the these events. No matter how sophisticated our account, when we tell stories about what causes what and why we should care, we are in the realm of narrative.
What makes The Narrative Transformation Lab (TNT Lab) different is that we try to break down the firewall that exists between fiction and nonfiction, emotion and reason, policy and imagination, and technical explanation and moral evaluation. In line with the cutting-edge findings in psychology, philosophy, literary studies, data science, and neurophysiology, we believe that story lies at the heart of all purposive, rational action.
Transformation means “change of shape.” Every good story has a shape. But some stories with a good shape can have bad effects; they might direct people to harm others and support abusive power more than human flourishing.
At TNT Lab, we believe that the only way to change the world is to understand its most abusive stories in order to reshape them and to understand its most hopeful stories in order to harness their transformative power.
We develop tools that help you recognize power—especially social power—and help you choose how to engage with it, hold it accountable, and heal the wounds caused by it.
We are excavators
Much of our work is an archaeological activity. Beginning as early as Aristotle’s Poetics, writers and scholars have developed abstract ways to represent story structure. We make them easy to use in your daily life, so that you can build upon these old ideas in new ways.
We are scientists
We do basic research, exploiting the longer time horizons that life in a university affords us to ask the questions that others might not have time to. We search for forms of evidence from across many disciplines, so that we might provide greater access to these threads of knowledge and build a space where we can weave them into something new.
We are allies
Although we don’t serve as advocates or practitioners ourselves, we are committed to making the tools we develop user-friendly, so that people at any level of the field of peace and conflict can put them to work in their daily activities.
We are a community
Whether you are an academic, a government official, a trauma healer, a diplomat, a human rights advocate, an artist, a mediator, or the manager of a political campaign, our goal is to help you to help yourself. Transform the narrative. Tweet better. Speak better. Writer better. Sing better. That’s what we’re here for.