Changing Culture

How does culture change? What does it take to tell the truth about this change?

These are a couple of questions that our impact campaign for the feature film DIFRET tackled. This year is the tenth anniversary of the film and we are revisiting the impact campaign and the lessons learned for our blog. The impact campaign we implemented for this film, with Girls Not Brides, taught us a great deal about how to use film as a tool for social change and more importantly how to bring audiences into the fold. This work is as relevant today as it was when Difret first was released in theaters.

In recent years, the challenge of communicating about cultural change has grown into the burgeoning field of narrative change. For everyone that has worked in the field of social change and behavioral change communications, the approaches that the narrative change community brings to the work of cultural change will seem familiar. However, some of the frameworks are not. We are exploring the overlap in a new research project that explores the parameters of cultural change in the era of machines, algorithms, and digital media.

Look out of for new blog posts on the topic. In the meantime, if you have never seen Difret, you can stream the film at your local library or university through Kanopy.