Nayantara Sen is a storyteller, writer, network builder, educator, and a defining practitioner in the field of narrative and cultural strategy. In the last two decades, Nayantara has trained thousands of activists, artists, educators and nonprofit professionals at the intersections of social justice, arts, culture, narrative and organizational change. She previously led narrative and cultural strategies at Race Forward and is the lead designer for Race Forward’s Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategies. And, until just recently, Nayantara helmed Real Food Real Stories’ programs and cultural strategies.
This winter, Nayantara stepped down from her formal position at RFRS to develop a national narrative and cultural strategy network, paired with a cultural strategy mentorship program and learning institute at the Pop Culture Collaborative––a project she seeded as a fellow back in 2019. Our team at RFRS was, of course, sad to see Nayantara go, but we know we will continue to work together and we are beyond excited for the tremendous contributions she will undoubtedly make to the field in her new role.
Nayantara joined the RFRS staff at the start of 2021, as we had begun to grow from a storytelling community into a culture change organization. Since she came on board at this pivotal moment in our work, we wanted to create an opportunity to reflect back on her time with the organization and offer a glimpse into some of the live questions and revelations that emerged.
Last month, Nayantara and Real Food Real Stories’ Narrative Strategist Shizue Roche Adachi sat down virtually for an expansive conversation on narrative and cultural strategy work in food, agriculture, and movement building. A meaty download, this conversation will be shared as a two-part series. In this first installment, we’ll dive into food’s role in reshaping our understanding of home, belonging, and our collective relationships in this time of social polarization, and what it means to embody transformative narratives as a daily practice.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Shizue’s questions and comments are demarcated in bold.
You came to Real Food Real Stories with a background working in arts and culture, and racial justice spaces. Unlike myself––as you know, I’ve been working in food for over a decade––the food and agriculture space was new to you. I'm curious how your relationship to food and the power that it holds, and your understanding of how food shapes culture, shifted during your time at RFRS? Perhaps a way to enter into this is to first answer, what felt juicy about moving into food initially, and how did that evolve as you got deeper into the work?
Yeah, I mean, one of the first projects that [RFRS Director] Jovida asked me to think about was a cultural strategy campaign or curriculum project––a creative engagement around food to situate oneself intentionally in the contexts of our lives. I honed in on racial and cultural history, through food. I loved having that particular lens to enter directly in through, because it also allowed me to learn about my own relationship to belonging and community and place in America, through my own history and experience with food.
I am a first-generation immigrant. I have struggled for most of my life to find ways of reconnecting with my Bengali culture. Like many other people in this country, the first place I turned to is food. The second place I turned to is language. I had to create my own sense of self, my own personal narrative and identity about how I take up power and space and have worth and value in this country. Creating myself through food had been actually a very implicit and invisible process for me. So when I came to Real Food Real Stories, it was incredible to feel like I was part of a community that was giving language to this process, and was learning about it together. And, in fact, not just learning about it, but actually thinking about ways to open up that portal even further.
Nayantara Sen addresses the crowd at an RFRS community event in December 2021.
“Creating myself through food had been actually a very implicit and invisible process for me. So when I came to Real Food Real Stories, it was incredible to feel like I was part of a community that was giving language to this process, and was learning about it together.”
What does it look like to come up with a set of creative work, cultural strategy activations, writing, media, collaborators, artists, who are all talking about this particular, very broad and complex topic––which is about the making of oneself in relationship to each other? So, when I entered through that particular door, what became increasingly clear to me is that there are very narrow spaces in this country where people are taught to learn deeply about themselves and their racial and cultural history, and all that in relationship to their privilege and their power. Food is the most natural and the most intuitive entry point that people are already engaging with anyway. They're finding themselves, their families, their relationships, and their communities through food.
We are in this moment where, actually, not just communities of color, but also white people, are contending with an incredible erasure of our history––both erasure, omission, suppression, and just frankly the rise of totally false narratives about our US exceptionalist history, which is completely whitewashed and ahistorical, and in some cases patently untrue. Like the things around Manifest Destiny, and the founding fathers, and the whole rise of the rhetoric that is fueling the white nationalist movement. In this moment, I actually think that reclaiming our own relationship to our personal and family history, and our racial and cultural history through food, is incredibly important.
So, that is one vein. The other really big thing that I learned working with you all on food, which was really transformative for me, was around the particularities of how food and embodiment have the ability to transform our work at every level––personal through systemic.
I think a lot of people identify cultural strategy with media production and dissemination. And I know that towards the end of your time on the team, Jovida encouraged us to dig into an orientation of creation and emanation versus dissemination. Given your history in narrative and cultural strategy work––and as one of the practitioners who has been part of defining this emergent field––I’m curious, how has working with Real Food Real Stories influenced the way you think about what forms narrative and cultural strategy can take?
I think there’s this assumption that cultural change can be both best assessed and is primarily generated through media—particularly in the most mainstream iterations of media—like social media, news media, journalism, pop culture. I think that is in part because the narrative and cultural strategy field has been overwhelmed by money, influence, and resources from marketing, advertising, and PR. That’s informed how people think about culture change, which is why media and pop culture is understood as one of the most primary and significant ways to make change.
And it's not that it isn't. The scale and the impact that media and pop culture has is tremendous. But, ultimately, when culture changes the way that you want it to change––so that it is more liberatory, more healing and more just––it actually shows up as behavioral and perceptual changes in the relationships between us. Between us interpersonally, between us and our neighbors, the ones we love, the communities that we sit within, and in our own relationships to power and the places that hold power. So the actual relationships.
“…when culture changes the way that you want it to change––so that it is more liberatory, more healing and more just – it actually shows up as behavioral and perceptual changes in the relationships between us. “
I see relationships as being the node of where the indicators for culture change are. If your relationships are changing, you're starting to orient differently, you find yourself consistently in spaces where you're speaking up, you know, when things are unjust, or you're extending way past your comfort zone in order to make a space safe and welcoming for people who are otherwise made to feel excluded or marginalized––if you're actually finding yourself consistently practicing ways of power-sharing in day-to-day behaviors and relationships––those are the ultimate indicators of when culture has changed.
So, what's unique and wonderful about where Jovida guided our strategy was to begin by truly centering the impacts we wanted to see in the world. And there are so many different ways to engage that particular transformation. I mean, one thing Adrienne Maree Brown shares in Emergent Strategy is that one of the ways to build trust in people is to trust them. You just begin by acting the way that you want to see the world unfold. And that's where relationships and ideas start to change. (Additional note: Nayantara has written about prefiguration, the ability to enact and manifest future realities as though they already exist now, as being a fundamental tenet of cultural strategy. To learn more, check out her Cultural Strategy Primer.)
So, how do we change narratives through immersion, through relationships, and through experience? Media does this at a very large scale, but people are not only changed by the media that they consume––especially in the algorithmically siloed life that we now live. What is really beautiful about starting with the daily practices that shape our relationships is that it actually gives us a way to witness transformation in real-time. People are shaped by their intimate relationships, and who they're choosing to be responsible for and responsible to. And that is how Real Food Real Stories’ work is transformative, because we enter in through food. There is nothing more experiential, immersive, or relational than the process of making, sharing, and creating food––and eating it, and consuming it, and being transformed by it––together.
So in that regard, what is more transformative than using food, and living in relationship with food and with people, to actually engage in narrative and culture change?
“There is nothing more experiential, immersive, or relational than the process of making, sharing, and creating food – and eating it, and consuming it, and being transformed by it – together. So in that regard, what is more transformative than using food, and living in relationship with food and with people, to actually engage in narrative and culture change?”
You joined RFRS during a pivotal moment for the organization. When you reflect back on your experience, are there any moments of clarity in that process of transformation that continue to stick with you?
I’m just reflecting on our journey over the last year––the evolution of Real Food Real Stories. One thing I'm really struck by is the gentle, natural, and intentional way in which we moved towards a narrative and cultural strategy focus that felt really, really purposeful. But also, it didn't feel at any point like we were making hard left or right turns, even though the changes were fairly dramatic; the evolution of the work felt so kind.
One of the reasons this specific example comes to me is because I feel like there's all this writing and, sort of, trendy expectations in the field now about organizations that are trying to do narrative work, or trying to find their way into it. And there are some implicit assumptions about the degree of dramatic change it requires––which it does, because there's a lot of clarifications, strategy, and commitment that's required for organizations to really prioritize narrative and cultural strategy work. But, I was just struck by the fact that it doesn't actually have to be that hard.
The amount of change that we were able to accomplish in a year––with the degree of organic movement and reciprocity and deep listening––felt easeful. And I think that's due to a couple of different reasons, but I think one core reason was that we were actually practicing some of the deep listening that we had prioritized as a value in our programmatic work. Jovida encouraged us to practice it internally for ourselves and to create the conditions for embodiment for ourselves, which allowed us to really embrace transformation. So I'm proud that we embraced that, as a team, and I’m proud of what it led us to, like our core narratives…
Those five, core narratives being:
Food is relational––rooting us in place, community, past, present, and future.
We all deserve a home. We all belong to the land.
Nourishment is a right of all people, all bodies.
Care is the essence of all labor, and all food and culture workers are essential, invaluable and skilled.
Together, we have what we need to flourish; all people are powerful and innately capable of the deep, embodied work of collective transformation.
In her time at Real Food Real Stories, Nayantara lead the launch of our story workshop program, inviting the public into a story facilitation process to surface and explore personal stories tethered to our core narratives.
Exactly. And I have not experienced such a clarifying and energizing process around core narratives before, actually. These narratives emerged from many years of RFRS practicing deep listening with food changemakers and culture-bearers as an organization, as well as from each of our [Jovida, Shizue, and myself’s] strategic insights into the dominant narratives we need to disrupt, and the joyful and liberatory narratives gaining momentum in the intersecting spaces we’ve worked in.
After you synthesized the narratives with us, Shizue, I was able to seed an activation process to tie all of Real Food Real Stories’ story-based work to these core narratives. So that every time we do a one-off activation––or an event, or a convening, or a gathering, or write something––that it’s tied to an aligned narrative strategy that is about reinforcing the values and the ideas that we want to see out in the world. Putting the narrative work at the heart of what was a story-forward orientation was pretty organic and natural, but I'm glad that I was able to help really clarify it and center it across our programs.
I’d love to ask you a bit more about the personally transformative aspect of the work, for you. What aspect of the work, perhaps unexpectedly, offered you some personal clarity or opportunity to transform?
I was struck by how clarifying it was to reorient our work to our core narratives and actually lead with those core narratives. To some degree, that's about repetition and grounding in the narrative strategy. But the thing that felt just so vibrant and useful to me was a pretty simple reminder that we have five core narratives. Leading with them is just a daily reminder of the actual specific values that we want to see for our future––the future where we all share in our liberation.
I found that the more you repeat these ideas, even for myself––when I woke up in the morning, or sitting in front of my computer, and I just say over and over again, you know, “all bodies deserve nourishment,” or “we all belong to the land and we all deserve a home”––there is a qualitative joy that just fills your body. It’s the joy of living with these narratives day in and out. It's the energizing nature of actually naming the ideas for yourself over and over. And I think that's really important.
I think we can talk about narrative strategy forever, without actually just remembering that the ideas that we want to see out in the world are actually simple and they're powerful. But the more we live with them on a daily basis and put them into practice as a team, and as a community of collaborators, it just starts to feel irresistible. And I mean it was a simple process––it was thoughtful, it was intentional, but it wasn't rocket science. And we lived with them, day in and day out, and I find myself transformed at the end of the year because of it, because now I get to think about routinely, what does it mean that “care is the essence of all labor?” I can think about it in terms of how I apply this, how I put it into practice. And that allows me to think about, “where am I expressing care for myself and for others in my labor, every day?”
“I think we can talk about narrative strategy forever, without actually just remembering that the ideas that we want to see out in the world are actually simple and they're powerful. But the more we…put them into practice as a team, and as a community of collaborators, it just starts to feel irresistible.”
That to me was––is––really powerful and remarkable: somewhere at the heart of all of this strategizing and adaptation and exploration are simple values about the future that we want to have. And it's important to just return to those ideas and live them. Now. Together. So that it doesn't become about how things change over time, it's also about what are the ways in which we enliven and activate those narratives in our daily lives. It's incredibly transformative.
Yeah, I'm thinking about how people are so taken by those videos of small children repeating affirmations and mirrors to themselves like, “I am beautiful, I am smart, I am intelligent.” How do we move from that personal experience of “I am,” to repeating and embodying the cultural shift work of, “we are,” and “we all believe.” It’s a powerful thing, because so often there's a framework of “we do this work to change our future,” but we do this work to change our right now. Our future is now, our future was yesterday, our future was two weeks ago. Because it comes down to the stories that we hold in our bodies, fix in our minds, and carry forward in the work we do.
I think that's a really beautiful place to stop and take a breath.
The second half of our conversation with Nayantara will be published in April.