StoryLab
Designed to Power Narrative Change
Define American’s StoryLab is a resource to equip storytellers and advocates with accessible tools to strengthen storytelling about immigration, and to develop narrative change strategies.
The Define American StoryLab offers a unique framework to seamlessly turn research into actionable narrative change practices, driving impactful stories for immigrant inclusion and justice.
What We’re Up Against
Immigration is at the center of American partisan politics, with digital platforms fueling a media narrative that often dehumanizes and misrepresents immigrant communities. This harmful language has spread and grown across mainstream media at an unprecedented scale.
Since 2020, Define American has been studying how anti-immigrant actors create and spread false and dangerous narratives across digital spaces. The below data visualization represents an ecosystem of anti-immigrant YouTube content that Define American studied in 2022.
Click and pull any of the dots to see how it is connected to other YouTube channels that also spread anti-immigrant content.
Who is the Moveable Middle?
Despite anti-immigrant media portrayals, a large portion of Americans across racial and ethnic backgrounds fall between party lines on immigration and are moveable on this issue. This audience is at the heart of our work. We call them the “Moveable Middle.”
To understand the Moveable Middle audience, we worked with our research partner Harmony Labs to analyze the Moveable Middle’s media consumption data over the course of a year, including news, TV, film, and social media.
Harmony Labs identified four key audience segments within the Moveable Middle who are open to pro-immigrant perspectives and are moveable in attitudes and beliefs on immigration.
Harmony Labs works from a globally evidence-based and cross-cultural model of basic human values developed by the theorist Shalom Schwartz. The model shows us that we, as humans, fall on a spectrum of how much we care about the “we” of community vs caring about “me” as the individual and how much we care about protecting and preserving our current way of life vs. striving and creating something new.
Values-distinct audiences from the Narrative Observatory @ Harmony Labs. The four audience segments in the center are the Moveable Middle.
Toolkit
Immigrants Belong Toolkit
Immigrants Belong: The Toolkit is the culmination of two years of coalition-oriented work supported by Tides, which brought innovative research into real-world narrative change practice for immigration nonprofits. It outlines some of that research and provides step-by-step guides to help content production for storytellers implementing digital narrative change.
Report
Move Them or Lose Them
Move Them or Lose Them is a series designed to help advocates engage Moveable Middle audiences—those open to shifting toward pro-immigrant attitudes. Drawing on research with Harmony Labs, it explores media habits and offers strategies for crafting stories that resonate with these audiences' values across news, TV, film, and social media
Guide
Telling Authentic Immigrant Stories
Telling Authentic Immigrant Stories: A Media Reference Guide educates content creators on best practices for telling specific, layered immigrant stories in the media they produce, helping immigrants be seen in their full humanity.
Guide
Creativity is Boundless: An Inclusive Guide
Creativity is Boundless: An Inclusive Guide outlines practical steps artist support and grantmaking organizations can take to make opportunities accessible, regardless of citizenship or immigration status.
Report
Change the Narrative, Change the World 2022
Our groundbreaking television research on immigrant representation with the Norman Lear Center is changing storytelling in Hollywood.
Report
‘Immigration Will Destroy Us’ and Other Talking Points
“Immigration Will Destroy Us” and Other Talking Points presents three years of research on anti-immigration narratives on YouTube, aiming to inspire coalition building and a more positive online narrative for immigrants.
Toolkit
Popping the Immigration Filter Bubble
Popping the Immigration Bubble Toolkit draws insights from our study of the anti- immigration network on YouTube, and offers a framework for storytellers to engage audiences in advocating for the rights of refugees, migrants, and displaced peoples.
Guide
Immigration Reporting 101
Immigration Reporting 101 Reference Sheet is a quick and handy guide with key definitions and tips that serves as a reliable source for fact-checking to ensure accurate, fair, and nuanced reporting on immigrants.
Toolkit
The Define American Immigrant Representation Scale
The Define American Immigrant Representation Scale is an assessment tool designed to help content creators and storytellers craft more humanized and nuanced stories featuring immigrant characters.
Toolkit
Talking to Journalists: What You Need to Know
Talking to Journalists: What You Need to Know, developed in partnership with PublicSource, educates individuals about their rights and what to expect when approached by reporters. It is now available in six languages.
Report
American Dreaming
American Dreaming: The Roadmap to Resilience for Undocumented Storytellers synthesizes two years of research with 40 immigrant rights storytellers, offering a guide for centering the well-being of storytellers in strategic communications efforts.
Report
Reimagining Immigration News: North Carolina's Case for the Nation
Reimagining Immigration News: North Carolina’s Case for the Nation examines the challenges journalists face when covering immigrant communities and presents collaborative models for local newsrooms nationwide.
Toolkit
A Toolkit for Immigration Reporting
Quoting Immigrants: A Media Toolkit for Anonymous Sources informs journalists on ethical guidelines and how to best quote sources anonymously across all media: print, digital, television, audio, and documentary journalism.
Insights: Understanding the Middle
FINDING: Immigrant belonging is not their priority.
The Moveable Middle holds a variety of opinions and beliefs about immigration but immigrant belonging is not a central concern – nor is it for pro-immigrant supporters.
FINDING: The Moveable Middle seeks out stories that confirm their worldviews across all mediums, ones that align with their current perspectives.
If we want these audiences to believe a different narrative about immigrants, we have to be prepared to work within their media ecosystems and meet them where they are.
When it comes to news, opposition narratives dominate the Moveable Middle's media.
