ABSTRACT
The Center for Story-Based Strategy (CSS) advocates “changing the story” through activist advocacy. Part of changing the negative connotations of “activism” is to understand what discourses constituted those definitions in the first place. Continued and repeated news media stories placing activists in the villain role perpetuate negative stereotypes and affirm the common-sense notion that activism is not an acceptable course of action. In sum, the words “activism” and “activist” carry the baggage of how they have been historically used and understood in popular culture, news media, and scholarship. The strange actions of activists can be made familiar if analyzed through familiar theories and models. Just as CSS can take common-sense ways of understanding stories and do similar narrative analysis to rhetorical scholars, rhetoricians can take our rhetorical models and translate them into useable models for any group.
