Project Description

This is an advanced workshop for people who want to more effectively express their own political values and ideas through framing.

Powerful and influential communicators are constantly framing conversations to gain political and psychological advantage. Well-meaning advocates often react and respond without re-framing, and lose ground to their political adversaries as a result.

This course was based largely on the work of George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist who studies politics. Lakoff’s books, including ‘The Political Mind’, ‘Don’t Think of an Elephant’ and ‘Metaphors We Live By”, have laid the foundation for the ideas we’ll explore in this course.

My Role

I developed, delivered and marketed the program through Springtide from 2017 – 2019.

A note on future offerings

I’ve been studying framing since I first encountered Lakoff’s work in my mid-twenties. I would like to run a workshop on framing and language in the future, however I would likely do it differently next time. I found Lakoff’s work to be limited by the binary political culture of the United States. Framing is a way of asserting an entire values system in a single sentence. Lakoff works with two values systems. In recent years, I’ve come to use the Spiral Dynamics model of universal human values systems which outlines at least eight values systems of progressive degrees of complexity, with each transcending and including the previous. So, if I offer this program again, I’ll likely change it significantly, and include a primer on the systems described in the Spiral Dynamics model.