EDITOR’S NOTE: In a series on making “good trouble” through journalism, Paul A. Kramer of Vanderbilt University argues for seven story approaches that can help address social problems. From his introduction: “The best narrative non-fiction writing on social problems … grapples with a particular social reality in order to question it, subject it to critical attention and convince readers that its existence and continuance is not inevitable.” 

The conclusion of the rhetorical re-frames reminds writers that it requires a thoughtful process of reporting; he cautions against overreach and underscores the value of this work to society.

Social-change journalism: risks and rewards

Narratives that explore social problems are core to good journalism. As society and its accompanying problems become more complex, I suggest a reframe of classic projects that can highlight primary journalistic tasks:

• Introduction: Making good trouble
• I. Exposure: Highlighting overlooked problems
• II. Urgency: Revealing the immediacy of problems
• III. Activation: Challenging a sense of powerlessness
• IV. Re-specification: Reconsidering causes and effects of a problem
• V. Solidarity: Standing with those affected
• VI. Responsibility: Connecting action to consequence
• VII. Value-switching: Considering different moral stances
• Conclusion: The gift of narrative nonfiction

To be clear, these seven categories don’t so much refer to specific, overarching types of pieces as to the tasks stories can undertake or goals they can help achieve. The richest journalistic work weaves these tasks together in subtle and intricate ways.

So, for example, you may find yourself bringing some new problem to readers’ attention, but also heightening its reality and sense of urgency in ways that help readers feel solidarity with those most affected. Ideally, whichever of these tasks the writer takes up, they blend in ways that allow readers to experience them as an effortless whole.

The tasks the writer chooses to emphasize in a project also can shift during the reporting and writing. They may start off with the intent of exposing a problem or re-specifying its cause or building solidarity, only to discover that the story they’re exploring requires other reframes or a different of mix of them. The writer’s research shifts into the drafting process and they have to come to grips, sentence by sentence, with the question of audience: Whom, among their readers, do they most want to reach? There’s seldom one, great, dramatic point of decision — no clear roadmap for this work — only smaller, incremental choices that build on each other.

Focus on the people affected by the problem

Are there limitations to approaching non-fiction writing about society through the lens of social problems? First, of course, the language of “problems” is abstract and, like all abstractions, risks draining and sanitizing the harsh realities of life. So it’s worth stressing that when you write about “social problems,” you are always writing about people: issues that infuse and structure people’s experiences, their relationships with each other, and the institutions they build and live within. The story isn’t about the “problem” per se: It’s about how people experience it, how it is embedded in their lives, how they think about it and relate to it, how they live with it and struggle against it.

It’s also, of course, about who is responsible for the problem and whose interests, power, profits and status are advanced by it. It’s about those who sowed its seeds and kept it growing. It’s about the work they did to legitimize and normalize it, in part by making sure that it’s not regarded as a problem in the first place. It may not be your goal to anger these people, but they won’t celebrate you doing it — especially if you do your job effectively.

Problem-centered approaches also have limitations from a practical angle. Readers pick up non-fiction writing for countless purposes that can have little to do with a desire to delve into society’s thorniest problems. They want to travel, encounter new people, access quick-and-useful information, learn something new, even spend companionable time with a writer’s voice and savor the delights of well-crafted language. When social problems exercise too strong a gravitational pull, readers can be denied the other gifts they expect, and they will flee.

But thinking about the limitations of problem-centering has value politically and ethically. Writing that sets out too confidently from a cozy, shrink-wrapped sense of a problem can come across as authoritarian. The textual world gets engineered around the problem, with every narrative beat and detail machine-tooled to dramatize it. Such writing conveys that nothing can be left to chance — or to the reader.

The best social-change narratives, by contrast, guide the reader’s political and moral imagination without assigning it a single, fixed destination. They provide rich, open-ended surface areas, textures and moments that are never reducible to the problems the writer hopes to highlight. In this way, they give readers the chance for unpredictable and perhaps transformative encounters, including with problems the author hasn’t noticed before.

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Paul A. Kramer is an associate professor at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches history and non-fiction writing. He is the author of several academic studies and essays that have been published by major news sites. His book, “The Blood of Government,” has won several awards, including being named a finalist for the Philippines National Book Award in the social science category.

The post Social-change journalism can make “good trouble” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In a series on making “good trouble” through journalism, Paul A. Kramer of Vanderbilt University argues for seven approaches that can help create partnerships between writers and readers to address social problems. From his introduction: “The best narrative non-fiction writing on social problems … grapples with a particular social reality in order to question it, subject it to critical attention and convince readers that its existence and continuance is not inevitable.” 

The seventh and final of the re-frames focus on value-switching: shining a light on a situation in ways that helps the public see it through in new ways. Additional approaches will be posted this week and next.

Let’s look at this problem from a different moral stance.

Of all the projects I’ve suggested as a way to reframe social issues journalism, value-switching might be the hardest to pull off. Value-switching involves things that readers approach through the prism of particular moral frameworks, and the writer hopes they might come to see them by the light of different ones.

It doesn’t mean hammering readers with the need for new values: It’s well-established that the more an author confronts or seems to threaten peoples’ value commitments, the more likely they are to dig in as a matter of perceived self-defense.

Instead, value-switching unhooks a social reality from the prevailing moral framework that surrounds it and tries to lodge it somewhere else. The writer may not depict the moral frame itself as the problem; it has just been misapplied to the issue at hand. In its place, the writer makes the case that readers should highlight a different set of values instead, one that readers may already possess in subdued or latent forms. If there’s a shorthand phrase for value-switching at work, it’s something like: “Yes, x is important as a value, but that’s not actually what’s at stake when we try to make sense of y.”

In this respect, value-switching can be closely allied in practice with re-specification. By representing a situation in a new and perhaps startling way, the author can make it easier for readers to apply a different facet of their moral vision to it. As it detaches from the values that previously gave it meaning, readers may opt to move it elsewhere on their moral terrain.

There are better and worse ways to do this. The best work exhibits thoughtfulness of value landscapes in all their complexity. What commitments might readers already hold that could enable them to see social realities in a new light? Successful value-switching also conveys that it’s understandable that the problematic moral frameworks have been applied; perhaps these approaches are ones the writer also began with.

Sarah Stillman’s “The List,” a 2016 New Yorker investigation into the dysfunctional and abusive character of publicized sex offender lists, provides a demanding example of value-switching. Stillman is on difficult ground; readers are likely to have visceral reactions to the sexual abuse of children and seemingly well-intentioned measures put in place to prevent and punish it. But through painstaking research, she uncovers ways that such lists not only fail to protect children but also stigmatize innocent people, including many children, whose futures they destroy.

One of Stillman’s central protagonists is Leah DuBuc, a woman from Michigan who was thrown onto the sex offenders list for mimicking sex with her step-siblings as a 10-year-old, imitating what she’d seen in some movies. “Throughout her first semester in college, she was dogged by fears of being outed,” Stillman writes. Her boyfriend invites her to his home for winter break, and she explains to him, sheepishly, that she needs to stop and register with local police or face a felony charge. “Her boyfriend parked in the lot of the Brighton Police Post,” she writes. ““I’m here to fill out the paperwork,’ DuBuc told the trooper at the front desk. ‘I’m a registered sex offender.’ ‘We don’t serve your kind here,’ he replied. ‘You better leave before I take you out back and shoot you myself.’”

In an adept, value-switching move, Stillman says to readers that no one is questioning the urgency of protecting children from sexual abuse. But that is not what is at stake here, as even some victims’ rights advocates come to concede in her piece. What is at stake instead is the value of protecting people from fairly arbitrary, technologically streamlined, total exclusion from society.

The primary danger here is that the author challenges readers’ values in ways that provoke them to entrench themselves where they are. And readers might not be completely wrong in suspecting that, when asked to apply a different set of values to a thorny situation, they are actually being asked to rethink their actual values; After all, doesn’t a key part of a value system consist of the ways it’s applied?

But when it’s done well, value-switching can create openings for readers to rethink the ways they connect social realities to specific values; as it achieves this, it can magnify the prominence, utility and authority of the values being invoked.

NEXT: Conclusion: The gift of narrative nonfiction

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Paul A. Kramer is an associate professor at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches history and non-fiction writing. He is the author of several academic studies and essays that have been published by major news sites. His book, “The Blood of Government,” has won several awards, including being named a finalist for the Philippines National Book Award in the social science category.

The post Making good journalistic trouble, Part VII: Seeing through other moral lenses appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In a series on making “good trouble” through journalism, Paul A. Kramer of Vanderbilt University argues for seven approaches that can help create partnerships between writers and readers in ways that can better address social problems. From his introduction: “The best narrative non-fiction writing on social problems … grapples with a particular social reality in order to question it, subject it to critical attention and convince readers that its existence and continuance is not inevitable.” 

The fourth of the re-frames calls for re-specification: stories that help align tracing the root causes of current problems. Additional approaches will be posted this week and next.

You have something to do with why this problem is happening.

Responsibility work takes on things that readers know are problems — problems in which they are complicit and may even hurt people they care about but for which they don’t feel responsible. Readers may think that this isn’t their problem, not because it doesn’t affect them but because they don’t feel it is their fault.

Here the writer’s job is to show readers how, even without knowing it, they participate in instigating, permitting or perpetuating the problem through their actions or inactions. To do this, writers may need to take on readers’ assumed understandings of how causation works in the world and how far one’s responsibility extends.

Readers come to a piece with powerful but usually subterranean moral maps that tell them how far out their actions and inactions extend; these maps may be vastly inaccurate, tailored by political ideology and the pursuit of limited liability rather than by the demands of justice. So writers may need to establish causal connections that link one thing to another in ways that are compelling and believable even, or especially, if they are unconventional.

For an outstanding example of responsibility work, take Nicolas Niarchos’ New Yorker portrait in 2021 of cobalt extraction in Congo, “The Dark Side of Congo’s Cobalt Rush.” The piece reveals how, in the context of oppressive poverty resulting from colonialism, dictatorship and civil war, skyrocketing prices for cobalt have fueled a rush of dangerous mining in Congo. The industry is overseen by Chinese company officials and supplied by a hyper-exploited labor force that includes children as young as 4.

The article brings these realities home to the very technologies on which readers are likely reading it: Cobalt is currently an essential element in many electronic devices, preventing them from overheating. The piece makes clear exactly how much company profits and consumer convenience depend on harrowing, exploitative relationships. The author extends responsibility to readers, whose material goods and ways of living are tied to oppressive conditions they subsidize with their everyday choices, knowingly or not.

At one point, Niarchos asks Ziki, a former child cobalt miner, “what he thought of people who profited from cobalt mining. ‘I have sadness in my heart when I think of people who buy the minerals,’ he said. ‘They make so much money, and we have to stay like this.’ When I told him that Americans paid more than a thousand dollars for the latest iPhone, he replied, ‘It really hurts me to hear that.” Later, Niarchos notes that in 2016, Apple issued a self-exonerating statement stating that “underage labor is never tolerated” in their supply chains. “The following year, after a report by Sky News showed that cobalt mined by children was still being used in the company’s devices, Apple suspended purchases of hand-mined cobalt, but once the media attention died down the practice continued.”

Missteps in responsibility-focused stories can include simplistic and linear causal chains, or assigning responsibility to actors or institutions that aren’t really that blameworthy. There are conspiracy’s mental comforts, the tightly woven spider-charts of nefarious cause-and-effect. There is the risk of charging readers with complicity in a way that’s alienating rather than activating, perhaps with the writer casting themselves as righteous and blameless.

There’s also the opposite problem of not making a convincing case for responsibility, instead counting on readers to feel responsible before they are convinced. And there is always the danger of making the case for responsibility in ways that promote self-indulgent guilt.

But with attention and craft, there are balances to be struck here, which allow readers to encounter and experience responsibility in ways that remain joined to the people affected by their actions or inactions.

NEXT: Considering other value systems

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Paul A. Kramer is an associate professor at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches history and non-fiction writing. He is the author of several academic studies and essays that have been published by major news sites. His book, “The Blood of Government,” has won several awards, including being named a finalist for the Philippines National Book Award in the social science category.

The post Making good journalistic trouble, Part VI: Shared responsibility for social problems appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In a series on making “good trouble” through journalism, Paul A. Kramer of Vanderbilt University argues for seven approaches that can help create partnerships between writers and readers to better address social problems. From his introduction: “The best narrative non-fiction writing on social problems … grapples with a particular social reality in order to question it, subject it to critical attention and convince readers that its existence and continuance is not inevitable.” 

The fifth of the re-frames calls for solidarity: stories that underscore what people have in comment. Additional approaches will be posted this week and next.

We need to stand with the people whom this problem affects.

Solidarity projects present things readers know are problems in the abstract or in the lives of others, but in which the particular people affected by the problem lay on the peripheries of the reader’s circle of “we.” In readers’ minds, the problem just doesn’t seem to affect them or the people they care about most. Here the writer’s job is to bring those affected closer, in their full, complicated, idiosyncratic humanity, so readers can redefine their relationship with story subjects and widen their sense of who matters. The goal is to help readers stand alongside those most affected as they grapple with oppressive realities.

Useful approaches here cultivate perspective-taking and empathy-building, implicitly asking readers to consider: What might it be like to be this person, and experience what they do? Writers can try to immerse readers as much as possible in the tactile, lived experiences of those they may have regarded as far removed from themselves.

Here it can be crucial to make sure readers get to hear from the affected in their own words and voices, and through their actions. This opens a kind of person-to-person link between reader and subject —  a highly mediated and limited one, of course, but also one with potentially transformative power.

To align reader and subject on an equal, moral plane of solidarity, writers can represent their main characters as active self-advocates, so that readers’ can relate to a mutual sense of agency. Writers also may include characters involved in admirable solidarity work themselves, serving as guides for readers as they navigate across sometimes formidable moral distances.

For a model of solidaristic writing, take Diana Hubbell’s 2021 narrative, “There Has Been Blood,” published in Eater magazine. The piece tells the story of Thai farmers struggling to retake state-owned lands illegally occupied by large-scale palm oil companies. Hubbell accompanies the farmers as they as engage in risky, courageous land seizures, cultivate subsistence farms, borrow tactics from movements of the landless in Brazil, set up their own small, self-run palm oil cooperative and promote ideals of food sovereignty. The palm oil companies send out assassins; government officials fail to investigate.

Most of the land-rights activists, she writes, were “ordinary people who never owned much of anything, drawn by the promise of a plot of earth where they could grow enough food for themselves and their children. For Chai and Usa, after nearly 30 years together scraping by on manual labor jobs and sorting through recyclables for pocket change, operating a tiny general store and having 10 rai (about 4 acres) to call their own felt like a small miracle.”

The piece tells of atrocious violence and suffering; Killers calmly shoot activists in front of their children. But Hubbard is scrupulous in standing with the activists rather than looking down at them from on high, portraying their resourcefulness and determination without pitying them. The reader’s outrage and anger are energized by bearing vicarious witness to people wh9 who remain morally in charge.

Genuine solidarity requires standing beside people who face challenging circumstances as they are — their differences notwithstanding — on the grounds of moral equality, without assimilating them to asn assumed norm. But it can be easily mistaken for (and can slide into) distancing, hierarchical relationships of sympathy and pity.

Where sympathy or pity are in play, writers can turn people who experience the problem into virtuous, suffering, hapless victims — or mold them in the image of envisioned readers in order to make them “relatable.” That they don’t get to exist in the text beyond their pain and anguish — which readers embrace from a safe, perhaps even satisfying distance — can mirror their seeming powerlessness to resist the forces that assail them.

All this said, with these cautions in mind, bonds of solidarity between writer, reader and subject are achievable, in ways that can transform readers’ sense of “we.”

NEXT: The shared responsibility for social problems

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Paul A. Kramer is an associate professor at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches history and non-fiction writing. He is the author of several academic studies and essays that have been published by major news sites. His book, “The Blood of Government,” has won several awards, including being named a finalist for the Philippines National Book Award in the social science category.

The post Making good journalistic trouble, Part V: Expanding perspective and empathy appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In a series on making “good trouble” through journalism, Paul A. Kramer of Vanderbilt University argues for seven approaches that can help create partnerships between writers and readers to address social problems. From his introduction: “The best narrative non-fiction writing on social problems … grapples with a particular social reality in order to question it, subject it to critical attention and convince readers that its existence and continuance is not inevitable.” 

In the fourth approach, journalists explore the root causes of familiar social problems to highlight possible solutions. Additional approaches will be posted this week and next.

This problem is not what you think it is.

Re-specification takes on a problem that is familiar to readers but may be misunderstood in terms of causes or effects. The writer’s job here is to critically examine the existing frameworks that readers may bring to the problem and discuss why they don’t work —or only partly work. The goal is present alternative approaches and evidence that supports these approaches.

Some possible reframes: Yes, we’ve all heard about this problem but it isn’t exactly the problem you think it is. Or yes, this is a problem but it’s a problem for a different reason than you thought. Or this known problem is caused by something different from what you imagined, or manifested in ways you haven’t recognized.

Sometimes this reframing confronts the dominant, misguided formulation head-on: When it comes to x problem, we hear a lot about the role of y but not enough about z. Sometimes it needs to be even stronger: y is misleading and z gets us closer to the truth.

To re-specify, writers may need to clarify, confront and break down authoritative approaches to the problem that experts may have fortified in jargon (as is the case in much social science research and policy analysis). And they may be called upon to pry loose encrusted background assumptions readers may not know they hold.

Re-specification can sound nit-picky. If it’s clear that something is a problem, does it really matter so much how we describe it?

But how we describe it matters because whether or not we realize it a problem’s portrait is also a diagnosis. It tells us how deep the problem runs and what else it is entangled with. Perhaps most essentially, in doing this, it helps us realize what kind of inquiry and political action we need to take.

Powerful, exemplary re-specification is at work in Linda Villarosa’s 2018 New York Times Magazine investigation, “Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies are in a Life-or-Death Crisis,” which explores the disproportionate dangers that Black women face in pregnancy and childbirth. The story unfolds through the relationship between Simone Landrum, a working-class mother of two in New Orleans, and her doula, Latonya Gita.

While the piece exposes some readers to facts they will be unfamiliar with, it also elegantly explores a host of plausible but ultimately insufficient explanations for Black women’s additional health risks. Along the way, it serves up striking findings: that experiences of racism and sexism, including in healthcare itself, can take a devastating physical toll. Here Villarosa thoroughly recasts the origins and meanings of Black women’s healthcare predicaments in ways that raise further questions about the wide-ranging, lethal consequences of racism and sexism in American society.

“The reasons for the black-white divide in both infant and maternal mortality have been debated by researchers and doctors for more than two decades,” she writes. “But recently there has been growing acceptance of what has largely been, for the medical establishment, a shocking idea: For black women in America, an inescapable atmosphere of societal and systemic racism can create a kind of toxic physiological stress, resulting in conditions—including hypertension and pre-eclampsia—that lead directly to higher rates of infant and maternal death.”

Risks of re-specification include dismissing previous perspectives outright — did they get anything right?  — or overselling one’s own approach as definitive. And one can confuse readers with technical matters that haven’t been expressed clearly, vividly or economically.

There also are tricky questions to be asked about how much writers should skirmish with the inadequate or wrongheaded explanations they seek to overturn. Spend too little time on them, and readers may try to graft better accounts to worse ones they haven’t replaced; spend too much, and a piece can inadvertently reinforce them.

But if writers navigate these issues well, re-specification can play a decisive role in giving readers new maps with which to chart the world.

NEXT: Stories that show the solidarity between readers and those affected by social problems

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Paul A. Kramer is an associate professor at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches history and non-fiction writing. He is the author of several academic studies and essays that have been published by major news sites. His book, “The Blood of Government,” has won several awards, including being named a finalist for the Philippines National Book Award in the social science category.

The post Making good journalistic trouble, Part IV: Tracing the cause and effect of social issues appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In making “good trouble” through journalism, Paul A. Kramer of Vanderbilt University argues for seven approaches that create partnerships between writers and readers to address shared social problems: “The best narrative non-fiction writing on social problems … grapples with a particular social reality in order to question it, subject it to critical attention and convince readers that its existence and continuance is not inevitable.” 

The third of the re-frames calls for activation: stories that demonstrate the power and possibilities of individual action. Additional approaches will be posted this week and next.

You can do something about this problem.

Activation is called for when readers think of something as a problem and may care about, but don’t think anything that can be done. People may feel intimidated and overwhelmed by a problem’s actual or perceived scale and complexity. They may not feel they have the knowledge, experience, skills and tools to solve it. They may be terrified into inaction by the issue’s cataclysmic expressions and existential stakes. They may surrender their power to experts.

Here the writer needs to shed light on viable, generative activity in order to thwart apathy or a sense of futility. This can mean going back and re-specifying the problem itself, its origins and manifestations, then profiling contemporary or historical attempts to push back that have brought hopeful or successful results. The goal is to reveal ways that a seemingly immovable problem has budged.

Such pieces can zero in on an effective mobilizing techniques and ask how they work, who first figured them out, who took them up and why, and where they have succeeded. They also should explore known limitations and downsides. This might spur readers to implement and reinvent such techniques themselves. More broadly, such writing can rekindle readers’ sense of their power and effectiveness.

Activation writing can counter political loneliness. Readers may feel isolated in their beliefs and powerless because of that isolation. Introducing them to comrades and allies — even just textual ones — can help embolden readers, by making it easier for them to rediscover themselves as part of a larger community of the like-spirited.

One striking example of writing that activates is Rebecca Solnit’s 2017 essay “Protest and Persist,” in the Guardian. Published near the start of the Trump administration, it emphasizes the imperative of hope for social transformation, and the impossibility of knowing what prospects one’s actions may ease or break open. Solnit suggests that history can provide inspiring maps, allowing readers to find resources, hope and courage in the past’s unforeseeable zigzags, bank-shots and surprises:

“Actions often ripple far beyond their immediate objective,” she writes, “and remembering this is reason to live by principle and act in hope that what you do matters, even when results are unlikely to be immediate or obvious…” Solnit reflects, “…I sometimes wonder when I’m at a mass march like the Women’s March… whether the reason it matters is because some unknown young person is going to find her purpose in life that will only be evident to the rest of us when she changes the world in 20 years, when she becomes a great liberator.”

In one passage, Solnit takes readers on a century-spanning, global journey of inspiration and riffs: British suffragists’ storm Parliament, inspiring Gandhi in South Africa, who adopts direct action tactics against South African segregation and then British imperial rule in India; that fires the imagination of Black freedom activists in the U.S., whose campaigns against Jim Crow help spark the transnational anti-apartheid movement. That these links weren’t linear or predestined — that someone had to imagine, build and sustain them, often at tremendous cost — is part of what summons readers to their own possibilities.

Some dangers here include exaggerating hopefulness, underplaying obstacles, heroizing those who take some kind of action or settling for the easiest solutions (often the most individualized and least disruptive) in the interests of persuading readers that something can be done. Writers can neglect deeper, structural causes and stress workable tactics at the expense of larger strategic questions.

But these hazards in no ways prevent writers from successfully and responsibly energizing readers to join necessary struggles.

NEXT: Retracing the real roots of social problems

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Paul A. Kramer is an associate professor at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches history and non-fiction writing. He is the author of several academic studies and essays that have been published by major news sites. His book, “The Blood of Government,” has won several awards, including being named a finalist for the Philippines National Book Award in the social science category.

The post Making good journalistic trouble, Part III: Stories of empowerment and action appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In making “good trouble” through journalism, Paul A. Kramer of Vanderbilt University argues for seven approaches that can help create partnerships between writers and readers to address social problems: “The best narrative non-fiction writing on social problems … grapples with a particular social reality in order to question it, subject it to critical attention and convince readers that its existence and continuance is not inevitable.” 

The second re-frame calls for urgency: projects that reveal the immediacy of problems. Additional approaches will be posted this week and next.

This problem is more of a priority than you think it is.

Immediacy comes in when readers already think of something as a problem but may not care much about it relative to their other concerns. The problem is known to them — readers don’t need an introduction — but exists in the background of their daily. Past a certain point, of course, this  reduces these matters to non-problems.

For writers interested in raising critical awareness of an issue, this can be a frustrating place to get stuck. The situation is familiar enough that readers may suspect they already know what they need to know about it. Writers can no longer offer exposure — the enticement of the previously hidden —or the thrill of a before-and-after revelation.

Here the writer’s job is to sharpen the reader’s sense of why the problem is vital. They can show that problems assumed to be hypothetical and future-projected are already erupting. They can show the stakes of the problem to be higher than previously imagined. If the problem is relegated to a faraway place and people, the writer can bring it home, showing ways it directly affects readers and their world.

To do this, writers can craft vivid, sensory imagery to communicate the problem’s impacts and implications. Or they can focus on stories of people who are already battling with it, for whom it is already a tangible and urgent reality, and whose actions might tug under-noticed trouble to the foreground.

Eric Klinenberg’s 2012 essay “Adaptation,” from The New Yorker, on preparations American city planners and disaster specialists are making for rising sea levels and intensified storms, represents a stellar example of heightened immediacy. Where writers often discuss global warming in terms of unlivable futures, the piece’s account of climate-induced catastrophes like Hurricane Sandy drops readers into climate change’s grim here-and-now:

“For the past decade and a half,” he writes, “governments around the world have been investing in elaborate plans to ‘climate-proof’ their cities—protecting people, businesses, and critical infrastructure against weather-related calamities…” While the fundamental threat to human survival has been our failure to reduce carbon emissions and slow climate change, even if carbon emissions ended tomorrow, “we would probably experience several centuries of additional warming, rising sea levels, and more frequent dangerous weather events. If our cities are to survive, we have no choice but to adapt.”

The piece analyzes what makes some communities more resilient than others, paints arresting portraits of volunteer networks delivering food, water and supplies in Hurricane Sandy’s wake and outlines experts’ plans to raise and waterproof electrical cables, interlink regional communications grids and build coastal cities uphill towards higher ground. Through that, it makes climate catastrophe a burning and immediate reality.

Of course, there are perils in boosting the urgency of an issue. Writers can over-emphasize its significance for the reader rather than focus on the people it affects most intensely and negatively. And writers can come off as scolding or self-righteous, eager to display their moral alertness and impatience at readers’ failure to prioritize.

But done well, this kind of writing can thin out or eliminate the buffers that insulate readers from pressing realities that they may be trying to avoid.

NEXT: Showing the power of individual actions against a social problem

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Paul A. Kramer is an associate professor at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches history and non-fiction writing. He is the author of several academic studies and essays that have been published by major news sites. His book, “The Blood of Government,” has won several awards, including being named a finalist for the Philippines National Book Award in the social science category.

The post Making good journalistic trouble, Part II: Highlighting urgency and proximity appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In a series on making “good trouble” through journalism, Paul A. Kramer of Vanderbilt University argues for seven approaches that can help create partnerships between writers and readers to better address social problems. From his introduction: “The best narrative non-fiction writing on social problems … grapples with a particular social reality in order to question it, subject it to critical attention and convince readers that its existence and continuance is not inevitable.” 

The first of the re-frames calls for exposure: stories that highlight problems “hidden in plain sight.” Additional approaches will be posted this week and next.

This problem is something you need to know is happening.

Exposure work takes on issues that readers are expected to see as problems in the abstract, or in the past, but that they don’t know are real and serious in their present world. So the writer’s job is to raise awareness of the situation and convey what needs to be known about it. It’s the classic form of social-investigatory writing, one that dates back at least as far as the American “muckraking” journalism of the turn-of-the-20^th-century.

Projects in exposure can rely on a rosy assessment of readers, their values and the ways they read and think. They can, for example, suppose that author and reader already share common values and that what readers ultimately need most is information: If they only knew what was going on, they would think and act differently.

So the writer pledges to reveal things that readers are simply unaware of, or that might seem implausible or even impossible, or that have until now been concealed. Writers often use the commonplace language of a problem “hidden in plain sight,” piquing readers’ curiosity with the promise of disclosure.

Nikole Hannah-Jones’ article 2014  ProPublic piece, “Segregation Now,” offered a gripping example of exposure journalism: She zeroed in on the racial re-division of American schools that has been occurring in recent decades. Through the educational experiences of James, Melissa and D’Leisha Dent, from three generations of a Black family in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the piece tells of school integration’s national rise and fall in ways that expose segregation’s persistence and shatters complacent narratives of advancement. From the project:

“Tuscaloosa’s schools today are not as starkly segregated as they were in 1954, the year the Supreme Court declared an end to separate and unequal education in America…” she writes, but school segregation is “no less pernicious: in Tuscaloosa and elsewhere, it involves the removal and isolation of poor black and Latino students, in particular, from everyone else. In Tuscaloosa today, nearly one in three black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened.”

Where readers might come to the subject with vague, optimistic visions of progress, Hannah-Jones instead brings to light the ways that conservatives’ defiance of court-ordered desegregation, white flight from integrated schools that cross demographic “tipping points” and the pressure to attract investment by companies with mostly white staffs conspired to reverse earlier gains.

As she shows, to devastating effect, the result has been deeper segregation and stratification, declining educational opportunities for Black students and widening gaps in achievement. While the fact of school segregation itself — especially in the past — should not be new to her readers, Hannah-Jones’ exposure of present-day “apartheid schools” recasts integration as an abandoned project that must be revitalized.

Beware sensationalism and simplification

Exposure work can come with occupational hazards. Writers can sensationalize, over-dramatizing an issue in order to break through readers’ assumed ignorance, or they can simplify matters in the pursuit of punch or monetized attention. Where such writing assumes shared values, it can fail to connect with readers who bring different moral frameworks to bear and who may need to be directly engaged at that more fundamental level.

Reliance on an exposure mode also can shut out those who are already painfully aware of the problem, especially those harmed by it. How many authors promise to expose social worlds that are supposedly invisible or hidden to an assumed mainstream readership that is white, middle-class, invested with citizenship or otherwise empowered in ways that many people simply aren’t?

Here the “other half” is separated from and uninvited to the conversation about them, but as the object of pity and prurience. And those who have exercised the privileges of unawareness up to this point get to enjoy the additional pleasures of sudden revelation, a sense of enlightenment and the chance to perform this enlightenment to others.

This is not an inevitable result of exposure work, but it is a risk. The best writing in this mode makes troubling realities known in ways that undercut or dismantle these social divisions rather than reinforce them, convening broad-based publics by calling them to outrage and action, including publics that had not previously existed.

NEXT: Revealing the urgency and immediacy of social problems

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Paul A. Kramer is an associate professor at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches history and non-fiction writing. He is the author of several academic studies and essays that have been published by major news sites. His book, “The Blood of Government,” has won several awards, including being named a finalist for the Philippines National Book Award in the social science category.

The post Making good journalistic trouble, Part I: Exposing overlooked problems appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This post introduces readers to a rhetorical re-framing of narrative nonfiction that a Vanderbilt University professor argues can create partnerships between writers and readers in pursuit of addressing societal problems. This week and next, we feature each of his seven approaches to story projects.

How do writers of narrative non-fiction tackle social problems? It’s easy enough to think that problems just float out there, awaiting journalists capable of finding and capturing them and wrestling them into words.

But writers actually take realities that readers might gloss over or write off, and then craft words that help people notice and interpret them as social problems that warrant thought and action. To take inspiration from the late civil rights leader and U.S. Congressman John Lewis, writers use language to make good trouble that needs to get made. To do this, writers almost always learn about the social problems from those who first brought them to light: the people directly affected by them or activists they work with, whose protests and voice — often against serious odds — punctured the silence, euphemism and complacency that shrouded the problem against critical inspection. They provide not only information about the problem, but ways to make sense of it.

So how do writers go about crafting an understanding of problems from this starting point? To answer this, it’s worth parsing two different meanings of the word “problem:”

• There is problem as something that you find upsetting or concerning — something that clashes with your sense of the way the world ought to be, is broken and needs to be repaired.
• And then there is problem in the sense of a math problem: a puzzle or conundrum that needs sustained thinking to make sense of, untangle and perhaps even solve.

Plenty of non-fiction writing about society confronts a problem in one of these two senses but not the other: texts that challenge a troubling social reality their authors think they have completely figured out; and texts that play with some intriguing, elusive mystery, the broader social stakes of which are unclear or unimportant to the writer.

The best narrative non-fiction writing on social problems does both. It grapples with a particular social reality in order to question it, subject it to critical attention and convince readers that its existence and continuance is not inevitable. Writing that does this communicates to readers that the problem is tricky, requiring the combined intelligence of author and reader. For this reason, however paradoxically, the best works of narrative non-fiction that deal with social issues may not start out with a firm sense of a known problem. Rather, they can set out to profile an intriguing setting or situation, for example, that has some disquieting aspects.

This approach has lots of advantages. It gives writers the room and time needed to figure out for themselves, ideally through close, sustained reporting, what the problem actually is rather than assuming they already know. As they work it out, they stay alive to details that have distant or ambiguous relationships to the problem, or maybe none at all. This tack makes it less likely that writers will reduce the people in question to individuals whose existence is completely enveloped by the problem. (Shrinking people down to the problems they confront can, of course, come dangerously close to defining the people themselves as the problem.)

Writers working in this exploratory mode also are more likely to remain open to investigating a problem’s many causal roots and manifestations, and to hearing from people who are actually experiencing it: how they define the situation, where they think it comes from, why it’s a problem for them and what they think should be done about it.

Perhaps most of all, this approach invites the reader in as an intellectual partner and companion. Problem-oriented writing can seem convinced of its moral superiority: The virtuous writer pronounces from on high, squinting hard enough that the choir they are preaching to blurs into an expansive, imaginary congregation. In contrast, writing that approaches social problems as intellectual problems says to readers: I’m bothered by this… Let’s dive in together.

Social-issues stories that reimagine society

Why is it so essential to investigate, present and wrestle with social problems in the first place? First, it’s crucial because it’s one way that society gets imagined and reimagined.

There are countless ways that we’re told that things we recognize as problems have nothing to do with the ways society is organized. We’re told that these problems are intractable — the result of individual failings, punishment by transcendent forces, fate or bad luck, or just the way the world works. Highly capitalist societies may be especially prone to underestimating and minimizing the social origins and character of problems, sidelining questions about whether social institutions need to be built differently. Think of how often we’re told that poor people could have simply bootstrapped themselves to prosperity, without any larger, systemic changes.

But one of the most compelling things that narrative nonfiction can do is to show how problems that seem individual, cosmological or matters of inescapable destiny are actually social and political problems, therefore rightly subject to public debate and collective, remedial action. As writers detail the social and changeable dimensions of a problem, they can enrich readers’ visions of society and their role in it.

Articulating problems also can mean redrawing the very boundaries of the political “we.” The rhetorical choices a writer makes resonate with certain people — and not others — and summon them to participate in an implied “us.” These choices communicate who matters — whose freedom and domination, thriving and suffering counts — and, more fundamentally, the question of who has standing to join in debate and decision-making.

Through the process of defining its problems, a community defines the common good and makes sense of its shared life together.

While it’s a mistake to overestimate the power of any particular story, the best nonfiction writing about social issues can help assemble new communities, public spheres and spaces of deliberation. The choices a writer makes — about emphasis, framing, rhetoric, voice and societal purpose — can raise scaffolding for new architectures of “we.”

We’re constantly absorbing the objectionable into our everyday sense of the normal: Problems that were once overt and charged — that animated peoples’ sense of self and society — fade with time, political change and concerted efforts to bury them. Vast swaths of norms, hard-won rights and valid objections are perpetually at risk of being obscured and forgotten, as we gradually, without even noticing, accommodate to things that were previously unacceptable.

This capacity to normalize the bad is both adaptive and terrifying. But rather than seeing it as the cause for naive hope or hopeless despair, it can remind us of the need for vigilant, unyielding, inquiring attention to problems that threaten to vanish without going away. That can be, at its most valuable, the work of narrative nonfiction.

New frames for addressing societal problems

Whenever in the process of research and drafting that a writer settles on a sense of what the problem is, they need to think hard about the relationship between a desired audience with particular subjects and themes. Will readers see a problem here? If not, why not? And how could framing the situation in new terms, or providing new evidence, help them see differently? If readers already see the situation as a problem, are they inclined to approach it in ways that overlap with yours?

To get more concrete, let’s distinguish a variety of story approaches taken by non-fiction writing about society. I’ll consider seven of them in coming posts:

• Introduction: Making good trouble
• I. Exposure: Highlighting overlooked problems
• II. Urgency: Revealing the immediacy of problems
• III. Activation: Challenging a sense of powerlessness
• IV. Re-specification: Reconsidering causes and effects of a problem
• V. Solidarity: Standing with those affected
• VI. Responsibility: Connecting action to consequence
• VII. Value-switching: Considering different moral stances
• Conclusion: The gift of narrative nonfiction

Each of these frames a partnership between a writer and a reader as partners:

We’re in this together, they say, but we’re not the same. Maybe we share key values but don’t have the same information. Maybe we possess similar knowledge but prioritize issues in different ways. Our commonalties and differences will shape the terms of engagement between us and the worlds we are learning and thinking about together.

One of the most important decisions the writer makes here — one that will affect which tasks you take up and how — is how to position yourself. Do you adopt the stance of a detached observer, affected only as anyone else would be? Do you take on the perspective of insiders with direct experience and knowledge of the problem? Or do you write from the position of both outside expert and first-hand witness?

The writer’s stance: a crucial choice

A great deal hinges on this choice and the way you express it. Each position asserts a different kind of authority. Outsiders tend to advance claims of rationality, disinterestedness and fluency in multiple perspectives. Insiders convey truths that only victims and eyewitnesses can: unmediated experience, potent emotions and enduring consequences.

The position you assume as a writer can change the basic meanings of the seven story modes I sketch out. Imagine, for example, the vast difference between an outsider holding readers partly responsible for a problem, and that same charge arriving in the voice of an insider who tells you they have directly suffered it themselves.

These seven project categories are seldom isolated or confined, one at a time, in any single nonfiction narrative. They get stirred together, with each picking up and heightening the others. But it helps to grasp their purposes one by one. Skilled cooks already know just how much of each flavor to toss into a dish, and when, without studying the spice rack. But they can learn by lingering briefly over each, how it works and what it brings to the whole.

NEXT: Exposure: Stories that expose overlooked problems

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Paul A. Kramer is an associate professor at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches history and non-fiction writing. He is the author of several academic studies and essays that have been published by major news sites. His book, “The Blood of Government,” has won several awards, including being named a finalist for the Philippines National Book Award in the social science category.

The post How narrative journalists can make “good trouble” to tackle social problems appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.