About this Workshop

A significant challenge facing progressives today is whether they can turn good intentions into concrete political realities. Doing so requires articulation — the use of language in strategic, purposeful ways to create clear links between core values and social priorities. This hands-on workshop is modeled upon several that the facilitators have done around the Northwest, with a wide range of progressives and leaders of the Democratic Party. At this workshop we will work with participants to develop a series of message strategies, in the following ways:

• showing how to create resonant communications that translate core values into powerful, engaging language;
• demonstrating how personalization and metaphors work in persuasive ways in political debate;
• providing a framework for participants to build “communication maps” that identify the key talking points for different issues;
• explaining how participants can successfully “go public” with their message in a culture dominated by mass media.

Workshop Facilitators

David Domke and Crispin Thurlow research and teach in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. Professor Domke is a former journalist, and his work focuses on the ways that political leaders strategically craft their public communications and how news media cover these messages; he is author of God Willing? Political Fundamentalism in the White House, the “War on Terror,” and the Echoing Press (2004). Professor Thurlow has an academic background in psychology and critical linguistics, and his work examines the ways that people use language and other forms of communication to negotiate their differences. Specifically, he is committed to understanding how relations of power and conceptions of privilege and inequality are sustained in everyday human interaction.

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