Who Is Setting the Agenda You're Living this Week?
An invitation to define the frames of our own lives
Who is setting the agenda for what you’ve been talking about this week?
This question has been weighing heavily on my mind recently. I’ve been snatching quick breaks from immigration law practice to finish an article about my theory of narrative legal history, and it’s been a good reminder of how power dynamics operate – and how to retain our agency even in demanding circumstances.
Narrative and Power
Narrative theorists often point out that process and content aren’t separate. In an article called “Empowerment and Mediation,” conflict resolution scholar Sarah Cobb noted that mediators are trained to ask one party – usually the complainant – to “tell us why you are here.” This prompts that party to craft their narrative version of the conflict. “As the first speaker does this,” Cobb wrote, “they do more than just ‘take their turn’ – they construct the semantic and discursive space on which all subsequent speakers must stand by providing a set of coherent relations between plots, characters, and themes.” In other research, Cobb and colleague Janet Rifkind found that, in 75 percent of cases studied, the frames of the eventual agreement were set entirely by the first party to speak.
I’ve spent most this week reacting, or helping others deal with their own reactions. And I’ll have plenty to say about all that in the weeks to come.
But if you don’t mind, I think it would be healthy to shift the frame here today. After all, we always have the option to define our own frames. We just have to remember to exercise it.
Narrative Re-Framing: Getting to How We Got Here
For the past eight years of immersion in immigration law, I’ve hungered for historical perspective. How did we get here? What can we learn from the choices of the past? Can we walk vicariously in the footsteps of those who’ve faced similar migration challenges before? Could we avoid their biggest mistakes?
Fridays are generally quieter days in law schools, with fewer classes and emptier hallways. This week, my Friday calendar featured a refreshing change of pace. In the morning, I gathered with a few of my faculty colleagues in a conference room to workshop the articles that each of us is preparing for submission this spring. Topics ranged from the imperative for AI regulation, to tax policy around discriminatory religious beliefs, to narrative legal history in the legal formalist/legal realist debate. (And there were donuts.)
In the afternoon, I met for the first time with a writing coach, Helen Betya Rubinstein. I first encountered her work through my favorite podcast (which I’ve mentioned before), Drafting the Past.
There’s a difference, I’ve learned, between an editor and a writing coach. An editor works for the publisher. Their primary goal is to produce a product the publisher can sell. While the editor’s and writer’s goals overlap, they aren’t coextensive. Differences can result.
A writing coach (sometimes called a developmental editor) works for the writer. With no competing client and no commercial incentive to shape the work a certain way, the coach can focus solely on helping the writer perfect their process and craft to create the work product as the writer envisions it. I think of it like the hitting instructor a baseball player works with during the off-season versus the manager of the team he plays for in season.
My First Session with a Writing Coach
Before our first session, Helen sent several writing prompts that encouraged me to explore my writing process and identify how I could most benefit from coaching. I wrote about my writing habits, my favorite books, my biggest writing challenges, and the motivation behind my current project.
As we talked, those reflections guided our discussion. Seamlessly, we seemed to arrive at several sources and exercises that might help me loosen some of the knots I’ve been struggling with. For instance, my limited available time to write compels me to be highly productive in my writing sessions, yet I also have a tendency to get bogged down in research. Helen suggested several exercises for navigating more smoothly between research and drafting, such as setting aside time during a research session to craft a few ideas, insights, or favorite quotes from the source or archive and mining those mini-drafts for usable material later. Or starting with a timed freewriting session, then using the key insight from that session as the starting point for a timed drafting session.
As we chatted, I recalled that I used a very similar process to write papers for an interdisciplinary course called “Change and Tradition” that I was required to take during my sophomore year at Butler University. We read history, literature, and social science texts focused on a particular region and era: ancient Greece, medieval Spain, post-colonial West Africa. Since I started writing narrative legal history, I’ve thought often about those exhilarating late nights in the Science Library, starting with nothing but a head full of ideas and ending up with a coherent theory, supported by text, that helped me make sense of the time and place and questions we’d been studying in that unit.
Setting the Agenda
In those late-night writing sessions in college, I first experienced a way to make sense of the gap between lived experience and meaning. Without it, I feel buffeted around by life, reacting instead of acting. The more demanding the questions life presents, the more I need to come back to the page. Thank God I took the time to remember that this week.
Who speaks “first” in our own lives? It depends on where we choose to start the tape.
What happens when you’re setting the agenda – defined by no one else? Where do you go? Can you find your way there right now?
Help Protect the Right to Counsel in Immigration Court
The WVU Immigration Law Clinic is working to help immigrants in West Virginia exercise their constitutional right to be represented by counsel (at no cost to the government) in immigration court. If you’d like to support our efforts, you can make a contribution at this link. In the comments section at the bottom of the link, be sure to direct your contribution to the Immigration Law Clinic.