Anneshia Hardy | The Hardy Exchange
Years in movement work teach you to listen differently. Not just to what is being said, but to what lingers beneath it. Over time, the work begins to whisper. It reveals how memory shapes belief, how culture carries meaning, and how the stories people inherit often matter more than the messages they receive. This piece is shaped by those quiet lessons.
I did not arrive at narrative work because I wanted to tell better stories. I arrived there because I kept watching stories fail.
I watched arguments backed by data stall out. I watched legal victories struggle to translate into public understanding. I watched carefully tested messages bounce off communities they were supposedly designed for. Over time, it became clear that the problem was not the message. The problem was the assumption underneath it.
Too much narrative work begins with the belief that people decide what to believe after they receive information. My experience taught me the opposite. People decide what information matters based on what they already believe.
Belief is not formed in a vacuum. It is formed through memory. Through culture. Through stories that live in families, churches, music, and place. Long before people encounter a campaign or a court case, they have already learned how to interpret the world.
That understanding is what led me to develop the Applied Cultural Meaning and Memory Framework™ (ACMM Framework™).
The ACMM Framework™ begins with that tension between what is technically true and what feels true.
Intellectually, the framework is shaped by several traditions that helped me name what I was already seeing in practice. Scholars like Erving Goffman, George Lakoff, and Robert Entman gave language to framing, to the idea that people rely on interpretive structures rather than facts alone. But those structures are not neutral. They are cultural. They are inherited. The ACMM Framework™ treats frames as memory held in the body, shaped by race, region, faith, and history.
Narrative theory offered another anchor. Walter Fisher and Jerome Bruner affirmed that humans understand the world through story. But the stories that matter most are not only the ones crafted intentionally. They are the stories people grow up inside. Black Southern storytelling traditions are not illustrative examples within this framework. They are foundational. Oral history, testimony, humor, music, and ritual are where political meaning is carried long before it is debated.
Cultural studies and Black critical thought sharpened this understanding. Stuart Hall taught us that culture produces ideology. W. E. B. Du Bois showed how racial hierarchy shapes perception itself. Bell Hooks and Paul Gilroy made clear that culture is a site of struggle, not a side conversation. These ideas pushed the framework toward a central truth. Culture is not context. Culture is infrastructure.
The work of Cedric Robinson grounds the framework even deeper. Robinson’s articulation of the Black Radical Tradition clarified that cultural memory is not passive. It is produced through survival under racial capitalism. Memory holds instruction. It carries both constraint and resistance. Within the ACMM Framework™, memory is not nostalgia. It is a political force shaping how people understand power in the present.
Robin D G Kelley’s work insists on something else equally important. That narrative is also where imagination lives. His writing on freedom dreams shaped how I understand narrative not only as a tool for analysis, but as a space for possibility. Meaning making must allow people to imagine themselves beyond the limits of the present. Without that, no amount of messaging will build power.
The framework is also informed by scholars who studied how reality itself is constructed. Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, and Karl Weick helped articulate meaning making as a collective process rather than an individual one. The ACMM Framework™ extends this to intergenerational belief, especially in communities shaped by exclusion, adaptation, and resilience.
Questions of where meaning circulates and who gets to produce it draw from the work of Nancy Fraser and Catherine Squires. Counterpublic theory helped me name what I was already seeing. That Black Southern communities are not peripheral audiences. They are primary sites of narrative production through faith spaces, cultural expression, local media, and digital storytelling.
Critical race theory further sharpened the analysis. Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell made clear that narrative and law work together to uphold racial hierarchy. The ACMM Framework™ takes seriously the idea that belief is racialized long before people encounter policy or institutions. Narrative work that ignores this will always be incomplete.
Taken together, these traditions shaped a framework that treats narrative as infrastructure rather than messaging.
The ACMM Framework™ is applied because it had to be. It was built in real political conditions. It is used to help movement partners slow down before they speak. To ask what meanings are already present. What memories are being activated. What identities are being reinforced or constrained. What beliefs must shift before power can move.
This approach changes how narrative strategy is practiced. Messaging comes after meaning. Story arcs, content strategy, and messenger selection are shaped by cultural memory and ideological terrain, not just audience segmentation.
What distinguishes the ACMM Framework™ is not that it is informed by theory. It is that it treats Black Southern cultural knowledge as theory. It understands memory as political. And it recognizes that people must be able to imagine themselves differently before they can act differently.
We are living in a moment where belief is being shaped with precision and intent. Those invested in maintaining hierarchy understand this. They invest heavily in meaning, identity, and belonging. Movements committed to democracy and liberation must meet that level of rigor.
The ACMM Framework™ is one way I attempt to do that. It is an approach to narrative that takes culture seriously, treats memory as power, and understands that the struggle over meaning is the struggle over the future.
Narrative is not just what we say.
It is what we come to believe about who we are.
And belief shapes what becomes possible.
The Applied Cultural Meaning and Memory Framework™ (ACMM Framework™) is a proprietary, practice based narrative methodology developed by Anneshia Hardy, grounded in applied narrative and pro-democracy messaging work across the Deep South.
About the Author
Anneshia Hardy is a narrative strategist, scholar-activist, and social impact entrepreneur committed to leveraging storytelling and messaging for transformative social change. As Executive Director of grassroots communications and media advocacy organizations, Alabama Values and Alabama Values Progress, she leads efforts to strengthen the pro-democracy movement in Alabama and across the South through strategic messaging and digital strategies.
Co-founder of Blackyard LLC, Anneshia equips changemakers to amplify their impact in marginalized communities. With over a decade of experience, she has conducted narrative and messaging trainings for organizations like the NAACP and the Obama Foundation. Anneshia has also shaped strategies for landmark voting rights cases, including Allen v. Milligan and Louisiana v. Callais Rooted in the belief that culturally relevant narratives can drive equity and inspire action, she bridges academic insight and real-world advocacy to create lasting change.