Anneshia Hardy | The Hardy Exchange
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been sitting with the weight of a decision that has quietly lived in the background of my life for years. This fall, I will begin a PhD in Communications at Georgia State University. It’s a sentence that feels both deeply personal and historically situated at the same time.
For many people, the decision to pursue a doctorate is framed as an academic milestone. But for me, this moment feels less like an achievement and more like a continuation of a long conversation I’ve been having with the world around me. It’s a conversation about stories. About power. About how people come to believe what they believe.
In many ways, my relationship with communication started long before I ever stepped into a classroom studying or teaching it formally. It started in the places where Black communities have always done some of their deepest intellectual work, around kitchen tables, in church sanctuaries, in beauty shops, on front porches, and in living rooms where the television played in the background while elders interpreted the news for the rest of us. Those were the spaces where I first began to notice how stories move. How people explain systems to one another. How history gets remembered and retold. How warnings, lessons, and humor travel across generations in ways that are both subtle and powerful.
What I didn’t know then was that I was witnessing the mechanics of narrative.
Years later, when I began studying communications more formally and eventually building a career around narrative strategy, I started to see those early observations in a new light. My professional work placed me in spaces where storytelling was not simply cultural expression but political infrastructure. Whether working with organizers, grassroots organizations, or legal teams navigating voting rights cases, I saw again and again that people rarely engage with politics through policy language alone. They engage through meaning. They engage through the stories that help them interpret what those policies mean for their families, their communities, and their sense of belonging.
That realization shaped much of the work I’ve done over the past decade. As a narrative strategist and movement communicator, I’ve spent years examining how stories shape public understanding of democracy, power, and participation. Through my work with Alabama Values and Alabama Values Progress, I’ve worked alongside organizers and cultural workers across the Deep South to develop narrative strategies that help communities connect civic issues to lived experience.
In that work, I began noticing something that the traditional frameworks of political communication didn’t fully explain. Many messaging strategies assume that people respond to information rationally. If you provide enough facts, the thinking goes, people will adjust their beliefs accordingly. But the communities I work with rarely process information that way. They interpret information through cultural memory. Through inherited stories. Through the social meaning attached to their experiences.
Over time, I began describing this pattern through what I now call the Applied Cultural Meaning and Memory Framework™, a way of understanding how narratives rooted in culture, identity, and historical memory shape how people interpret political messages and public life. The framework grew out of years of applied work in communities where narrative is not an abstract concept but a daily reality that influences how people make sense of systems and power.
The more I explored these ideas, the more I began to recognize a larger gap in the academic literature. Much of the scholarship that informs modern communication strategy was developed in contexts that rarely center the cultural traditions of the Black South. Yet the South has long been one of the most influential sites of narrative production in American history. From the freedom songs of the Civil Rights Movement to the sermons that sustained communities through segregation, from oral storytelling traditions passed through generations to the cultural innovation of Southern hip-hop, the region has consistently produced narrative forms that shape how people understand justice, resistance, and belonging.
Despite that influence, these traditions are rarely examined as intellectual frameworks within the field of communication studies. That realization stayed with me for years. It lingered in the back of my mind during community meetings, during strategy sessions with organizers, and during the countless moments where I watched communities interpret political events through stories that had been carried forward for generations. Eventually I realized that the questions that kept emerging in my work deserved deeper scholarly exploration.
- How do communities inherit narratives that shape their political identities?
- How does cultural memory influence the way people interpret messages about democracy and participation?
- What happens when the stories communities carry clash with the narratives produced by political institutions or media ecosystems?
- And perhaps most importantly, how can narrative infrastructure be built in ways that strengthen democratic participation rather than manipulate it?
These are the questions that will guide my research as I begin my doctoral journey.
Choosing Georgia State University for this next chapter feels fitting for several reasons. Atlanta has long served as a crossroads for Black cultural production, media innovation, and political organizing. It is a place where narrative has never been neutral. It has always been contested, shaped, and reimagined by communities determined to define themselves beyond the limitations imposed upon them.
Studying communication in that environment matters. It places research within reach of the very communities whose cultural practices have shaped American political storytelling for generations.
But this journey is not just about research questions or academic curiosity. It is also about responsibility. One of the things I’ve come to believe over the years is that the field of communication needs more scholar-practitioners, people who move between theory and lived experience, who recognize that knowledge does not live only in academic journals but also in communities, movements, and cultural traditions.
My work has always lived at that intersection.
As someone who has spent years working alongside organizers, storytellers, and advocates across the South, I carry a perspective shaped by practice. At the same time, my background in communications research and teaching has always pushed me to interrogate the deeper forces shaping narrative and meaning in public life. Pursuing a doctorate allows those two parts of my work to meet in a more intentional way. It allows me to examine the narrative patterns I’ve witnessed in movement spaces with greater theoretical depth. It allows me to contribute to the scholarly understanding of how culture and communication interact in the formation of political belief. And it allows me to develop research that not only explains narrative power but also strengthens the communities working to reshape it.
There is also a personal dimension to this journey that I cannot ignore. My path through education has never followed a straight line. Like many women navigating multiple responsibilities, I made choices early in life that prioritized family and community over academic timelines that universities tend to assume everyone can follow. For a long time, pursuing a doctorate was something I quietly held in the background of my plans. It was part of my long-term vision, but it was not always the right season.
Now, that season has arrived.
The road ahead will undoubtedly be demanding. Doctoral study requires patience, humility, and an openness to being challenged intellectually in ways that reshape how you see the world. But it also offers something that has always fueled my curiosity: the opportunity to ask deeper questions. And the questions that guide me are not small ones. Ultimately, pursuing this doctorate is not simply about earning another degree. It is about building the intellectual infrastructure necessary for the work that lies ahead. It is about strengthening the bridge between scholarship and movement work so that the insights generated in universities can meaningfully contribute to the communities shaping the future of democracy.
Most of all, it is about honoring the stories that raised me, the ones told around kitchen tables, whispered in church pews, and carried through generations of Black Southern life. Those stories taught me that narrative is never just about words.
It is about memory. It is about power. And it is about the futures we learn to imagine together.
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.