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August 20, 2025Milbank Quarterly0 citationsOpen Access

Changing the Story on Health and Racial Equity: Why Public Health Needs an Infrastructure for Building Narrative Power

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LDLori DorfmanSGSarah E. GollustMTMakani Themba

Key Points

  • Developing narrative power is essential for achieving improved health and racial equity, promoting new storylines within public health.
  • The analysis draws on evidence from tobacco control efforts and strategies aimed at combating structural racism in health systems.
  • Establishing narrative infrastructure requires connecting diverse organizations to collectively generate and sustain impactful narratives.
  • These findings suggest a necessary shift in public health towards strategic collaborations that prioritize narrative construction.

Abstract

Policy Points One form of power that is required for advancing health and racial equity is narrative power: the ability to shift the stories we use to make sense of the world. Building this form of power requires the field of public health to strategically work to connect institutions and organizations to align in complementary ways to create, build, and sustain new narratives—what we refer to as narrative infrastructure. We illustrate these ideas using real‐world examples drawn from work in tobacco control and emerging work in addressing structural racism in public health.

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Cite This Study

Dorfman et al. (2025) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/68af4965ad7bf08b1ead5cbfhttps://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0009.70047
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