Audio Dramas
A Tool for Organizing & Making Struggles Come to Life!
Paige Shell-Spurling, Portland Central America Solidarity Committee
Portland, Oregon, USA
Transform your organizing stories into audio dramas that captivate and mobilize. This workshop offers hands-on practice in turning real-life struggles into suspenseful, character-driven narratives—and explores how audio can be a strategic tool for justice movements.
Session Description
What if your struggle was more than a headline? What if it became a story that moved people—not just with facts, but with suspense, emotion, and imagination? In this hands-on workshop, we’ll explore how audio dramas can transform organizing into storytelling that captivates, educates, and mobilizes.
Audio dramas are more than creative expressions—they’re a powerful tool to speak directly to people’s hearts, build long-term interest in seemingly “lost causes,” communicate the intricacies of organizing work, and reach audiences that traditional political messaging often misses.
We’ll work with real-life moments from our organizing work and will get a taste of how to turn them into compelling narrative scenes using fiction techniques—dialogue, character arcs, plot twists, and emotional stakes. Participants will brainstorm, write, reflect, and share in a supportive, experimental space. Along the way, we’ll discuss why audio, in particular, is a uniquely powerful and accessible medium for activists—especially in contexts of surveillance, censorship, and isolation.
Participants will walk away with a sense of how audio dramas could support their own movement work, tools to help in building a story arc across episodes and seasons, and insight into the production process—from writing the script to recording to editing and launching. You’ll also learn about Audio Blindspot, a weekly newsletter where you can follow along with our process of telling the story of a labor rights struggle using audio storytelling.
Presenter Bio
Paige Shell-Spurling is a volunteer with the Portland Central America Solidarity Committee (PCASC) where she became involved in supporting the struggle of the injured Colombian General Motors workers. She is a labor rights educator, writer, and longtime movement strategist working at the intersection of organizing, storytelling, and creative media. She has spent two decades supporting immigrant communities and workers in Oregon and internationally, and is the creator of Audio Blindspot, an audio drama newsletter that showcases how an international labor rights struggle is using an audio drama to gain visibility and support. Paige is currently developing a course to support organizers and activists in using audio dramas as a tool for organizing and collective liberation.
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