Peter Masiakos, MD, director of Pediatric Trauma Services at Massachusetts General Hospital, co-director of the MGH Gun Violence Prevention Center and associate professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, is the lead author of a recent perspective in the NEJM, Transforming Narratives of Gun Violence
Additional authors of this piece include Chaplain Clementina Chéry, founder, president and CEO of the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute (LDBPI), Rachele Gardner, associate director of the Engagement Lab and community organizer, and Eric Gordon, PhD, professor and Director of the Engagement Lab at Emerson College.
This manuscript is a case study of a college-based storytelling initiative in Boston devoted to advancing healing and centering the experience of the people most affected by gun violence in Boston—the predominantly Black and Brown residents of the Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan neighborhoods.
TNGV is a consortium that began with a partnership among:
At a moment when much of the public health messaging around violence prevention lacks legitimacy within the communities meant to be its beneficiary, Transforming Narratives of Gun Violence (TNGV) represents a novel method of centering those closest to the pain in shaping and disseminating narratives around the impact of community violence.
TNGV supports six to eight studio courses per year in which faculty, students and community partners work together to develop and distribute narrative interventions (media and art projects) with specific organizational, social or policy-changing goals.
What makes TNGV different is that the people closest to the problem (i.e. those directly affected by gun violence) are directly involved in producing the content, rather than simply being its subject.
To date, 106 students, 44 community learning partners, and seven faculty members have collaborated on four documentary films, three longform news stories, a role-playing game, a virtual-reality experience and several theater pieces. These works have been integrated into organizational trainings and policy discussions.
One example project is the 20-minute documentary film Quiet Rooms, which centers on the perspective of people who have received devastating news about the impact of gun violence in small hospital waiting rooms and highlights the lack of resources available to help them move forward.
The film has been circulated widely within Boston communities, screened in courthouses, City Hall, and a prison, and its representation of the isolating space where these devastating conversations occur has inspired an effort to redesign the MGH family waiting room with input from survivors.
