Reflections on Counterpoints Arts’ 2026 Pop Culture and Social Change Retreat
By Isabella Kajiwara
From Brazil’s election-winning digital mobilisation for Lula to the democratic ‘blue tsunami’ we’ve just witnessed in the US midterms, political commentators are once again rushing to all corners of the earth to declare that “woke is back.” The radical potential of digital storytelling for social justice is back in the spotlight. Across waves of Gen-Z protests around the world, digital culture has become part of the language of resistance: social media is flooded with irreverent, emotionally resonant and memetic expressions of what collective action can make possible. But the digital world isn’t just for consumption of revolutionary ideas, it’s also where people co-create political narratives and transform disillusionment into action.
But what happens when we stop scrolling? How do we turn attention into understanding, visibility into agency, and audiences into movements capable of building collective power? And how do we know when we’ve won?
These questions were at the heart of Counterpoints Arts 2026 Pop Culture and Social Change Retreat, held at Dartington Hall in Devon. Bringing together around 50 other producers, creators, activists and cultural workers, the three-day gathering explored the possibilities of digital storytelling for social justice, while reckoning with the corporate platforms and power structures that increasingly dictate how those stories are told and heard.
From the beginning to the end of the retreat, we kept returning to how easily visibility gets conflated with impact. Most of us are chronically online by virtue of our work, so sitting together in real life to confront this dilemma felt, in some ways, like group therapy.
In communications, we’re encouraged to chase numbers: views, followers, engagement – the holy trinity. But the vanity metrics only tell part of the story. A video reaching a million people might feel like a win, but what happens after they’ve watched it? Have they understood an issue differently, joined a campaign or taken action offline?
We rarely get to ask ourselves, is what we’re doing actually working? As a digital strategist, I often return to Amilcar Cabral’s directive to tell no lies and claim no easy victories.
One of the retreat’s most useful provocations came from Dr Anastasia Mirzoyants of the AKO Storytelling Institute, who presented research into short-form video and social justice storytelling, in partnership with Counterpoints Arts. Analysing over 2,700 advocacy videos across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, the research identified four archetypes of social justice content: full-spectrum mobilisers, pairing compelling narratives with explicit calls to action; narrative reframers, which tell powerful stories but offer less obvious pathways to participation; low-intensity content, offering a gentler entry point, while ambient content sustains and broadens community through lifestyle or other cultural material.
Not every needs a call to action. Different formats can play different roles in a wider journey. Our audiences operate in an affective digital environment where emotional overwhelm and information overload are the norm. They need more than another urgent message: they need context, orientation and a meaningful next step.
The question of what meaningful engagement actually looks like also made me think about who gets to define it. Young people are constantly at the centre of conversations about digital culture, yet so often treated solely as audiences to be reached or problems to be managed, rather than political actors with ideas, demands and creative practices of their own.
That’s why I was keen to hear from Turner and Tate of The Spit Game, a youth-led creative collective using film, music and culture to shift narratives around young people and Black British life. In conversation with Counterpoints Arts producers Hossam Fazulla and Laith Elzubaidi, Turner made it clear we need to be real about the media environment youth are growing up in. They’re not absent from political movements. They’re navigating the costs of political exposure online, weighing their safety and social standing against the risks of speaking out. As far-right narratives receive increasing amplification and funding, dominating discourse around young men, initiatives like The Spit Game matter because they don’t just reflect culture; they push it forward and move for genuine youth leadership.
On the retreat, this discussion about who gets to shape narratives went beyond meaningful representation for young people. During the speakers corner, Syrian refugee advocacy expert Nour Jarrouj raised the importance of meaningful refugee leadership. It’s one thing to see your experiences reflected in the media; it’s another to have the resources, platforms and decision-making power to shape how these experiences are represented in the first place.
That distinction also grounded the roundtable I hosted, Creative Tools to Resist, on reclaiming agency from corporate algorithms and finding ways to organise beyond mainstream platforms. Alongside activists and creators including Aidan Kohn-Murphy (Gen Z for Change), Ruby Rare, Adele Walton and Jess Mally, we interrogated our dependency on social media platforms as a site of organising, and considered what it means to organise through and beyond them.
While we can obviously optimise our work in the digital sphere to disrupt harmful mainstream narratives, these algorithmically governed platforms are a means to an end. Success is what attention becomes – and Aidan’s experience as the founder and Executive Director of Gen-Z for Change, a grassroots coalition of 500+ creators and organizers with over half a billion combined followers was a helpful reference point for this. In 2025, he led creator engagement for Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, which generated over one billion views and reshaped how campaigns work with creators – showing what can be achieved when we use platforms strategically without allowing them to limit the terms of our organising.
Spaces like the AWETHU School of Organising co-founded by Jess also proactively challenge organisers to build movements that can use these tools without being dependent on them, moving communities towards mobilising as active participants in political action. Adele’s book ‘Logging Off’ explores what a digital world designed around human needs rather than corporate interests could look like, while Ruby’s work questioning the ‘default settings’ of relationships can help orient us as we question the default settings of our digital lives, reclaiming forms of connection and communication that aren’t designed around profit or polarisation.
And even when we do manage to hack the algorithm, we remember that visibility can come with risks. Livvy Gibbs from HOPE Not Hate and Amnesty International UK’s Head of Media, PR and Artist Relations Gemma Gillie spoke across different roundtables on the consequences of doxxing and online harassment, and the need to think beyond individual responses towards collective systems of protection.
This means preparing before the harm happens: asking what support we need from funders, learning from organisers in other countries who have been navigating these threats for years, and building the infrastructure to protect one another. Conversations about the true meaning of solidarity took centre stage, noting that allyship can too easily become private out of convenience when what we need is public solidarity across movements and society. Molly Fleming, Head of Media at the New Economy Organisers Network (NEON), reminded us this means taking responsibility for ensuring nobody is left to bear the consequences of risk alone.
I left Dartington thinking less about how to game the algorithm, and more about what we’re trying to build beyond it. Digital storytelling can shift culture and reach people bringing them into political conversations they may not have otherwise encountered. But reach should not be equated to power, representation is not the same as leadership, and an audience is not necessarily a movement.
We can’t take progressive constituencies for granted, and to be able to truly answer the question ‘is what we are creating moving people?’, we’re probably going to need to rethink the shape of communications roles and strategy at grassroots organisations so we can think through and beyond the digital, critically. As Naomi Evans from Everyday Racism put it, organising is at the end of the day all about human-to-human connection. The strongest social justice creators don’t just make videos, they design relationships and journeys into movements.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Isabella Yasmin Kajiwara is a strategist, editor, producer and organiser working across media, politics & culture. She has worked at Skin Deep as Comms Lead since 2024, helping develop their online membership platform, digital strategy, and new podcast series. Outside of Skin Deep, they also research and write on youth media, culture and strategic communications, with a particular interest in how independent media, grassroots organising and alternative cultural infrastructures can support liberated futures. Isabella has bylines in publications such as Red Pepper, shado, Unbias The News, Skin Deep and The Road To Nowhere, and has produced content for organisations including Greenpeace, Counterpoints Arts and The War on Climate – bringing mass audiences into political conversations.
