Beyond what people say.To what shapes what it means.
The Applied Cultural Meaning and Memory Framework (ACMM Framework™) uncovers the cultural meaning beneath the data, so strategies are rooted in reality and built to transform.
What the ACMM Framework™ is.
The Applied Cultural Meaning and Memory Framework (ACMM Framework™) is at once a narrative methodology, a meaning-making framework, a cultural interpretation practice, a movement strategy tool, and a public scholarship ecosystem.
It begins with a refusal: that politics can be understood through messaging alone, or that culture is only the soft tissue around the hard work of strategy. Culture is the hard work. Memory is the architecture. Meaning is the medium through which power moves.
Methodology
A disciplined way of reading culture and memory as political infrastructure.
Practice
A studio approach to building narrative ecosystems with movements and institutions.
Scholarship
Public-facing intellectual work rooted in Black Southern traditions of meaning-making.
Strategy
Applied tools for organizations navigating belief, behavior, and collective action.
Movements move
at the speed of meaning.
Nobody sat us down and called it political education. We learned it listening to grown folks talk after church, watching who got spoken for and who got ignored, noticing what everybody knew but nobody wrote down.
Field note. Montgomery listening session, 2024.
Beliefs are not formed by argument. They are formed by inheritance, by ritual, by proximity, by the stories a community tells about itself when no one is watching. Political behavior follows the contours of meaning long before it follows the contours of policy.
The ACMM Framework™ takes seriously what Black Southern storytelling traditions have always known: that culture is infrastructure, that memory is a strategy, and that interpretation, the question of who gets to make sense of what, is the deepest form of power.
We connect culture, memory, and meaning to move people, and movements, forward.
We integrate data with cultural analysis to reveal the beliefs, narratives, and identities that shape public opinion, then translate them into strategy, messaging, and action.
The ACMM Framework™ Process
A culturally grounded, five-phase approach
- 1
Signal Identification
We analyze data to identify patterns, tensions, and emerging narratives.
- 2
Cultural Interpretation
We interpret the why, exploring cultural memory, identity drivers, and lived experiences.
- 3
Meaning Mapping
We map how beliefs connect, revealing systems, influences, and points of tension or leverage.
- 4
Narrative Strategy
We translate meaning into narrative principles, messaging guidance, and strategic priorities.
- 5
Application & Activation
We create tools and guides that bring strategy to life across organizing, comms, and campaigns.
In Practice
Movement & civic ecosystems
Applied across movements and institutions.
The ACMM Framework™ has been applied with movement formations, philanthropic institutions, civic organizations, and grassroots ecosystems building long-horizon cultural and political power.
- ·Voting rights narrative work
- ·Movement storytelling
- ·Public engagement strategy
- ·Narrative ecosystem development
- ·Cultural organizing
- ·Youth narrative work
- ·Democracy & civic engagement
- ·Movement infrastructure design
The Meaning & Memory Lab.
A digital cultural journal, a narrative research archive, a public scholarship platform. The Lab is where the Framework breathes in the open.
Enter the Lab →Stay in practice with The Meaning & Memory Lab.
Receive essays, field notes, analysis, conversations, and methodology reflections from the Applied Cultural Meaning and Memory Framework (ACMM Framework™).
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Essay
On Inherited Belonging
How Black Southern memory operates as political infrastructure and what movements miss when they treat it as backdrop.
Read the piece →Essay
Memory Is Not Background
Reframing collective memory as the operating system of contemporary political behavior.
Read the piece →Essay
The Discipline of Patience
Long-horizon narrative work is not the absence of urgency, it is choosing whose clock to be urgent on.
Read the piece →
If your work moves at the speed of meaning, let's talk.
For collaboration, workshop inquiries, speaking invitations, and strategic partnerships, the studio reads every note carefully.