THE EMIC METHOD
TRANSFORMING IDENTITY & CULTURE FOR POSITIVE CHANGE
The Engagement Methodology for Identities in Culture (EMIC) is a comprehensive toolkit designed to help practitioners understand and leverage identity and cultural factors to create meaningful positive social change. Developed over 25 years by researchers, academics, and practitioners, EMIC is the cornerstone of all OICD work.
EMIC allows practitioners to go from research to analysis, identity mapping, strategy development, implementation, and evaluation. It's a comprehensive toolset to manage and build strategies across various human problem contexts.
Every component, approach, theoretical underpinning, and framework of EMIC is backed by evidence-based research and theory from across the human and social sciences. Scaled applications of EMIC also incorporate computer and network science, as well as the latest in large language models and other AI algorithmic processes.
Fundamentally, EMIC is designed to allow access to the invisible and abstract world of identity. It enables practitioners to directly engage with identities, rather than guess or estimate how these identities are being structured.
What Can EMIC Help to Do?
- Government & NGOs: Address threats to democracy and cohesion; Improve community development strategies and conflict transformation initiatives
- Policing and Law Enforcement: Develop balanced strategies for preventing and responding to extremism and terrorist threats
- Corporations: Enhance organizational culture, improve team cohesion, and navigate cultural challenges in diverse workplaces
- Social Work & Health Care: Develop new approaches for at risk individual clients or under-represented service groups.
- Education: Enhance teaching methods and address issues like bullying through better understanding of student identities
- Tech & Digital Platforms: Create more culturally sensitive digital identity solutions and reduce online harms
- Advocacy & Activism: Craft more effective messaging strategies for human rights, climate change, and public health campaigns
Detailed EMIC Capabilities by Sector:
- Social Work: EMIC provides social workers with tools to understand the identity factors driving problematic behaviors. It offers strategies for intervention that address the root causes of issues like gang involvement or vulnerability to extremist ideologies.
- Education: For educators, EMIC offers insights into student identities, enabling the development of more inclusive and effective teaching methods. It can help create strategies to combat bullying, promote diversity, and foster a positive school culture.
- Government & NGOs: EMIC assists in analyzing community dynamics, developing targeted strategies for social change, and improving the effectiveness of development programs. It's particularly useful in conflict transformation, helping to understand and address identity-based tensions.
- Healthcare: Providing healthcare across identity and cultural boundaries can be challenging. EMIC helps to build a comprehensive picture of the needs of under-serviced groups. Revealing the critical barriers which inhibit service delivery and trust, these root-causes can be then used to empower messaging and educational strategies.
- Tech & Digital Platforms: In the digital realm, EMIC informs the development of user-friendly and culturally appropriate digital identity solutions. It helps platform designers understand how identity operates online, leading to more ethical and less harmful social media and digital environments.
- Advocacy & Activism: EMIC equips advocates with tools to craft messages that resonate across cultural barriers. This is crucial for campaigns related to human rights, climate change, public health, and other global issues that require broad public engagement.
- Law Enforcement: For law enforcement agencies, EMIC provides a framework to understand the identity drivers behind extremism and radicalization. This understanding informs more effective and balanced approaches to prevention and intervention strategies.
- Corporate Sector: In business settings, EMIC can be applied to improve organizational culture, enhance team cohesion, and address challenges arising from cultural diversity in the workplace. It can inform leadership strategies, conflict resolution approaches, and diversity and inclusion initiatives.
Across all these sectors, EMIC provides a deep understanding of identity dynamics, enabling practitioners to develop more effective, culturally sensitive, and ethically grounded approaches to complex social, cultural, and organizational challenges.
Key Benefits of EMIC
- High-resolution understanding of identity and cultural factors in any context
- Evidence-based research and theory from across human and social sciences
- Ethical compliance built into the strategic and research approach
- Scalable from individual cases to complex national or international dynamics
- Accessible to practitioners with or without social science background
- Visually communicable outputs for effective team collaboration
EMIC is designed with ethical compliance built into the very structure of its strategic and research approach, minimizing the potential risks and hazards inherent in identity-based programming.
The fact that the EMIC method has social science built into its processes means that even practitioners operating with little or no social science knowledge or training are able to leverage the most powerful findings and theories from across the social and human sciences, with the corresponding level of improved output.
EMIC outputs - particularly its identity maps - are visually communicable to other team members, providing a large proportion of the value of social science approaches to a variety of challenging contexts.
The Importance of an Accurate Identity Model
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Identity is a complex psychological and social system. Accurately modelling its functioning is vital to the success of any identity-based approach.
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Over two decades of academic research has focused on extracting the most salient findings from across the Human, Social and Neurobiological Sciences, and building the "Generative Narrative Model" of identity at the heart of EMIC.
The EMIC Process
- Research: Collect and process ethnographic data from various sources
- Mapping: Visualize identity information and us/them positions
- Analysis: Understand critical logic, universal needs, and identity dynamics
- Strategy Development: Create ethically supported, evidence-based strategies
- Intervention Design: Develop and optimize interventions based on EMIC insights
- Evaluation: Monitor and assess the impact of interventions
Detailed EMIC Process:
Research
A key skill is the ability to process data, collect data, and understand what data is important in identity-based work. The research phases of EMIC involve a blend of skills applied to ethnographic data collection, potentially collected from online sources (netnographic), and other text or speech discourse. Data can also be material collected from interviews and/or observations conducted by practitioners.
Mapping
Identity mapping is a core skill set and resource developed by the OICD over the last two decades and refined as part of the EMIC method. Identity mapping converts the raw human data into a visualization, which, amongst other things, delineates the ways in which the us and them identity positions are constructed. It charts the belief systems which fuel these us and them positions, the stereotypes and concepts and ideas about a whole range of cultural factors, economic status, religious notions, views of other members of the society, etc.
Analysis
EMIC analysis of maps begins with understanding the critical logic of any identity positions, how they are anchored in key ideas and pivot around key notions of "other", and ideas of self. Subsequent analysis delves into the universal needs which drive these positions in the first place, and which must be considered in any strategy development in further stages. Lastly, a pathway analysis helps the practitioner understand how each concept, each construction of us and them, is built upon the us/them constructions in context.
Strategy, Intervention and Evaluation
Identity maps and subsequent analysis provide a sturdy platform for strategy development, testing, evaluation and optimization. Using the EMIC platform at this point in the process includes understanding what effective and ineffective identity-based strategies look like. OICD validated strategy development methods are ethically supported and evidence-based to allow practitioners to understand how both identity-based and behavioral change might be possible to build strategy around in any given mapped and analyzed context.
PREVENT, REPAIR & MEASURE IDENTITY DIVISIONS
ACCESSING THE EMIC METHOD™
Work with an EMIC Practitioner
Engage directly for strategy building and implementation
An organization can work with an EMIC practitioner directly to build strategies, interventions, monitor, evaluate, etc. This can be done on an advisory basis, or as part of a dedicated team of EMIC practitioners and advisors who can manage the whole process, resulting in delivering workable strategies or even potentially going on to include the design and evaluation of interventions.
Train Your Staff
Build in-house capacity with our 24-session training program
An organization may choose to train its own staff or personnel in the EMIC method. This is a longer-term solution but provides great sustainability of approach over time and builds capacity within the organization. A typical EMIC training program requires 24 sessions of 90 mins per session and can be offered online or in-person. Basic EMIC competency can be achieved as part of an intensive 2-week program or a part-time 24-week program.
CONTACT
Email [email protected] to discuss incorporating EMIC to your context
Blended Approach
Combine practitioner engagement with staff training for immediate impact and long-term sustainability
An organization can blend two approaches by first commissioning an EMIC practitioner or EMIC practitioner team and simultaneously training staff in the method as problems are dealt with and solved by that first practitioner team. This perhaps represents the best blend of immediately deployable method with sustainable long-term evaluation and future capacity to deal with implementing and evaluating strategies, interventions and arising challenges.
EMIC Training Workshops are Truly Enlighening
UN Staff Trainee, UNESCO
Identity is a core issue for peacebuilding work, but also a very complex one. What I found interesting and relevant about the OICD's approach is the way it combines a high level conceptual model with practical application.
Phil Vernon, former Director of Programmes, International Alert, London, UK (2004-2017)
EMIC Can Be Used to:
- Counter discrimination, prejudice and hatred
- Counter recruitment into criminal/terrorist communities and groups
- Counter hate crime and criminal violence
- Counter propaganda and the increased spread of disinformation
- Counter the erosion of public trust in public/democratic institutions
- Counter disenfranchisement of minority and marginalized communities
- Counter ethnic/racial/religious violence and persecution
- Counter root causes of human rights violations ranging from torture to atrocity crimes (genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing)
- Solve social problems at their root allowing for "treating the cause not the symptom"
- Unearth and promote deep shared values within and between divided communities
- Promote broad based social, economic and political participation, inclusion and cohesion
- Provide a reliable approach to impact measurement
- Promote economic productivity (as a direct result of increased cohesion)
- Contribute to deradicalization and disincentivization of violence and communities of violence
- Decrease vulnerability to disinformation and divisive manipulation
- Interface with a variety of existing initiatives (e.g. from across law, technology, governance, development, education, peacebuilding sectors), compounding and maximizing their effectiveness