Street narratives are the stories, framings, and running commentary that actually pass between people in daily life — in conversation, workplace chatter, family arguments, social media threads — rather than the accounts captured by formal research. The term surfaces in an interview with complexity theorist Dave Snowden, whose work on narrative sense-making (through tools like SenseMaker) starts from the observation that traditional qualitative research — surveys, focus groups, structured interviews — filters out the messier, self-signified stories people actually tell each other, replacing them with tidied, researcher-shaped accounts. Street narratives are what remains once that filter is removed: the narrative substrate circulating in real time, closer to raw micro-narratives than to the summaries that eventually reach policymakers or campaigners.
This distinguishes street narratives from meso narratives, a related term used by Leni Velasco for the shared stories operating at community scale, above the individual and below society-wide metanarratives. Where meso narratives describe a level of aggregation, street narratives describe a mode of access: raw material that exists whether or not anyone is listening for it, and that most narrative-change work never reaches.
Also see Meso Narratives and Street Narrative Nudging