Returning to the Civic Imagination Project: New Publications
/
This spring, my Civic Imagination Project will release two books, reflecting the past five plus years of our collective research. The first, Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change (Henry Jenkins, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro, and Sangita Shresthova) is already out in the world, where-as the second, Practicing Futures: A Civic Imagination Action Handbook (Gabriel Peters-Lazaro and Sangita Shresthova), will be released late spring-early summer.
Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination offers 30 short essays documenting a diverse set of social movements and their relationship to popular culture. The book starts with an extensive theoretical overview backgrounding the concept of the civic imagination. Here’s a few brief excerpts that may help you to better understand the core concepts:
Through the diverse cases represented in this collection, we model the different functions that the civic imagination performs. For the moment, we define civic imagination as the capacity to imagine alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; one cannot change the world without imagining what a better world might look like. Beyond that, the civic imagination requires and is realized through the ability to imagine the process of change, to see one’s self as a civic agent capable of making change, to feel solidarity with others whose perspectives and experiences are different than one’s own, to join a larger collective with shared interests, and to bring imaginative dimensions to real world spaces and places. Research on the civic imagination explores the political consequences of cultural representations and the cultural roots of political participation. This definition consolidates ideas from various accounts of the public imagination, the political imagination, the radical imagination, the pragmatic imagination, creative insurgency or public fantasy. In some cases, the civic imagination is grounded in beliefs about how the system actually works, but we have a more expansive understanding stressing the capacity to imagine alternatives, even if those alternatives tap the fantastic. Too often, focusing on contemporary problems makes it impossible to see beyond immediate constraints. This tunnel vision perpetuates the status quo, and innovative voices —especially those from the margins — are shot down before they can be heard.
When USC’s Media, Activism, and Participatory Politics (MAPP) research group interviewed more than 200 young activists for our 2016 book, By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism, many felt the language of American politics was broken: it was, on the one hand, exclusive in that policy wonk rhetoric was opaque to first-time voters and repulsive in that partisan bickering displaced problem solving and consensus building (Jenkins, Shresthova et al, 2016). These young leaders wanted to address their generation on its own terms. Activists around the world were appropriating and remixing popular culture to fuel their social movements. This discovery informed our own thinking about the civic imagination. This collection’s three editors lead the Civic Imagination Project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation. Many contributors are members of our University of Southern California-based Civic Paths research group or of our expanded research network. Our project conducts workshops across the United States and around the world designed to harness the power of the civic imagination as a tool for bridge building and problem solving. Our conceptual work here is coupled with efforts to test, strengthen and expand these ideas through practice….
Like Peter Dahlgren (2009), we feel the term “civic” carries “the implication of engagement in public life—a cornerstone of democracy.” The Civic for Dahlgren always has an affective and imaginative dimension: “The looseness, openendedness of everyday talk, its creativity, its potential for empathy and affective elements, are indispensable resources and preconditions for the vitality of democratic politics” (90). As Dahlgren further specifies, the term civic is also connected to the pursuit of a “public good” as “precondition” for other forms of political engagement. Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis (2016, 2) expand on Dahlgren’s notion, observing that “while the concept of ‘common good’ is deeply subjective” the term “invoke[s] the good of the commons, or action taken that benefit a public outside the actor’s intimate sphere”. The civic supports community connections towards shared goals. Dahlgren’s (2003, 139) civic culture circuit model is composed of six dimensions: shared values, affinity, knowledge and competencies, practices, identities and discussion. Neta Kligler-Vilenchik’s account of the Harry Potter Alliance illustrates how each of Dahlgren’s dimensions are built into this oft-cited example of fan activism (Jenkins, Shresthova et al, 2016), exploring how the group mobilizes youth around a shared fan interest (affinity), tapping fan skills to mobilize politically (knowledge and competencies), creating a shared identity around being imaginative, socially caring beings, building in supports for engaged discussion of social issues, and translating this new civic knowledge into a shared set of practices. We are building here on what was perhaps her study’s most controversial aspect —the idea that fantasies about wizards and magic might inspire real world social action, seeing popular culture as a provocation for civic engagement rather than as escapism. Let’s be clear that there is always a political dimension to culture and our definition of the civic contains a heavy cultural component, but we are interested in the ways cultural practices and materials are deployed towards overtly political ends, whether by established institutions or grassroots movements….
Many changemakers maintain a passionate relationship with popular culture, using that cultural vocabulary to broker relations across different political groups. Indigenous peoples are tapping Avatar to dramatize their struggles (Brough and Shresthova, 2012). Hunger Games’ three finger salute is being deployed by resistance movements in Thailand and Hong Kong. Media makers in the Muslim world and Russia are developing their own superheroes to reflect their own social mission (Jenkins, forthcoming). In her report, Spoiler Alert: How Progressives Will Break Through With Popular Culture, Tracy Van Slyke (2014) sums up the logic: “Pop culture has power. We can either ignore it, letting dominant narratives as well as millions of people who interact and are influenced by popular culture slide by, or we can figure out how to double down and invest in the people, strategies, products, and experiences that will transport our stories and values into mainstream narratives” (15). Michael Saler (2012) has coined the term, “public sphere of the imagination,” to describe the communities that form around popular narratives, spaces where discussions about hopes and fears are staged, often outside of partisan frameworks, one step removed from real world constraints. Not simply escapism, such discussions work through real world issues that participants might not be able to confront through other means.
If anything, I feel an even more urgent need to develop a more robust civic imagination today than when we first wrote these words. The conversations we had here last fall concerning ‘Participatory Politics in a Time of Crisis’ demonstrated the struggles to revitalize democracy which seems in crisis everywhere we look. Every day, we hear more about a lack of “empathy” and “vision” in public life. How might we achieve it? Our research group has been exploring ways that we might revitalize civic imagination and democratic participation at the grassroots level. Over the past few years, we have developed and field tested a series of six workshops through engagements with faith-based organizations, civic groups, educational communities, across the United States and around the world. Practicing Futures provides resources that other civic and educational leaders can use to engage their social circles towards greater reflection on their shared goals and aspirations. The following is extracted from the foreword I wrote for the book:
Practicing Futures: a Civic Imagination Action Handbook can be understood as a workbook for people who want to help rebuild the civic infrastructure of American democracy, who are interested in how they might do democracy at the local level within their own community. It describes ways communities might come together to consider alternatives to current conditions, to imagine what a better future might look like, and to build worlds together that help them to articulate shared values, hopes, and dreams. Through these workshops, we often find the common ground that so often seems missing in more partisan political discussions. We rediscover social bonds, because we are taking a step sideways from the immediate problems and playing with possibilities together. Imagine that.
A tradition of academic writing has spoken about “imagined communities”: the term comes from Benedict Anderson (1983) but he captures something which is widely recognized -- the ways a group of people too large to know each other directly perceives each other’s presence, feels connected with each other, and comes to share a common history, identity, and vision for the future. Anderson’s “imagined” is framed in the past tense, as if what links a group of people together to form, in his case, a nation-state is something which happened a long time ago, something we inherit from generations that preceded us. Often, the images we use to depict democracy -- the Spirit of 1776 or Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms, to cite two examples -- are images that evoke a sense of tradition, rooting democracy in the past, rather than as a living tradition. Yet, over time, those old symbols of shared identities and experiences wear out, they become stale as we see them used in far too many President’s Day themed advertisements -- they become “talk-democracy”. We stop listening as leaders talk down and talk past us with empty phrases and dead metaphors.
The work of the Civic Imagination Project embraces a different concept -- that of the imagining community which is actively generating new cultural symbols to describe their relationship with each other. Imagination is seen not as a product or a possession (not a fixed identity or predetermined set of contents). Rather, we talk about imagining as a process. Imagination is not something we consume or inherit but something we actively produce together, something we do. We can watch imagining happen; we can hear the voices of people engaged in acts of imagining. We are in the room where it happens…. This book describes some of the processes and practices which help free us to imagine together.
For those who have been on the front lines, making change happen on the ground, all of this talk of “imagining” together may seem loosy-goosy and frankly, beside the point. They want us to do, do, do, because the problems are too immediate, the stakes too high, the resources (chief among them time and energy) are too limited. Imagining, we are sometimes told, is a distraction -- mere escapism. The civic imagination may seem all talk and no action. Yet, the work of freeing the imagination is transformative, it paves the way for meaningful action, it opens a space where those who have not yet committed to a specific agenda can work through options together, it allows otherwise opposing groups to find a path forward together.
Social Activist Naomi Klein (2017) has written about her own experiences of sitting in a room with people of diverse backgrounds and concerns, groups that are often set apart and pitted against each other as they fight to be heard amongst the many distractions of a media saturated environment: “We had come together to figure out what connects the crises facing us, and to try to chart a holistic vision for the future...We also had come together out of a belief that overcoming these divisions -- finding and strengthening the threads that run through the various issues and movements -- is our most pressing task…. Our goal, and it wasn’t modest, was to map not just the world we don’t want but the one we want instead.” (232-233) We embrace these same goals through our workshops, whatever groups we are working within and across.
Frankly, we have more work to do in terms of creating truly inclusive spaces around these workshops, tending to operate so far in relation with pre-existing communities with shared histories and beliefs, rather than seeking to bridge differences in the radical and transformative way Klein describes. As a research team, we are actively seeking out and talking with diverse groups but we have not yet brought truly diverse people into the room at the same time. But, then, that is the struggle of the current decade -- to overcome histories of discrimination and exclusion, to learn to listen to a broader range of voices, to bring more diverse perspectives to the table. Putnam’s bowling leagues were never as inclusive as our nostalgic celebration of the past might lead us to imagine, and we need to figure out ways to define communities other than through acts of exclusion.
We are not going to get past such problems if we can not learn to talk across our differences. Such exchanges will push us beyond empty talk about “civility” or “political correctness,” because they will proceed on the basis of shared understandings and trust. Sometimes, these conversations will be difficult, they require those who have felt left out to call out that history and question its logic, and some people -- perhaps many -- will get upset in the process. But we can only proceed when we start with a commitment to work through this together, to stick it out through the discomfort in hopes of getting to the other side. And even when these discussions are not as inclusive as we might hope, they do important work in our efforts to build a more just society. As Dahlgren (2009) discusses in relation to the notion of counter-publics, “To work out counterprojects...often requires some kind of temporary public withdrawal, an internal working through among like-minded citizens….Attaining new values, defining new needs, and developing new social visions is difficult to attain via consensus-oriented conversation, with universalists assumptions.” (90) So, there are times when a smaller, more homogeneous group needs to take stock of where it stands and what it will stand for, just as there are also times when the boundaries of the community need to broaden to incorporate a larger, more diverse mix of participants.
Sangita Shresthova and Gabriel Peters-Lazaro are the authors and architects of the approach described in this book, an approach which has emerged from our research together but which they have taken into the field and refined in partnership with a broad array of stakeholders. Over the past few years, as the principal investigator for the Civic Imagination Project, I have had a chance to observe these techniques in practice, as our research team has tested this approach in communities across America and around the world. We have conducted these workshops with participants ranging in age from middle schoolers to senior citizens, in labor halls and mosques, with policy makers and journalists, students and congregants, all of whom have things they wanted to share with us and especially with each other. I have seen what happens when you bring a group of people together in a room to share stories of memorable objects, to build a world, to create narratives that anticipate touch points in the process of social change, to remix favorite stories, or to reimagine their identities, their communities, and their surrounding environment. I have seen these playful tasks sparking social integration, breaking down suspicions, strengthening social bonds, and sparking fellowship and laughter. Agenda setting and mobilization planning can follow, building on the spirit of good will and trust these workshops generate.
Imagining together can yield unexpected insights as we discover common ground that we might previously never have anticipated. I was surprised when a room full of Arab educators and journalists, dressed in traditional garb, announced their desire for a world where no one -- not the government or their neighbors -- polices their religious beliefs and practices. I have struggled to understand how a group of former coal miners and tobacco farmers from Kentucky might simultaneously embrace the need for single payer health care and still vote for leaders dead set against such policies in part because they did not trust any of the social institutions powerful enough to deliver the kind of medical insurance they desired. I have been touched when my graduate students reported back on a session with low income middle school kids from Los Angeles whose vision of the future included many things taken for granted today by more affluent people living in their city or that a child begged for a world where there were no “bad drugs.” I have listened to faculty and students of a Swedish university describe their desire for a better health care system having already achieved universal access but not necessarily the quality of communication between doctors and patients that maintained human dignity. And perhaps most profoundly, I have seen how the acts of imagining frees so many to think beyond current impasses. Through this process, some of the common tropes of fantasy or science fiction take on new meaning: magic often becomes a metaphor for power, the teleportation system in Star Trek helps Americans think about their carbon footprint, Europeans imagine more efficient means of moving across their Union, and Arabs express their fears of the risks refugees face in traveling to other parts of the world. A world which possesses teletransportation is also a world without border police or fixed boundaries: a world where anyone can beam anywhere at any time without having to show their papers. Sometimes the fantastic allows us to speak about realities too painful to confront otherwise or to imagine possibilities too wonderful to imagine possible.
Sangita Shresthova joined us for my podcast, How Do You Like It So Far?, to discuss the books and what we’ve been discovering as we have brainstormed possible futures with people around the world [Link to: ] .
This week, I want to celebrate the many current and former students who have contributed to these books through the work of the Civic Paths research group. Each week, some 10-15 PhD students from the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism and other parts of the University of Southern California gather informally to share research insights and contribute to our ongoing activities. Some 15 of those students contributed essays to Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination. We read through and critiqued each other’s work. They helped us identify and respond to contributors. They were included in every step of the process of the book’s development. And now, through the blog, we are featuring conversations amongst some of the current members of the research team, many of whom came onboard too late to be included in the book themselves, but who are still helping push forward our thinking about civic imagination, testing it through both case studies and workshops. We will end this series with an update by Sangita Shresthova about where our research is taking us next.
We thank the fine folks at the Catherine T. and John D. MacArthur Foundation for their ongoing support of the Civic Imagination Project.
