Imagining Humanity: The Potential and Limits of Humans of New York (1 of 2)
/Becky Pham, Parmita Sengupta & Eduardo Gonzalez
Becky Pham
Hi Paromita, congratulations on your book chapter, “Participatory Action in Humans of New York (HONY)” (p. 262-270) in the edited volume! Thank you for agreeing to let Eduardo and me be in conversation with you about this chapter in particular and your research directions in general. Could you first give us a brief introduction about yourself and what have you been up to recently?
Paromita Sengupta
Thank you, Becky. I am a fifth year doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at USC, writing my dissertation on humorous hashtag movements and the use of civic humor to push back against mainstream discourses around police violence, neo-fascism, amd rape culture. The chapter in the Civic Imagination casebook is a 2-part project that arose from my MA thesis on affective activism in participatory online communities. The book chapter focuses on civic imagination and storytelling, while the second part of the project is an article that is being published in Transformative Works and Cultures in March 2020, and focuses more on the fan-created “Humans of” spinoff pages, and how they have resisted what I see as Stanton’s obsession with maintaining a contrived spirit of goodwill and positivity on HONY. I am excited to talk about this in more detail, so thank you for interviewing me!
Becky
Thank you, Paromita! I am Becky Pham, currently a first-year Ph.D. student at the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at USC. My research interests mainly focus on children, youth and media, and the one research thread most pertinent to our conversation today would be my ongoing fascination with how the mainstream media portrays transnational K-pop youth fandom in Vietnam, how the Vietnamese publics react to these media representations, and how the young fans respond to and resist both. How about you, Eduardo?
Eduardo Gonzalez
I am Eduardo Gonzalez, I am also a first-year PhD student at the USC Annenberg School of Communication and my research focuses on political representations of migrants, and ethnic and religious minorities in the U.S., Mexican, German and Turkish media. My work also looks at rhetoric used in popular and political media outlets to depict minorities, political violence, censorship, and death. Lately, I have become more interested in understanding how the civic imagination might play a role to envision a more connected and compassionate world.
Civic imagination
Becky
Awesome, thank you Eduardo! Paromita, back to you, could you share with us more details about your trajectory in choosing HONY as the case-in-point to elucidate the concept of “civic imagination"?
Paromita
HONY was an interesting example of the civic imagination, because it manifested in two different ways in the community. Brandon Stanton (the creator of HONY) originally started out as a visual storyteller, who would tell beautiful, emotional, and very truncated stories about the people he photographed on the streets of New York. His Facebook fan community was an integral part of the participatory storytelling process, because they used the comment section to add to the narratives, ask questions, collectively brainstorm potential endings to the narratives, and express the desire to intervene directly when possible. Stanton facilitated this process by creating fundraisers where fans could donate money to help out in various situations. It was a participatory imaginative process that envisioned better endings to Stanton’s truncated micro-stories, and established an interventionist framework through which the fans could try to achieve those endings.
However, Stanton has also made it very clear that he wants HONY to be an apolitical, positive space, which severely limits some of the more critical discourse around stories that Stanton had posted (or in one case, posted and then deleted). The second iteration of the civic imagination is expressed through the “Humans of” spinoff pages, such as “Humans of Tehran” and “Humans of Hindutva”, which deal more directly with local political issues, and have collectively reimagined what participation through the ‘Humans of’ storytelling model could look like if it was a more participatory process between the photographer and the community.
Eduardo
You brought up a great point, Paromita. Stanton’s vision of a simultaneously peaceful, apolitical space but with interventional tendencies indeed seems like it would be inherently at odds with each other, which naturally explains HONY’s severe limits on more critical discourses, and the emergence of the “Humans of” spinoff pages that ensued for more participatory communities.
Becky
Yes, indeed. Just to add onto this thread of participatory processes, I want to delve into how the history of a community could influence its trajectory of civic participation. The concept of “civic imagination" emphasizes the power of one's imagination before one could change the world. With regard to HONY, the case-in-point here has possessed in itself a rather established history and well-defined norms of engaging in real-life problem-solving and building social consciousness through imagining better. I am curious, then, during your research process, did you happen to come across any communities that were still in their early stages of imagining without concrete evidence of collective action yet? What could be some of the factors that influence how civic imagination could be successfully or unsuccessfully translated into real social changes?
Paromita
The answer to that depends on how you operationalize terms like “real social changes” and “concrete evidence of collective action”. My research focuses on humor and social change, so I am personally wary of using “social change” to refer exclusively to measurable changes in public policy, law, or infrastructure. And if that is how social change is to be calibrated and understood, my answer to your question would be no, I have not seen any of the ‘Humans of’ pages engage with any kind of collective, organized, civic action on that scale. Most of these are smaller pages, and do not have Stanton’s funds, reach, or media attention.
However, as Stanton began to gather global popularity as a philanthropist traveling through war-ridden countries in the Middle East and doing global outreach programs with the UN, he definitely started to become more fixated with the idea of keeping HONY friendly and positive, even at the expense of critical conversations around race, intersectionality, and the US military-industrial complex. In his conversations with the “Humans of” Syria and Iran, he is essentially curating the conversation through his choice of what quotes to feature and what to leave out. This is nothing new, of course. The truncated micro-conversations were always curated by him, even when they were about New York. But now, with his global outreach, he is shaping how millions of Americans (not to mention millions of fans globally) are imagining precarious populations like Syrian refugees. And that is problematic, because for Stanton, the “humanity” of a population is premised on how universal and “American” their stories are. The stories are meant to inspire sentimentality, but not necessarily empathy, because they do not depict social realities through a critical perspective.
More problematically, he wants the subjects to be de-racialized in order for them to be human. In an article in the (now discontinued) Bettery Magazine, Stanton described his experiences as an American photographer in Tehran as follows: “I was underwhelmed by the danger. I was underwhelmed by the religious fanaticism…The only thing present in a larger-than-expected dose was normalcy. The entire country was plagued by normalcy. Everywhere I looked—on street corners, inside of shops, and even inside of homes— there were normal people doing normal things.” The use of the phrase ‘normal’ here is troubling to me, because it implies that we should consider an entire population to be human only so long as they are ethnically-neutral, and subscribe to the mould of “normal people doing normal things.”
This is where the spinoff pages become really interesting to me, because they are much more willing to put aside the spirit of goodwill and positivity, and engage with local political issues. “Humans of Hindutva” is a satirical page that critiques the neo-fascist Hindutva movement in India by creating fictional interviews with Indian political figures (or in one memorable case, a cow, see attached screenshot) to expose the absurd logical fallacies within their ideals of nationalism and racial superiority. “Humans of Tehran” works with Iranian photojournalists to tell stories of Iranians from their own perspective, highlighting the complex, layered nature of their lives. For instance, it highlights the voices of women in technology in Iran and the complexities of maintaining trans-continental relationships with family in the face of the US travel ban. To me, these count as “real social changes,” because they use the civic imagination to resist public perceptions of Otherized communities and populations, and allow citizens of countries that are typically demonized in the media to tell their own stories on their own terms, and not be forced to be ‘humanized’ through a white, colonialist gaze.
