Yes, Transmedia HAS a History!: An Interview with Matthew Freeman (Part One)

From the start, there have been competing claims about the origins of Transmedia storytelling. Many read my discussion of The Matrix in Convergence Culture as indicating that transmedia was a new phenomenon emerging from networked culture. Transmedia in that account lay where old and new media collide. Indeed, at the time I wrote Convergence Culture, I was excited about the prospect of a new storytelling paradigm which I was trying to piece together from the glimpses provided by a range of contemporary projects -- from Dawson's Desktop and The Blair Witch Project to the early ARGS to The Matrix. So my understanding of Transmedia in Convergence Culture reflected a sense that something new was happening here. Yet, if you look closely at my discussion of "The Art of World Building", you will see references throughout two Homeric epic, Joseph Campbell, and the Christian church in the Middle Ages, as points of comparisons to the world building and extra-textual references found in contemporary Transmedia storytelling. I was certainly not arguing for a total break with the past, and I was hinting that people have been using every available media to tell stories fora long, long time. Derek Johnson in his own book, Media Franchising: Creative Licensing and Collaboration in the Culture Industries and through his contribution to Spreadable Media has consistently made the case that today's Transmedia is simply a reconfiguration of much older industry practices. Similarly Avie Santos has used the example of the Lone Ranger to make the case for earlier forms of product licensing as prefiguring Transmedia. See his recent book Selling the Silver Bullet: The Lone Ranger and Transmedia Brand Licensing. Other contemporary books such as The Rise of Transtexts explores a range of historical analogies. I will be sharing more insights from that boo'ks editors in a subsequent interview in this blog.

But to date, the most thorough and convincing exploration of the prehistory of transmedia has emerged from the pen of British media scholar Matthew Freeman. Freeman recently released the book Historicizing Transmedia Storytelling: Early 20th century Transmedia Story Worlds which represents the state-of-the-art in terms of exploring historical antecedents. Across this book Friedman develops case studies of the Wizard of Oz, Tarzan, and Superman as significant media franchises of the early 20th century. In each case, fictional characters and worlds were extended across a range of contemporary media platforms. For example, L Frank Baum, the "Royal Historian of Oz", wrote not only books but also comic strips, stage plays, films, games, and other print ephemera, each of which told us something we didn't know before about his magical realm. Within the first few years of Superman's existence, the character was appearing in both comic books and comic strips, animated shorts, live-action serials, and radio dramas. Each of these platforms contributed significantly to the development of Superman as we understand him today and of the superhero genre more generally. Freeman explores why each of these producers were willing to take a chance on a new genre and a previously unexplored audience. There were not necessarily the same strong links on a narrative level across these different versions, but there certainly were examples of additive comprehension as sophisticated as anything found in today's Transmedia franchises.

Freeman's book must be regarded as a essential reading for anyone wanting to understand how the modern sense Transmedia emerged and what forms it might've taken in earlier eras. Freeman is deft in his ability to move between contemporary theoretical and critical accounts of Transmedia and detailed historical accounts of earlier media practices. I was honored to serve as an outside reader on Freeman's dissertation and have watched with great interest as he's translated that document into the current book. I was delighted when he agreed to conduct an interview for the blog in which he explores a range of issues concerning both contemporary and historical forms of Transmedia entertainment. I will be sharing his insights over the next three installations of my blog. Enjoy!

Let’s begin with the question which frames your first chapter -- why “historicize” the study of transmedia? What has been lost by keeping the focus of discussions of transmedia on the current moment, on an emerging or evolving set of practices within the entertainment industry?

Most pointedly, I have attempted to show in Historicising Transmedia Storytelling that there is far more to transmedia storytelling than meets the eye. It may well be a practice of industrial convergence that affords media content to spread across the subsidiaries of a conglomerate. It may also be a system of technological convergence that grants audiences the power to themselves spread stories across a web of digitally connected media platforms. But transmedia storytelling is also a form of historical production, distribution and even regulation, and one that had a very important role to play in historical media culture long before such modern convergences existed.

That said, I do agree with those who claim that transmedia storytelling is the future. The concept and practice of transmedia has really come to define the workings of today’s (commercial) media industries, speaking as it does to the ways that the spread of content across platforms comes to encapsulate the networks and convergences at the core of today’s media.

And yet the perceived newness of transmedia storytelling – or rather the perceived importance of newer convergences on the rise of transmedia storytelling – has indeed left a sizable gap in our understanding of this practice and its importance across the face of history. Derek Johnson once remarked that ‘one of the newest dimensions of contemporary transmedia entertainment is our recognition of it as such’, and the practice of telling tales across media has not only fed into the workings of media industries over the past hundred years or so, but transmedia storytelling can actually be used as a lens through which to make better sense of some of the biggest industrial, cultural, social and even political developments characterising the fin-de-siècle, the rise of modern advertising and Hollywood.

For example, I explore modern advertising at the turn of the twentieth century, itself a fast-developing industry and system of cultural and commercial communication. That period’s advertising can provide us with a source of early industrialised transmedia storytelling. At that time, new trends in modern advertising invited authors to apply promotional techniques based on branding, collectivity, colour printing technologies, etc. to their storytelling practices. In essence, everything from the giant billboards on the side of buildings and the artistic arrangements in shop windows to the promotional forms of newspaper comic strips served to attract an audience’s attention with content (characters, images, spectacle, etc.) before steering them elsewhere, often across platforms to other related content in media texts and consumer products in an overtly transmedial fashion. In this instance, only via the process of historicisation can we more fully understand transmedia as itself the industrialised slippage of commercial logos, fictional characters and brands across platforms well over a hundred years ago.

In mostly conceptualising transmedia storytelling as part of digital or industrial convergences, it is fair to say that many scholars have thus far had a tendency to neglect such workings of the past – thus leaving us all with a limited and narrow understanding of what is actually a far longer, far broader and far more complex historical development. In other words, only by looking to the past can we fully see the contingencies of the present, and by searching for historical precedents it can force us to be far more nuanced in describing what is truly specific to our present media moment. To be clear, my work is in no way a ‘corrective’ to any particular scholarly understandings of transmedia storytelling. Simply, it is an expansion of those understandings, adding new information, insights and perspectives that enhance the characteristics of this important phenomenon as it evolved across history.

If we are historicizing transmedia, why should our focus start with the dawn of the 20th century? Set the stage for us in terms of what conditions were emerging then which would push storytelling in a more transmedial direction.

There’s no denying that the notion of stories that span multiple platforms pre-dates the dawn of the twentieth century. Derek Johnson and Roberta Pearson, in particular, point to the mythological narratives of Ancient Greece and to the cross-platform narrative architecture surrounding the figure of Jesus Christ as possible (almost pre-historical) forms of transmedia storytelling. Mark J. P. Wolf also points to things like Homer’s Odyssey as a storyworld that exists transmedially and trans-historically.

And so while identifying ‘the first’ transmedia stories is surely well and truly beyond our abilities as researchers, there were nevertheless some major and fundamental transformations associated with the United States circa 1900 that became intrinsically tied to the rise of transmedia storytelling on an industrial scale. Most broadly, two of these key transformations were industrialisation and consumer.

I should probably explain that statement a little. In many ways, telling stories across media is not really about stories converging as it is about stories building – rather like a series of extensions that are added to a building to form a larger and ever-expanding house. This analogy of a house hints at a central point: The industrial strategies of the past century that became most significant to the industrial history of transmedia storytelling were all practices or developments that afforded a way to build and to spread that which was built. Industrialisation was all about building and spreading. Just as media convergence allows content to flow across multiple media platforms, so did industrialisation, albeit in different ways.

Of particular importance were the technological changes that made the production of new forms of culture possible and the concentration of people in urban areas that created significant audiences for this new culture. At the turn of the twentieth century in the US, indeed, larger cultural factors concerned transformations that saw a predominantly rural-farming economy eventually develop into an emerging urban-manufacturing landscape. It may have only fully characterised particular cities such as Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, but this period unquestionably witnessed the full force of industrialisation and became characterised by related developments to do with new models of mass production, fresh industrialised systems of modern advertising, and evolving developments in methods of mass communication.

What is important to stress is that, come the turn of the twentieth century, new forms of mass production technology, which led to a new and characteristically American form of manufacture, emerged only around the turn of the twentieth century. And this American form of mass production was vital to transmedia storytelling at this time.

Consider the era’s new archetypal model of industrialised mass production – the assembly line. The assembly line’s significance on what is now called transmedia storytelling ties most straightforwardly to the fact that production fast became a reproducible system of adjoining interchangeable parts during this particular time.

If imagined only from a strictly manufacturing perspective, transmedia storytelling is similarly about the reproduction of many media texts as much as it is about the creative expansion of fictional storyworlds and the migration of audiences. If the entire process of transmedia storytelling is ‘like building your Transformer and putting little rocket ships on the side,’ as Heroes’ Tim Kring once put it, then those additional ‘rocket ships’ are essentially interchangeable extension parts. And it is for this reason that the assembly line – this quintessentially American form of mass production – is so crucial to comprehending the industrial context through which transmedia storytelling emerged as an industrialised practice.

After all, in the same way that transmedia storytelling is the integration of multiple forms, or a process where elements of a larger product work like components of a unified experience, so too was the model of early-twentieth-century mass production: The assembly line was a process whereby one component was produced according to its relationship with others, which in turn was designed to be joined with another component, and with each of these adjoining components eventually all coming together to form one larger product. Conceptually, the assembly line and transmedia storytelling both work on the basis that separate product-pieces are each added one by one to form a larger product, like individual bricks building a proverbial house. In short, mass production afforded the sheer reproducibility of fiction as multipliable products for the industrial age.

From there, we then reached a phase in US history where consumer culture emerged, and this too was crucial. Economically, transmedia storytelling operates on the basis that audiences will gain both a richer and fuller understanding of a given story if they consume more of its media texts. Any attempt to historicise transmedia storytelling must therefore account for consumer culture as a broad contextual backdrop; the consumerist ideology ingrained into many current definitions of transmedia storytelling suggests that its history is closely related to the rise of consumer culture.

Specifically, the rise of consumer culture around the early twentieth century was important to the industrial history of transmedia storytelling for two reasons. First, the new models of mass production described above would lead to increased mass distribution, spreading the array of new products across media and audiences whilst further intensifying the importance of standardised differentiation on the production of products. Second, this mass distribution gave rise to the business of a number of interconnected licensing practices associated with corporate authorship’s managerial function, and in turn transmedia storytelling became corporatised. Put simply: If industrialisation afforded ways to build media on an industrial scale, then consumer culture afforded the means to spread and market that media across platforms.

Dr Matthew Freeman is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Bath Spa University, and Director of its Media Convergence Research Centre. He is the author of Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds (Routledge, 2016), the author of Industrial Approaches to Media: A Methodological Gateway to Industry Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and the co-author of Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (Palgrave Pivot, 2014). His research examines cultures of production across the borders of media and history, and he has also published in journals including The International Journal of Cultural Studies, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and International Journal of Communication.

Presenting the Videos of Transforming Hollywood 7: Diversifying Entertainment Conference

Today, I am happy to share with you the videos capturing our Oct. 21 event, Transforming Hollywood 7: Diversifying Entertainment, hosted by the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, in partnership with our colleagues in UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television’s Producers Program. The event was organized by Denise Mann, Henry Jenkins, and Stacy Smith and sponsored by JK Foundation, Fusion/Univision, George Foster Peabody Foundation, and the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. The day was incredibly rich, full, and generative, so we are hoping that the discussions captured here can provide resources for others who are exploring issues of diversity and inclusion in the entertainment industry. Final conversation with Melissa Rosenberg, Series Creator/Showrunner, Marvel’s Jessica Jones, was not recorded at the request of the speaker, but everything else is here. WELCOME Ernest J. Wilson III, Dean, Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism Denise Mann, Head of the Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television Henry Jenkins, Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education, University of Southern California

STATE OF THE FIELD

Stacy L. Smith, Director, Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative, Associate Professor of Communication, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

In February 2016, the Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative at USC Annenberg released the Comprehensive Annenberg Report on Diversity (CARD). The CARD report examined films, television and digital offerings of 10 major media companies from 2014-2015. Looking across gender, race/ethnicity and LGBT status, the study provides a look at what its author, Dr. Stacy L. Smith, calls an “epidemic of invisibility” in media. Dr. Smith will present findings from the CARD report and her most recent studies to give attendees a glimpse of the current state of entertainment media and the progress still needed.

PANEL 1: WHY DOES INCLUSION MATTER?

Moderator: Robeson Taj Frazier, Director of the Institute for Diversity and Empowerment at Annenberg (IDEA); Associate Professor, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

After hearing about the dismal representation of marginalized groups in entertainment, one question remains: What can be done? As the conversation on diversity and inclusion continues to escalate, several voices stand out from the crowd with solutions, strategies and attempts to address disparities. This session brings together industry members and experts to discuss four essential topics. First, the panel will address why inclusive entertainment matters. Second, individuals will discuss the underlying causes at the heart of why under- or skewed-representation persists. Third, the group will overview what efforts are underway in Hollywood to effect change. Fourth, panelists will cover the challenges that remain and the work still needed to increase representation on screen and behind the camera.

PANELISTS:

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Head of Equity and Inclusion, Pearl Street Productions Bertila Damas, Actor and National Chair of the Ethnic Employment Opportunities Committee, SAG-AFTRA Melissa Goodman, Director of the LGBTQ, Gender and Reproductive Justice Project, ACLU of Southern California Danny Woodburn, Actor, Vice Chair SAG AFTRA Performers with Disability Committee, Member International Council on Disability, Ruderman Family Foundation

PANEL 2: WHAT ALTERNATIVES DOES SOCIAL MEDIA OFFER?

Moderator: Denise Mann, Co-director, Transforming Hollywood; Professor and Head of the Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television

This panel explores social media as a powerful tool for artists, activists and influencers to express their voices of diversity and dissent outside the Hollywood mainstream. Social influencers are a new breed of online creator whose ability to thrive in the platform economy depends on their facility with social media connectivity to amass a dedicated following of online users. Fans who become invested in a favorite artist or musician can help spread their messages of change across an exponentially wider circle of social media communities. While guaranteed a paycheck via “work-for-hire” contracts, Hollywood talent lack essential power and agency because they don’t control the copyright for their artistic work. In contrast, actor-creator-entrepreneurs such as Freddie Wong and Issa Rae are running mini-studios of their own making and retaining part or full ownership of their creations; at the same time, they must use a variety of social media tools to keep their voices heard above the din of clickbait and app fatigue. This new breed of online creator also needs powerful advocates: TV showrunners who understand how to navigate the Hollywood system; talent managers who know how to connect creators with alternative voices to their fans; and tech experts who can tweak algorithms so that streaming content aggregators serve artists as well as platform founders. Welcome to the platform economy.

PANELISTS:

Troy Carter, Founder, Atom Factory; Global Head, Creative Services, Spotify Bambi Haggins, Associate Professor, Arizona State University; author Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America Prentice Penny, Executive Producer/Showrunner, HBO’s Insecure (based on Issa Rae’s web series, The Misadventures of an Awkward Black Girl) Freddie Wong, Director, Co-Founder and CEO, RocketJump; online video pioneer and VFX artist

PANEL 3: HOW DO WE CHANGE THE SCRIPT?

Moderator: Henry Jenkins, Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education, University of Southern California

Within the entertainment industry, genre conventions help to shape what stories get told and how productions get promoted and marketed. Many of today’s creators find themselves pushing against taken-for-granted assumptions and long-standing formulas, and as a consequence, often fall back on old tropes and stereotypes. Both realist and fantastical genres offer opportunities for “changing the script” but they also bring historical baggage — old ideas about race, gender, sexuality and disability. The news media like to focus on the white male backlash in fandom but many active fans are embracing these changes and, indeed, modeling through their creative responses what more diverse genre entertainment might look like. Activists are asking critical questions about the ways even more diverse and inclusive productions fall short of our hopes. So, how do we change the script? How do we embrace new stories? How do we tell the old stories differently? And what role can the fantastical or speculative genres perform in imagining alternatives to current racial realities?

PANELISTS:

Grace L. Dillon, Professor, Indigenous Nations Studies Program, Portland State University; Editor, Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction Javier Grillo-Marxuach, Writer/Producer, Lost, The Middle Man, The 100, Xena: Warrior Princess Nakul Dev Mahajan, Dancer/Choreographer, So You Think You Can Dance Dodai Stewart, Executive Editor and Director of Culture Coverage, Fusion Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Young Adult Writer; Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania Phil Yu, Founder/Editor: Angry Asian Man

A gliche cut off the very beginning of this program, but the core is here.

PANEL 4: HOW DO WE MOVE FROM STEREOTYPES TO MORE COMPLEX CHARACTERS?

Moderator: Maureen Ryan, Chief Television Critic, Variety; Juror, Peabody Awards

The challenge of creating more diverse representations often centers on the construction of characters. It is not enough to put diverse faces in front of the camera: We need to depict those characters with nuance and complexity, in ways that audiences will recognize from their own lives, in ways that inspire their imaginations. Where does the responsibility rest for generating compelling characters in contemporary popular entertainment? What roles do producers, writers and actors play in defining who these people are, what they desire, how they react, what goals they pursue and what relationships they form? And how should we respond when bad things happen to good characters, when subsequent production decisions undercut or marginalize characters whose presence is particularly significant for underrepresented segments of the population?

PANELISTS:

Evelyn Alsultany, Associate Professor; Director of Arab and Muslim American Studies Program, University of Michigan; author of Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11 Desmin Borges, Actor, You’re the Worst Effie Brown, Producer, Dear White People Kathy Le Backes, Vice President of Research and Development, Wise Entertainment Melissa Silverstein, Founder and Publisher, Women and Hollywood Jeff Yang, VP of Cultural Strategy, Sparks & Honey

Mapping the Pragmatic Imagination: An Interview with Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian (Part 6)

How important is it that we share what emerges from our imagination with others -- that we think of imagining as a collective rather than personal/individual process?  

This is such a powerful and important question - one worth devoting much attention to, as you have!

I don’t think we can ignore that it starts with the personal/individual process – this question of the collective imagination, I mean. As individuals, as children, we learn about the world through our imagination. Playing with things, imagining what they can do and then feeling the pushback to learn about the world. As we grow, we use the same mental capacity to create the stories through which we participate in social life and then, ultimately civic life. We assimilate events and build stories that construct our individual identities inside of a larger group. So all the tools and capacities and tricks of the imagination that we employ as individuals are in preparation for both social/civic life and a larger kind of civic imagination. If we aren’t using our imagination fully to somehow close gaps between novel things and events and what we know, the stories we hold and the identities that they sustain, then we atrophy as authentic individuals – we become part of a pack. And if we are not using our imaginations fully to imagine alternate stories, to experiment with those stories, then we also atrophy. We succumb to inertia in a world that is far from inert. Resilience requires being able to imagine and then act on alternate pathways.

Imagining as a collective scales off of the personal/individual process. We know that as a child grows, they begin to participate in a social group of peers through play where the imagination gets shared through language – beginning language and simple stories. As they interact with family, school and then ultimately increasingly larger social groups, the friction between stories of their own – the stories of their embryonic identity - with and without peers - and those of the larger body require some kind of resolution. This resolution is the beginning of participating in a social group and then civic life - public life with a sense of responsibility to the group. The moment one stops using their imagination for that resolution – accepting unaltered the stories and rules of the social context they are entering – is the moment when one loses the faculties needed for a civic imagination as a collective imagining.

In Pragmatic Imagination, we talk about the personal/individual process of imagining as an intra-psychological process that occurs in a short amount of time – from nano-seconds to seconds. The collective imagination is a shared cognitive/psychological/emotional process that is mediated through language or images and over some amount of time.

So when I think about the collective imagination, I think if it in two ways: as a sustaining imagination and as an evocative – propositional - imagination. The sustaining imagination is contained in the stories of a social or civic group – those stories that provide the shared identity and frames through which a group interacts with the world. ‘Images’ of how a group sees itself, the historical events from which it derives this perspective, and even what constitutes viable futures. Just as a child resolves novelty through the imagination, the civic body does as well. This is why ‘history’ is always an interpretation of facts. Biases of a group are a function of this. The fact that a group of people might actually see something – believe they see something – that does not intersect with the actual event, means that they are all working off of similar banked mental images – the stories of collective self. This is why contested geopolitical boundaries are so contested and so emotionally charged. The stories of events rarely overlap. This is also how we have things like the Salem witch trials and mass hysteria of all sorts.

But in addition to a civic imagination that sustains a civic body, there is the civic imagination deployed to either participate in civic life for the betterment of the whole and the potential for a civic imagination that works to evolve the civic – to shape the civic body anew.

If the collective imagination relies on a current of language and images, today, with all the new media we have, and with the way in which it can spread quickly over vast distances, clearly there is a new capacity for engaging people in collective imagining: for finding and building social community, for sustaining stories, for presenting the stories of others in order to hold up a mirror to a situation, cultivating understanding and empathy, and for engaging others in imagining possibilities in order to create authentic and impactful action at many scales from the personal to political. The pervasiveness of media and the ease with which individuals can participate as both creators and consumers has created hyper-performance around stories and images that are the currency of any communal imagination.

You have made great use of J.K. Rowlings quote “We do not need magic to transform the world. We carry all the power we need inside of us already. We have the power to imagine better.” Again that seems to imply the individual BUT when it is part of the Harry Potter fan base – a collective group that takes seriously that challenge and call to action – the imagination transforms into real civic engagement – engagement with a sense of responsibility to make the world better – and real civic action. This is pretty spectacular. Your new civic imagination atlas project is a testimony to the scale of this endeavor of using collective imagination for social change. And again, whether it is change to be catalyzed by empathy or by actual projects – a kind of activism of the imagination.

Another thing about media today is how engaging it is because it surrounds us with multiple inputs that challenge the boundary between the real and virtual. To be able to not only hear about something, but to see it, to be in it, virtually, and then to even participate in the story through media intentionally designed for participation (games, args, world building, fan fiction), has heightened the potential for identifying with people, situations and events as stories. The potential in this is that one slips beyond understanding into empathy. This is fascinating. John Dewey spoke of the Moral Imagination as a capacity to imagine oneself in the shoes of another in order to act better. But he also spoke of rehearsing better action. So imagining and then rehearsing, with the intention of this spilling over into real life. The ability to use media today to, not only rehearse, but to be in the situation with all of its texture is an opportunity to super-charge Dewey’s concept. I, myself, am fascinated with empathy. Empathy is a state that does not go away. Sympathy does. Too often the two are confused and little sustained action comes from sympathy.

It may seem like I am digressing but for me, empathy is engagement that transports one into a different place. Beyond understanding as a cognitive intellectual process, it compels you to act as if it were you. Collective imagining that can attain this and then open up possibilities for alternate futures – possibilities either not imagined or not seen as viable before - and then possible action - the how to get there – this is very powerful for shaping desired, not default, futures.

As I talk about this I am reminded that one must also understand how all of this can be used for bad as well as good. The capacity is agnostic. Collective imagining (ISIS’ new caliphate) can be as powerfully bad as it can be good. Understanding how it works is necessary for counteracting as well as acting.

So, yes, imagining as a collective and imagining at scale. The potential is enormous. Which makes me wonder . . .

In Pragmatic Imagination, we talk about how the imagination engages in an entire spectrum of cognitive activity from perception, through reasoning, speculation, experimentation, and free play. This is a spectrum, not different categories, and different locations on the spectrum correspond to different degrees (proportions) of using the imagination for sense-making and sense-breaking.

So if you permit me to riff off this relative to the collective. Although I am not quite clear how yet, I think there is something super interesting in thinking about how the spectrum works on a collective, even civic, level both operationally and cognitively . . . Certainly networks are forging an entirely different set of scaled public spaces of imagination. I think it could be productive to unpack how the civic imagination (let’s stay with that phrase) operates and could operate all along a similar spectrum. We’ve talked about its value for creating understanding (at least) and empathy (at best), for speculating on possibilities around civic action and then carrying them out (that’s the pragmatic part – instrumentalizing the products of the imagination), and for building/widening communities around this social action . . . We know how the imagination functions collectively to perceive/interpret events that come along (often emotionally) but is it used for ‘reasoning’? And on the far side of the spectrum, towards experimenting and playing (without specific goals in mind), how to think about that . . . at scale . . . could we engage a civic collective at scale in imagining a different future? For instance, could we get a nation to imagine an alternate ‘american dream’ in a way that scaffolds ownership and commitment and leads to political action and redesign.

Benedict Anderson used the phrase Imagined Community in 1983 to define nation as a socially constructed community imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of a group despite the very real differences, inequalities and exploitations that exist. It is an imagined political community that shares, what he calls, a deep horizontal comradeship. As testimony to this he talks about the willingness of millions of people over the last two centuries ‘to die for such limited imaginings.’ Writing this today on 9/11 2016, it is pretty clear that that statement has become much more true in certain contexts and much less true in others. What would be interesting is to pragmatically construct a process to catalyze the civic imagination of us at the scale of all of us in order to, not only find coherence of nation, but to imagine a nation that holds all of our diversities[1] in a productive culture[2] of cacophonies.

So yes, to answer your question, sharing what emerges from our imaginations with others is invaluable. Finding pragmatic ways to instrumentalize what emerges is even more critical. And imagining collectively for civic purpose (on the good side) and then finding pragmatic ways to set that imagination on the ground running towards a better future at any scale is even more valuable. I want to emphasize the ‘at any scale’ part because small actions, smartly deployed, can have disproportionate impact. BUT, there is a caution in this. And that is that ‘smart’ is critical. Intention and capacity to imagine better is not enough. In a complex world that is constantly changing and hyper-connected, where contingencies override absolute conditions, unintended consequences or even just unforeseen consequences can override intentions. Knowing how to navigate this world is critical for civic action. This is what Design Unbound is about - a kind of manual for how-to-think-about and tools-to-do. Pragmatic Imagination is what we call both parent and child to DesUnbound because without the imagination, it is hard to get beyond incremental change and default futures. But also, it, as a specifically human faculty, is the way we evolve as individuals, as societies and cultures, and as a globally distributed species. At all scales, imagination is, as one of Frank Underwood’s writers, Beau Willimon, says, its own form of courage. In context of the show, he did not mean imagination itself, but the willingness to follow where it leads and act on it. Of course, in his case, we can’t ignore that there was/is some degree of evil involved.

Ann Pendleton‐Jullian is an architect, writer, and educator of international standing whose work explores the interchange between architecture, landscape, culture, science, and technology within complex contexts. She is currently Full Professor and former director of the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University, distinguished Visiting Professor out of the President’s Office at Georgetown University, and periodically co-teaches world building studios at USC’s School of Cinema.

ApJ’s projects range in scale and scope from things to systems of action. Notable projects demonstrating this range are: a house for the astronomer Carl Sagan and his wife; award winning prototypical bioclimatic houses – one for Tenerife; various winning or placing competition entries including a New Congress Hall in Valparaiso, Chile, and an urban design project for the Miguelete River basin sponsored by the Municipality of Montevideo. Much of her recent work focuses on empowerment and economic development through various projects including the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh and an eight-village ecosystem conceived around rural craft tourism in Guizhou province in China. Currently she is working on a new Jesuit University for Eastern Africa, including its pedagogical model, the future re-imagining of the Pardee RAND Graduate School of Public Policy, and a house in an environmentally sensitive part of the Pocono Mountains. ApJ has five authored books and portfolios, including: The Road That Is Not a Road and the Open City, Ritoque, Chile by MIT Press (’96); Games for Shanghai (’08) published by CA Press in Shanghai; and Design Education and Innovation Ecotones (’09).

[1] Diversities is pluralized to indicate many kinds of diversity from physical to cultural to socio-economic to educational to dispositional and so on – a whole host of diversities.

[2] by culture I mean like the culture in a petri dish – the growing of organisms in or on a medium.

Mapping the Pragmatic Imagination: An Interview with Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian (Part 5)

You cite designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Ruby as saying, “The purpose of speculation is to unsettle the present rather than to predict the future.” Does this imply that science fiction and other speculative genres might have a particularly powerful role to play in fostering the Pragmatic Imagination? What do you see as the relationship between speculative fiction and speculative design?  

Yes, absolutely, and in two ways. Speculative genres serve as provocation, whether as a challenge directed at society through speculation as critique, or as an evocative object/text/construct, that sets the imagination in motion in the reader - orchestrating their participation in the speculation. But speculative genres can also serve as methodologies, meaning that one can engage in the making of speculative fiction – writing scenarios of one’s own as part of a larger process of speculation around a topic or problem. In Pragmatic Imagination, we have a chapter on this issue of setting the imagination in motion – tricking it to appear when one has something they need it for.

Speculative genres are powerful because they are much bigger than merely predictive. When done well, they honor the same muses of prediction – they understand the need to find trends in the present that will impact the future - but they don’t stop there because they do not assume that the future is pre-written, nor are they uncritical of trends and their possible trajectories. Dunne and Raby’s statement hit a chord with me because of the opportunity that is inherent in shifting from prediction to speculation. Prediction implies that the future is something playing out and that predicting it in advance puts us in a better position when we get there. Unsettling the present is about actively accepting the responsibility that we are all constructing our future with the decisions we make and the things we do. Trends then are merely trajectories with a history but also with an alterable future. Both speculative fiction and speculative design work to question trends and their interactions by speculating on what might play out (for good and bad) and presenting alternatives that may be either worse or more desirable. Science fiction and speculative fiction can do both. They can play out trends the authors see emerging – alerting us to the monster in the backyard or pointing out the angel of opportunity in the driveway – but they can also break with the logic of trends, unsettling the present by speculating on futures that would demand action in the present to get there.

Speculation comes in different genres – is present in different genres. We see it as fantasy and horror, as science fiction, and even as satire or mock non-fiction. Speculative fiction and design can be extreme fantasy or it can be just one note shy of reality.

The kind of speculative fiction I have always been most drawn to is the one that is just a note shy of reality; one that opens up a gap of dissonance between what you think you know and some peripheral parallel possible reality. I remember discovering Ray Bradbury when I was very young . . . Growing up in the Midwest – not one particular place – but lots of the same kinds of places – suburban towns-not-quite-towns – where the trees never grew taller than 5 feet (seemingly – we moved a lot) and the back yards blended into one unending undifferentiated lawn. Under-stimulated intellectually and emotionally, I took to reading Ray Bradbury. I remember discovering Something Wicked This Way Comes, October Country and The Illustrated Man (preparing me for my obsession with Magical Surrealism later on). These are not what we think of when we think of science fiction – perhaps closer to an American surrealism that blends some aspects of science fiction with liminal horror and fantasy. These novels completely captivated me because they revealed an edge or crack in reality. Inside that crack was a mirror reflecting back a hyper-perspective – an uncanny space alive with possibilities, both good and bad. This instilled in me the sense of alternate spaces and stories just out of reach, simultaneously just beyond the big-sky horizon at the end of my street and embedded in the folds of too much time on my hands. I became captivated by the notion of what else might be out there, especially possibilities that might make little or no sense in the calculus of the present, although one might reverse engineer them to.

So back to your question more directly, I think the value in science fiction is that it speculates on what the future might look like if we play out certain trends in science and technology. This helps us see where we might be headed. If we don’t like it, then that certainly unsettles the present, emotionally. The Matrix is one very good example of this as is Stephenson’s work. Socially oriented science fiction tends to critique the world, show us the repercussions of our ways, and in a space that we emotionally respond to whether positively or negatively. Science fiction when it is story based tends to create an emotional look and see. But science fiction can also speculate on what one might accomplish in the future. This is where the fiction of Jules Verne or Asimov might fit in. Jules Verne’s work not only socialized the science and technology but created desire for.

Science fiction helps readers imagine alternate scenarios constructed on playing out science and technology trends or desires. There has always been a gap between those who are scientifically and technologically sophisticated, or even knowledgeable, and those who are not – usually the majority of a population. This gap is only increasing. Science fiction brings this science and technology into the realm of the social. It does so to entice and to warn, playing out fantasy and fears. The unsettlement is the emotion of being confronted with these. In a complex evolving world, there are always unintended/unforeseen consequences of things we do – the sciences and technologies we develop. But when a monster appears in the back year, most of us believe it will disappear because it wasn’t there yesterday or the day before. We believe it must be an aberration. Science fiction writers recognize these monsters – the good and bad ones – for what they are, imagine what they might become, and construct stories around them. This is valuable. But the problem with science fiction (why I am less interested in most of it) is that it doesn’t necessarily speculate on possible alternative states that may or may not be about trends. And science fiction often does all the work for the reader.

Science fiction that engages in world building goes beyond science fiction that is meant to show us something. In creating an entire world context with texture and coherence, the reader is now asked to participate in that context. In doing so, they contribute, they speculate. They write new stories and build out more of the world. This moves one from the big picture of, for example, machines dominating the world in The Matrix, to the texture of a prototyped near future – Minority Report – in which the big picture cascades through all facets of the world in which we participate. In this kind of science fiction, we run into conflicts as things bump up against each other. Driving for coherence, we seek to resolve, or wrestle with these conflicts: marketing and surveillance and bio-engineering and cars and family life . . . So beyond the message and themes, one participates and wrestles with the world one is speculating about. This is valuable.

I am much more interested in fiction that explores and tests boundaries to stimulate insights about the world around us - to challenges us to see the world less naively – and then provoke a space of possibility in which we can imagine – non-naively – the world differently – different for better, whether only incrementally better or hugely better.

World building can do this.

But this brings us also to speculative fiction. It would be fair to say that all fiction is speculative but of course what you mean, what we mean, when we refer to speculative fiction is fiction where one is speculating, usually about a world space, around some theme or idea. For me the paradigmatic example of this is the short ‘story’ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by the Argentinian poet/writer/intellectual Jorge Luis Borges. Tlön is written as a narrative account of finding a piece of an encyclopedia for a supposedly real, but obviously fictional, world. In parallel to telling the story of the discovery of this encyclopedia, it cites from the encyclopedia, providing a textured sketch of the world of Tlön, which is built on a specific philosophical ideology that exists in the society in which Borges lived. He speculates on what a world based on Berksonian Idealism would look like – in all domains from language to animals to social and economic systems. He does this in order to speculate on how this idea would play out – what a world based on this concept would look like. This kind of speculative fiction is stunning in that it allows us to play with concepts or trends or anything in order to see a different possible world. This disrupts how we think and act in the present. Borges did not set Tlön n the future. Instead it was an alternate now (actually, an alternate then – it was first published in 1940) that was intended to disrupt and influence – unsettle – the now (then).

Speculative fiction can be in the realm of futurism, but it does not have to be. This is where it parts company with science fiction. I am actually much more interested in speculative fiction that is used to interrogate the present, unsettling it so that we might actually act differently (so back to the quote from Dunne and Raby).

Another one of my favorite books, which is speculative in nature, is The City & the City by China Miéville. Alex McDowell introduced me to this when we were doing the RiLao world building studio. The City & the City interrogates the notion of two cities that exist overlaid, or interleaved. One city is wealthy and modern, while the other is struggling and not modern. There are forces that believe the two cities were one city and forces that are responsible for policing the difference. Citizens of each city are required to ‘unsee’ the other city, even if a car from the other city is hurtling towards them – stepping out of the way without ‘seeing’ the car. To travel between cities requires going through customs and immigration even if the person you want to meet with lives in the building next door to you. Miéville denies different interpretations that frame the book as only a critique of given conditions in our cities today. I suspect it is because he is more interested in the speculation than the critique - interrogating what this condition means for one’s love life, business, etc. and then speculating on how to get around it. The novel is a who-done-it set in a world of ‘what-if’. As we participate in the who-done-it aspect, we begin to engage with the premise and try to see a few steps ahead. Speculative fiction allows us to see a story or a world based upon a ‘what if’. And usually, it engages us to participate in speculating on that what if. But it stops there. It might emotionally and intellectually motivate us to action but it does not really ask us to, nor does it provide a framework for action.

Speculative design on the other hand is a call to action, even if only for the designers. Design that is speculative, even if existing on a very theoretical plane, is always a call to action because design by nature goes from ‘what-if’ (the speculative question) to designing ‘as if’ if were real (fiction and world building does this as well) but because design is engaged within a practice that is geared towards ultimately producing things in the real world, it puts speculation and imagination around speculation to purpose. Even when not realized, it is there ready to be released into the real world because speculative design is meant to circulate. It “depends upon dissemination and engagement with a public or expert audience” – those who are in a position to do things in the real world.

Speculative design can be about small things (Superflux – a camera to photograph 5 dimensions) or it can play a social and possibly political role, “combining the poetic, critical and progressive by applying excessively imaginative thinking to seriously large scale issues,” quoting Dunne and Raby again. Dunne and Raby have a project called “The United Micro-Kingdoms”, which they talk about in their book Speculative Everything. They refer to it as ‘big design’ because it is societal systems level design. But it actually does both. It speculates at the ‘big’ systems level and then designs artifacts that both manifest and interrogate the ‘big.’ The project speculates on four different possible futures based upon a set of four different political ‘what-if’ scenarios that are derived from crossing degrees of personal freedom with degrees of economic freedom. They used a scenario planning framework where two axis cross representing two different current trends one wants to focus on, creating four quadrants that represent four possible scenarios. Unlike traditional scenario planning though, the axes are not associated with real world trends but (conflicting) political positions, and the scenarios are not anticipated scenarios but imagined states. Instead of “it will play out this way”, they ask “what if we could imagine it this way.” The project creates four concurrent micro-Britains, each of which is based upon an alternate ‘what if’ scenario. Not stopping there, they then do a partial world build of those scenarios and then focus on the automobile and its infrastructure as a physical artifact and system that manifests many aspects of that world. In the end, the results play out, critique, and interrogate current positions and trends. But they do so by speculating on alternate courses of history based upon other values and intersecting ideologies.

While being a type of research, it is more. It opens up a public imagination (speculative design is meant to be disseminated – the United Micro-Kingdoms project was extensively exhibited and published) to possible future realities. Speculative design, even in its extreme form, is not fiction. It is meant as research into possibilities. And like all good research, the most successful speculative design can be rigorously interrogated and assessed.

This is part of the pragmatic dna: to not imagine gratuitously or for personal pleasure only, but also, for public influence and agency. For me, as an architect, this is when it becomes very interesting – when it leads to agency in the real world.

Speculative design is a space between reality and the impossible. It focuses on how to think about reality in a sophisticated, complex, world-space way. To use the imagination both freely and synthetically - for sense-breaking and sense-making to radicalize reality. In Pragmatic Imagination, we talk about setting the imagination in motion and then instrumentalizing the products of the imagination for action in the world. Speculative design offers a framework for setting oneself in motion within the context of a big question or problem that draws on the pragmatic imagination. It also suggests a practice of design speculation that instrumentalizes the products of the speculation through public dissemination. But one need not stop there.

Ann Pendleton‐Jullian is an architect, writer, and educator of international standing whose work explores the interchange between architecture, landscape, culture, science, and technology within complex contexts. She is currently Full Professor and former director of the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University, distinguished Visiting Professor out of the President’s Office at Georgetown University, and periodically co-teaches world building studios at USC’s School of Cinema.

ApJ’s projects range in scale and scope from things to systems of action. Notable projects demonstrating this range are: a house for the astronomer Carl Sagan and his wife; award winning prototypical bioclimatic houses – one for Tenerife; various winning or placing competition entries including a New Congress Hall in Valparaiso, Chile, and an urban design project for the Miguelete River basin sponsored by the Municipality of Montevideo. Much of her recent work focuses on empowerment and economic development through various projects including the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh and an eight-village ecosystem conceived around rural craft tourism in Guizhou province in China. Currently she is working on a new Jesuit University for Eastern Africa, including its pedagogical model, the future re-imagining of the Pardee RAND Graduate School of Public Policy, and a house in an environmentally sensitive part of the Pocono Mountains. ApJ has five authored books and portfolios, including: The Road That Is Not a Road and the Open City, Ritoque, Chile by MIT Press (’96); Games for Shanghai (’08) published by CA Press in Shanghai; and Design Education and Innovation Ecotones (’09).

Mapping the Pragmatic Imagination: An Interview with Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian (Part 4)

Let’s shift to a topic that is central to both of us -- why is it important that adults retain the capacity for play?  

There are six critical reasons that have to do with one’s relationship to the world in the world: for learning and unlearning that leads to new learning; for constructing and evolving meaningful social relationships; for experimenting with possibilities in order to imagine alternate perspectives and pathways; for its cooperatively competitive aspects; for its emotional aspects; and for resilience because all of the others build resilience.

For learning and unlearning-leading-to-new-learning: The smallest children play as a form of unencumbered experimentation. This is how they begin to learn about the world as unique individuals – playing on their own to discover the world and themselves in the world as a concrete thing. Then play becomes social. One plays to learn with others, then about others and how one fits into the social puzzle. For children, play is a way to learn about the world – concretely and socially – experimenting to see how things respond, testing boundaries, playing with possibilities. The world is a place of magic because the ‘rules’ of the world are not yet clear to them and so their imaginations are as engaged in making sense of it, as in seeing the possibilities in it.

A stick is as much a wand as it is a stick until one ‘learns’ that the normative rules of physics and biology declare it just a stick. But play is a space of permission to relax those rules. So, for adults, play is a space of permission to unlearn ‘rules’ in order to experiment with possibilities that re-imagine the world under different terms – concretely and socially – with different rules or with themselves in different roles. Imagining ourselves in different roles, playing with those roles, allows us to discover new capacities, new interests, imagine alternate pathways forward, and build new social relationships. Imagining different rules governing reality, playing with those rules allows us to imagine alternate contexts, how they might work, and entertain as viable, alternatives that would not have seemed so before.

Both of these are valuable – maybe necessary – in a world that will always provide us with unanticipated events and often-drastic unforeseen change. Unlearning through play allows us to open our minds to learning things anew. Playing/experimenting with alternate selves in safe spaces of play, allows us to potentially evolve an authentic, not default, self. In a world rapidly changing with radically contingent unanticipated changes, authenticity is one’s center of gravity.

Play is, by nature, social. We play with others. Play helps us construct social relationships that are meaningful and it helps us sustain and evolve those relationships. On the individual level, playing with self-authored instructions one lives by in order to find where there is play in the system, helps one evolve in a social body. On the level of personal relationships with others, one constructs and evolves relationships through play, tapping into the emotional aspects of play as a means to draw someone closer. Playing with someone else in an emotional/playful space to create intimacy, but also to probe for similarities and dissimilarities – Do we believe in the same things? Do we play by the same rules? – in an unthreatening way because these underlie the play. One is probing, not debating.

Play also constructs social groups and scaffolds learning through social groups. My good friend and co-author John Seely Brown, when he left PARC in 2000, asked the video game designer, JC Hertz to reverse mentor him in the world of MMOG’s (massively multi-player online games). This experience led to him writing “The Play of the Imagination” and then A New Culture of Learning with Doug Thomas. I remember one of my very first conversations with JSB was about World of Warcraft and the peripheral communities that have grown up around the game – the way role playing, emotionally charged collaborative efforts, invented means of review and assessment for learning, all of these contributed to social communities of highly diverse individuals from around the world. And had the capacity to amplify learning around collaboration and leadership.

So I want to come back to this idea of a space of permission. Play, by definition, and by nature, is a safe space because we agree that it is not serious. When we enter into play (Johan Huizinga called this the magic circle), we agree that the endeavor is without any of the consequences of our normal lives. While based in reality, it is not reality. Therefore, play is rarely free form or random. It advances by rules, be they well designed and articulated as in complex game environments (from Go to WoW), or tacitly accessed and lightly present (children’s role playing games or affectionate repartee). Rules create coherence for play. They create the logic for what one can do. Animals frolic for exercise and socialization. Humans do too, but early on in life, stories begin to creep into the space of play providing the catalyst and the coherence for rules of play.

Because stories (close to, or far from reality) provide coherence and the calculus of play, play is a space of permission that relaxes the constraints of reality, allowing us to play with our own concrete and social relationships to reality. Concretely, we can do physical things differently. Socially, we can try out different roles and relationships. This can, and does spill out into the real world for both good and bad, But on the good side, playing new roles, we can learn about ourselves and we can also imagine as viable, new possibilities for ourselves. We can also learn about the world as it is by playing with ‘simulations’ of it, but we can also test boundaries, jump boundaries, and push on them. But we can also use play to imagine as viable, new possible futures. This is important for evolving as individuals and as social groups.

Play is an emotional space. As a space of permission where one relaxes real world rules, there is a sense of emotional and even cognitive relaxation. And there is delight in a space of play. There is delight in the cooperative pact of ignoring reality’s rules, for fun, for the game of it. But play is also competitive. One plays to win, even if only in the breaching of reality. In games that are set up as specifically player competitive, whether one on one or raid team against raid team, there is both collaboration and competition, which creates an emotionally charged social space. This entanglement of cooperation and competition in an emotionally charged space heightens the experience, which can amplify learning and capacity for real life collaboration and leadership. In play and games, where the consequence is insubstantial, one will take risks they will not take in the real world. And one will play them out in a space that still has a story’s logic. Mistakes will have to be fixed or at least analyzed for learning. One can fail big, learn and live to tell about it.

So all of these – learning and unlearning, evolving meaningful social relationships, experimenting with possibilities in order to imagine alternate perspectives and pathways, the cooperatively competitive emotional aspects – all of these lead to resilience and adaptability. If only for this, adults should not only retain the capacity for play, but they should play more. Not merely recreate more, but play more.

And then there is innovation, novelty, and the evolving of society and culture itself, including novelty and innovation around things – technological and otherwise – but also around the institutions and systems that make up society, and around the ideas that evolve culture, especially in a problematic age. For innovation and novelty, one needs to find the play in the system – where rules can be bent, broken, written anew. And even more radically, create rules for new systems - writing new stories that catalyze whole new rule sets - and then designing ways to close the gap between the present and envisioned future.

The fuel of play is the imagination, in all of its colors – the full spectrum of cognitive activity from perception to improvisation, all mixed together and inextricably entangled with the action of the ‘play’ that is in play. (This is what The Pragmatic Imagination outlines.) In the opening of play, we create a break from reality that invites our imaginations to participate as dominant cognitive activity. It requires our imaginations to participate, first to help us break with reality, and then to help us participate in constructing new rules of play – new instructions for action. So for what we term, in our book, sense-breaking, and then sense-making.

In our book, we talk about the imagination like a muscle. In play we exercise the imagination and the more we exercise the imagination, the more we can engage in meaningful play. One of the baseline perspectives of our larger system of books Design Unbound is that the world has “just come together too quickly” (to quote one of our colleagues) and that “we need a new tool set” (to quote another one). But in addition to a new tool set, we need a new ontology – a new way to be. I would suggest that this is a triangular ontology.

Several years back, JSB began to speak about a necessary new shift for learning from Homo Sapiens to Homo Faber. Sapiens literally translates as wise, but implies scholarly knowledge, and faber translates as artisan. So from learning through scholarly pursuits to learning through the act of making, loosely conceived. While supportive of the Maker Movement, it was more about all of the tacit, but bodily-imbedded ways we learn about the world. A triangular ontology – a way of being that we believe is critical for the 21^st century – would be the simultaneity of homo sapien plus homo faber plus homo ludens. Engaging the world – both learning about it and acting in it - through acquiring knowledge, making things, and playing. Homo sapien is about the world of the mind. Homo faber, the physical world. And homo ludens is about us as social creatures that engage in storytelling

So, adults need to play more because, from stories for role-playing to stories for 'what-if’ scenarios of new worlds, we interrogate the world through play, which leads to imagining and then prototyping new possibilities. This is critical not only for evolution of self, but also for evolution of society and culture. So we have a sixth critical reason for adults needing to play more. In addition to resilience and adaptability in the world, it is about agency on the world.

John also has been a great supporter of the Maker movement. In the earlier days he was supporting a shift. He used Homo Sapien to Home Faber as a construct – Faber being making. With all of his interest in WoW and my own interest in games and using them in studios . . . I became so fascinated with play and games, that I added homo ludens to the other two – not replacing but adding. Homo Faber is about the material world that we learn about through our hands/bodies, through making things. Homo Sapien is the world of the mind that we learn about through thought and reading and . . . Homo Ludens is the social world – the world of our relationships with others – that we learn about through play. Triangular ontology.

Ann Pendleton‐Jullian is an architect, writer, and educator of international standing whose work explores the interchange between architecture, landscape, culture, science, and technology within complex contexts. She is currently Full Professor and former director of the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University, distinguished Visiting Professor out of the President’s Office at Georgetown University, and periodically co-teaches world building studios at USC’s School of Cinema.

ApJ’s projects range in scale and scope from things to systems of action. Notable projects demonstrating this range are: a house for the astronomer Carl Sagan and his wife; award winning prototypical bioclimatic houses – one for Tenerife; various winning or placing competition entries including a New Congress Hall in Valparaiso, Chile, and an urban design project for the Miguelete River basin sponsored by the Municipality of Montevideo. Much of her recent work focuses on empowerment and economic development through various projects including the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh and an eight-village ecosystem conceived around rural craft tourism in Guizhou province in China. Currently she is working on a new Jesuit University for Eastern Africa, including its pedagogical model, the future re-imagining of the Pardee RAND Graduate School of Public Policy, and a house in an environmentally sensitive part of the Pocono Mountains. ApJ has five authored books and portfolios, including: The Road That Is Not a Road and the Open City, Ritoque, Chile by MIT Press (’96); Games for Shanghai (’08) published by CA Press in Shanghai; and Design Education and Innovation Ecotones (’09).

Mapping the Pragmatic Imagination: An Interview with Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian (Part 3)

I have been taken lately by a phrase from Stephen Duncombe’s writing about the value of utopian imagination, where he speaks of the “tyranny of the possible,” suggesting that our solutions to problems get limited when we are thinking only within the constraints of what we currently accept as reality. What are some of the tools you have discovered that people are using to think beyond “the tyranny of the possible”? How do we address the concern that unfettered imagination is by definition impractical if we are to achieve that mix of imagination and practice you advocate throughout the book?  

I love this phrase – “the tyranny of the possible”! Similar to it is one by Erik Olin Wright from Envisioning Utopias where he writes, “the actual limits of what is achievable depend in part on the beliefs people hold about what sorts of alternatives are viable.” The problem that I see with holding too tightly to only the viable and the possible is that one often ends up being purely tactical in nature – going after solutions to pieces of problems based upon one’s own biases and expertise – optimizing for what one thinks is most important and/or what one can ‘realistically’ do. This is fine for simple or complicated problems (think bicycle or Tesla) but will not work for complex problems that need real work at a dynamic systems level (think rainforest) where breaking apart the problem or operating tactically often causes negative versus positive outcomes. These are the problems that require a pragmatic imagination for reasons already touched upon.

Complex problems require thinking forward more than solving for the present. Imagining a better state and then working towards it. The “tyranny of the possible” when it looks forward only sees trends of today playing out. It is stuck in only what is known. It assumes that the future is a version of today playing out. But if you think about it, the future – in any domain, any piece of it – is an unknown. More importantly, it is an unknown that we are constructing, whether consciously or not, with every decision or action we take, small or large. In fact, I would suggest that it will be only a default construction if we wrestle in real time with problems and opportunities constrained by both the tyranny of the possible and the tyranny of time.

Utopian thinking, or imagining utopian states/societies, is liberating precisely because utopias are fictional no-places. But what if you want to think about real places and especially new possibilities, new possible states of existing conditions, problems even, how do you ‘land’ utopian thinking. How do you make it useful? How do you avoid the rejection of its results as being (tautologically) ‘utopian’? Historically, utopian thinking has acted as an invaluable critique of existing society, existing realities. As such, its role has been as an agent to prod others to act. So I come back to the question of how do you land it? In fact, how do you start it in a way that it is valuable and then how do you land it?

As you know, I have been interested in, and involved with world building for several years now. I am fascinated by its two-sided nature. It helps us escape the “tyranny of the possible” by giving us permission to imagine and then build a world based upon a larger construct, whether that construct is utopian or not. And then, because we engage in building out that world, with texture, across a wide range of domains, from those that are material (geography, climate, architecture, clothing), social domains (family structure, politics, markets and advertising, crime), mental domains (language, culture, memes), and technology, we create something so vivid that one can actually imagine inhabiting it.

At the 2014 TED conference (its thirtieth anniversary), the rock musician Sting gave a presentation in which he spoke about his rise to stardom and a period in which he was unable to write. After years of silence, he discovered a new muse in reflecting on his childhood. David Brooks wrote about this saying that “most TED talks are about the future, but Sting’s was about going into the past. (TED conference speakers generally live in hope and have the audacity of the technologist. And there’s a certain suspension of disbelief as audiences get swept up in the fervor and feel themselves delightedly on the cutting edge.) The difference between the two modes of thinking stood in stark contrast. In the first place, it was clear how much richer historical consciousness is than future vision. When we think about the future, we don’t think about the texture and the tensions, the particular smells, shapes, conflicts – the dents in the floorboards. Historical consciousness has a fullness of paradox that future imagination cannot match.”

What is interesting and so valuable about world building is that you are after imagining, and then creating through text, images, games, film, books, artifacts, “the dents in the floorboards,” So much so that one can actually imagine inhabiting that world. And even desiring to do so. In world building, one is making a whole range of viable and not so viable possibilities actually tangible enough that we are willing to consider them. We are willing to consider them because, as strange as the individual details might be, the world is coherent and therefore credible. And most world building starts in some aspect of reality that draws us in. The coherence keeps us involved until we begin to suspend our disbelief and run with the proposition in all of its detail and texture. And in capturing the “fullness of paradox” or paradoxes that one finds in real life, one is not only entertaining possibilities that escape the tyranny of the possible, you are also wrestling with conflicts and paradoxes that might belong to the present – but now in the way they may play out in the future (The Matrix or Hunger Games) – and/or actually discovering new paradoxes that are specifically related to what might happen if you place different imaged scenarios into the same world building container and let them bump up against each other through story (Minority Report).

There are different purposes for world building in cinema, literature and games. One might aim to create an intensified experience – frightening, delightful, fantastic or humorous; or, to immerse us in an historical period; or critique the present. World building can help us play out hopes and fears. But it can also be used to prototype a future: playing out trends to see where they might go; interrogating conflicts and paradoxes; but also to imagine, or hypothesize, a future based upon an idea or desired outcome - to imagine an ideal state, an ideal response, or a better world, and then build the world around it in the world building space so that one can build towards it in reality.

The value of this for real world situations and problems is just this: to imagine a desired future state, with texture, detail, and coherence, and then build towards it, as opposed to trying to solve for present problems – the kind that, in fact, cannot really be solved - in a fractured way. This can be done at the scale of a world situation, but it can also be valuable at the scale of an organization, or even an individual. I have engaged in world building my future and am actually doing a course this term for the students at Ohio State on exactly this. But I have also worked with organizations to world build the future of their institution in a way that has created something completely unforeseeable and catalytic. I have worked with students and faculty in three institutions to world build the future of the university. And I have worked on world building projects that have generated insight about the future. In these kinds of projects, one of the greatest contributions is that world building uncovers unforeseen questions, paradoxes, conflicts and even opportunities in the process of thinking big.

I was immensely fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with Alex McDowell, the production designer for Steven Spielberg on Minority Report, probably the best example of world building that aimed to prototype the future by bringing together the most advanced thinking, trends and inventions on the horizon to intersect with each other. Alex was recruited to a faculty appointment at the School of Cinema at USC and we worked on his first world building studio together. The project was a wonderful conceit. He was interested in working with either Rio or LA as a beginning point. I had been fascinated by a book of José Saramago’s called The Stone Raft in which a seemingly benign incident causes the Iberian Peninsula to break off from the continent and float out to sea. Saramago plays out the political, social and personal repercussions based upon the historical and contemporary relationship of Portugal to Spain. This influenced the generative idea for the studio: a portion of Rio had experienced a cataclysmic event, sending it out to sea, as did a portion of LA. They had collided in the ocean, somewhere non-specific and far from civilization, creating a new city-island-state called RiLao. As the students picked this up, they added more to the history including a major plague that had isolated the island from the contemporary world for a period of time, trapped a series of visiting scientists and technologists who developed a parallel, but different from any mainland society, science and technology – one that was very biologically oriented and highly constrained by resources. There was also a foundational mythology and economy.

The catalytic beginning point of Rio and LA collided together allowed us to look at the city as a site of major economic and cultural divides – both Rio and LA have this in common – multiple city islands within the city (we also read China Miéville’s 2009 novel The City & the City). It also allowed us to play with similarities of cultural exuberance and other themes. We found many similarities that underlie global trends and differences that characterized different expressions and possible future trajectories of these trends. World building worked off of the original premise of the collision of the two cities and themes that came from there, but also from student preoccupations as they mapped their own interests onto this world.

There was a fascinating oscillation between playing out reality with permission to let go of the ‘tyranny of the possible’, and the overlay of large ideas and questions that came from the students’ own preoccupations and obsessions about the future. It was fascinating! The responsible irresponsibility led us to find and wrestle with some hard questions. Not in the abstract, but in terms of how they might play out in a world – or a future world. In world building, coherence is the magical mechanism because, while you have permission to imagine beyond, or other-than, reality, the fact that you are building a world, demands coherence. It demands that all of the parts stick together in some sort of mesh of imaginative calculus. This is why and how one discovers paradoxes, conflicts, questions and opportunities.

For example, we had students interested in the plague and biological mutations that occurred because of it. Others were interested in the relationship of the plague doctors to the evolution of medical science on the island, while others were interested in how these plague doctors intersected with mythology and religious/cultural constructs. Some students played with the role of memory and identity associated with the plague generation, and how this conflicted with younger generations. The size of the island and its increasing population led to terra-forming, drones for construction, drones for cleaning and repairing buildings that were no longer accessible by infrastructure . . . the increasing divide between the dense lower income city and the new terra-formed neighborhoods . . . artistic traditions from both LA and Rio lent a surreal aspect to much of this . . . all of these contributed. Everything new folded back in to recalibrate the rest of the world.

One of the many memorable projects – just to show you the way things bumped up against each other – was the project of a Media Arts and Practices doctoral student, Behnaz Farahi, who was interested in how the densification of the city and the biological overlay intersected with issues of privacy, identity, fashion, architecture and expression. She was playing with the trend of machine-augmented humans with the assumption that the isolation of the island had allowed and demanded an accelerated level of development of biomechotronic parts. But concurrently, she was also deeply interested in how other life forms both protected and expressed themselves through camouflage, defensive adaptations, dramatic coloration and plumage. And then, of course, this resonated with the exuberant artistic cultural heritages of Rio and LA.

Camouflage from WbML on Vimeo.

Her project resulted in a ‘wearable’ device of feathers/armament that was controlled electronically through connections to the electrical output of the skin. Although it was prototyped as a wearable, there was always the assumption that it might actually be a permanent addition to a body. Featherlike in appearance, making reference to the elaborate costumes of Carnival, it could open and close providing privacy, defense and possibly shelter in a hyper-dense environment. The questions the project raised relative to future forms of humans, cybernetics, mutations, identity, space etc were fascinating, and deeply provocative – real questions that we should be entertaining with more rigor and imagination. In assuming the existence, and not the denial, of these trends, Behnaz allowed us to see something that might be as magnificent and useful as it might also be frightening. I have touched on this only briefly but it gives you an idea.

A second world building studio that I had the opportunity to witness the results of stands in productive contrast to the RiLao studio. Sometimes, one world builds around responsible and important questions. I was able to sit in on the final review of a world building studio that took on looking at solutions for a highly marginalized community in Lagos. The work was very responsible to the problem and beautifully produced. But wanting to be viable so that the results might be implementable, it got stuck in the tyranny of the possible. Specifically, many of the projects were evocative manifestations of assumed ‘solutions’ around education and health – solutions that others involved with these communities have already identified as necessary. The world building part added certain new technologies to the mix. Not to deny that these are important assumptions, but they are partial solutions that, while viable, have not yet gotten enough traction because the system – the world - around them (lack of funding, lack of government participation, community belief structures, etc) remains intact and immovable.

Going back to the RiLao example, the one project I cited – one of several very successful projects of the first studio – allowed one to see further and more critically – to use one’s imagination to interrogate the present in an exaggerated situation and to look for possible alternate paths of emerging trends. This is not to say that the fearful issues go away, just that one is willing to entertain possibilities that escape from normative biases. And entertain them in a way that lets you see them in a more complex context, technologically, socially and even culturally.

The RiLao studio spread after its first semester into a much larger group of participants. When it finished its ‘run’ after two years, 9 other schools in 7 countries had participated in building and interrogating this world with tremendous richness and imagination. Some of the work was pure fantasy but much of it provided windows into how to think about the future and real prototypes for projects that can actually be built today. This is another aspect of world building – that, if successful, the world is so evocative, that others can, and will, begin to build upon it, adding new content to the world and new stories that play in that world.

In world building for real world impact, we can target a future date that is far out enough to allow us to break with the present, yet close enough to avoid the seduction of fantasy. Far out enough gives us permission to imagine more than if we stay fixed in the problems, opportunities and solutions on our doorstep. Over the past three years, I have done a series of three studios with a colleague of mine at Georgetown University and one on my own at Ohio State to world build the future of the university for 2033. The first studio at Georgetown was in 2013. Our students were (mostly) twenty years old and so adding 20 years to 2013 meant that we were adding a ‘lifetime’ to the present year.

This created enough of a ‘too far out’ to escape fixed views of what is viable. They were still students that had emotional and epistemological attachment to their university, and so that, by default, provided responsibility. Sometimes too much so, but we persevered in pushing them. At the moment, there are two camps in both thinking and action around innovation in higher education. One looks at the problems to resolve, usually picking one to three of them to optimize for, and then creates mechanisms to do so. The other comes from the ‘let the new technologies disrupt’ side and promotes new technology rich methods for learning. Both of these are valuable, but partial, carving off a piece of the problem to work on when the university of today is actually the legacy of an era that is so distinctly different than our own that a new model is required. The digital hyper connected age could not be further from the industrial age, structurally, socially, epistemologically, emotionally, in terms of identity, and in terms of the functioning of the world. Therefore, we focused on what the ‘university/higher ed’ would look like if one world built it for the world of 2033. In world building a new model, the students worked to create integrated, rich, textured and coherent systems/models where conflicts and paradoxes are taken into account and held (not resolved) by the world.

The question then becomes: if one world builds a future, which we have said is not necessarily viable today, how practical is that? How can you ‘land it’? How can you create concrete things and actions that lead to change? How do you close the gap between the world that you have imagined/built and where we are now?

If we accept that the future is not known, that it emerges out of actions taken in the present, based upon actions in the past, then one has to work to shape the emergence. This means that you cannot create strategic plans in the traditional top-down five-year-prescriptive sense. In Design Unbound, we present a meta-tool that is a System of Action which works both in and on the context to shape change - to close the gap between a new imagined context/world or condition and the present reality.

Unfettered imagination should not be seen as impractical. The issue is that it is often seen as not actionable for anything but individual artistic expression. But pragmatic means being able to accomplish something. The pragmatic imagination means being able to marry imagination to action that has purpose and agency.

World building helps one do that. It helps you imagine beyond what you know to see more than you knew. Systems of action or any mechanism that instrumentalizes the imagination helps to put it to pragmatic purpose.

But I also want to be careful. One of JSB’s colleagues, who is an artist and website creator, was offended at even the term pragmatic imagination. He felt that it was demeaning or demoralizing to think of the imagination as pragmatic. As a person, myself, who is very thankful for having a practice that traffics in imagination, I’m not sure I understand completely his concern, but I can imagine that if one thinks that pragmatic means only practical, or that one has to even start purposefully, then I have the same problem. But the concept of the pragmatic imagination is actually the opposite of that. It is the fact that we use the imagination for everything to different degrees. Our point is that it needs to be understood more, valued for more, scaffolded – developing practices that set it in motion – and instrumentalized – both it and its products.

Sometimes the imagination just happens, but too often, especially as one matures if one is not in a discipline that specifically traffics in imagination, the imagination is illusive. The pragmatic imagination recognizes this. It looks at ways that others use to set it in motion all along the spectrum. Some of these just happen covertly, while others intentionally provoke its emergence. Pragmatic imagination consciously avoids the rhetoric around ‘we all just need to use our imaginations more’. Instead, it pragmatically sets out to talk about how, why, when, and where we can make more use of it as a cognitive muscle that releases us from the tyranny of the possible!

Mapping the Pragmatic Imagination: An Interview with Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian (Part Two)

Break down the core concept -- the pragmatic imagination -- for us. What do you mean by imagination? In what senses can our imaginations be turned into pragmatic tools for changing the world?  

When most people think of imagination, they mostly - or only - think of it in terms of the role it plays in artistic or speculative activities, those activities that we tend to associate with the word ‘creative.’ It has been deified within the realm of cultural pursuits and demonized when it emerges to get in the way of important thinking and serious work.

Those who trade in reason for a living recoil at its undisciplined nature. While others claim that we should not squander it on ‘practical’ work. Throughout western history, we have seen philosophers, artists and scientists setting imagination up against reason. Pragmatic Imagination proposes that the imagination is actually integral to all cognitive effort and therefore all activities in the world. But it is integral in different ways and to different degrees of effort. Understanding this allows us to unpack its role in the relationship between thought and action and then propose a way to think about how to amplify its capacity for meaningful activity of every kind.

We began by defining imagination. Because imagination and creativity are too often used interchangeably, we started by uncoupling the two. To do so, you need to enter into the domains of linguistics, philosophy and the brain sciences. (I said earlier that DesUnbound was its own ‘design’ project. This is because it moved forward through questions and more questions around those questions. As we asked and wrestled with questions, we discovered unforeseen perspectives, openings and branchings in previous thinking. This whole chapter is a good example of that!).

In wrestling with a good way to think about the imagination we went back to word origins. Both imagination and creativity are associated with novelty. That’s why they get conflated. But etymologically, ‘imagination’ is the capacity for, or the product of, imagining, which refers to the making of mental images. ‘Creativity’ is associated with the verb ‘to create’, and refers to inventive, productive and usually intentional action that results in the making of something.

Creativity is aimed at making things that enter the world, while imagination is a specific kind of cognitive function. It is the power or capacity of humans to form internal images of objects and situations. We usually think of these images as visual images, but they can also be auditory, olfactory, or motor ‘images.’

My colleague, the renowned neuroscientist who directs the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC, Antonio Damasio, talks about how the imagination relies on banked images that one recalls, brings ‘on line’ and then operates on to create novel combinations. The banked images he refers to come from both the world outside the mind and images that we are continually working on inside the mind. Experiences create images for the imagination to hold. But the imagination, with its propensity for playing with associations, also creates new renditions of them. So, real world experiences seed rich image banks for the imagination to draw from. The imagination is eclectic. It does not care where it gets images from and ‘real’ images are quickly replaced by ‘interpreted’ images.

Both imagination and creativity are processes that create products. But the product of the imagination is the image itself, while the product of creativity is something that enters and belongs to the world, whether that something is material – a new gadget – or immaterial – a new policy. And - (this is a critical difference) - they are differently experienced because they are different processes of human cognition and interaction with the world. The imagination is primarily an intra-psychological process, occurring in the brain on a temporal scale of microseconds, and ending when a resolution between an individual’s experience, and the internal image formation that this experience calls forth, emerges.

Creativity is a process that is part of a social domain of action. It operates on a longer time scale, ending when an internal cognitive product – a solution to a problem, an idea or an image - becomes embodied as something that enters the world of social relations – a world that has a history to it. Both are socially and culturally mediated products but the experience is different and the relationship of the product to the world is different. Because of this, we tend to associate creativity with intentions and purpose and we tend to associate imagination with the luxury of individual expression.

Why do I dwell on this? Because in looking at the imagination this way - as the cognitive process of making mental images - we were then able to interrogate how this cognitive process functions, and when. New research in the neurological and cognitive sciences – different work that focused on specific activities from basic perception to jazz improvisation – led to a pretty good framework for understanding how it functions. In understanding better the how, we then asked when. It is important to add that, while the concept and framework of the pragmatic imagination might have been catalyzed by scientific advances, it is actually a blend of science, philosophy, experience, and speculation.

A catalytic discovery for us was the work of two cognitive psychologists at UCSD who were working off of the shoulders of the famous Russian psychologist Vygötsky. Lev Vygötsky built a theory of human cultural development that theorized the interaction between the social and biological aspects of our evolution. The work that interested us was on how culture mediates perception – specifically, the most basic function of perception, which is seeing. Everything we see is mediated by the images we hold from past experience - images that are personal and cultural interpretations of the ‘real’ experience. (This is why two people seeing the same event might not agree on what they saw, or worse, a whole group of people might agree on the something they saw or experienced in a manner that completely contradicts what actually happened.)

Two UCSD cognitive scientists, Pelaprat and Cole, did a series of experiments, three quarters of a century after Vygötsky’s seminal work, that actually showed how, in the physical act of seeing, the brain relies on nano-second gaps in vision. When those gaps were removed, the brain ‘saw’ nothing . . . the image in front of the subjects disappeared to gray. In those gaps, they theorized that we use existing banked mental images to correlate the new image with what we know. In other words, to make sense of what we are seeing. This is where Pragmatic Imagination begins because this suggests that the process of creating, retrieving, and making mental images is not just about the most extremely undisciplined activities we might associate with this kind of cognitive activity, but, if it is also part of perception itself, then why not part of everything in between – an entire spectrum of cognitive activity.

Once you understand that the cognitive operations that are the imagination can serve in multiple roles from the most basic cognitive activity that we believe is a direct translation of reality – I’m talking about seeing – all the way to dreaming, which is considered the least directly related to reality, then the bi-polar dichotomy between reason and imagination is no longer relevant. This sets up the first principle of Pragmatic Imagination, which is that the imagination serves diverse cognitive processes as an entire spectrum of activity from perception through three forms of reasoning, speculation, experimentation, and all the way to where the free play of the imagination dominates.

There is a quote by William James that I love. He gets it. He says, “There are imaginations, not ‘the Imagination,’ and they must be studied in detail.”

In our interest to ‘study in detail,’ we then went on to look at the role of the imagination in this spectrum, and to specifically ask about the role of the gap. The gap being the difference between the unmediated thing we see, or experience in the world, and what we know; between the new ‘image’ and our banked ‘images.’ On one side of the spectrum - in perception through reasoning - we use the image making capacity of the mind to resolve that difference. The imagination helps us close the gap and make sense of the world. But as one moves along the spectrum, we actually use the imagination to enlarge, or create, new gaps and then to assist in resolving them to different degrees depending upon how the image is meant to intersect with the world. When we speculate on something, we begin to entertain things that are not necessarily viable - we begin to form images of things that might not be possible – of things that are strange to us. And then we use the imagination to make sense of these strange things – or at least to make them familiar enough to assimilate them. So there is a sense-making capacity in the imagination but there is also a sense-breaking capacity.

These are the first two principles of our framework. The next four go on to talk about how to harness all of this – the whole spectrum for pragmatic purpose. This framework allows us to talk about how the imagination, in all of its cognitive roles, can be put to purpose for agency and impact in today’s world. But it is also important to clarify that we use the word ‘pragmatic’ in its richest sense. We do not mean ‘practical.’ They are often used synonymously to refer to common sense conduct that is concerned with ordinary activities and ordinary work. This may accurately define ‘practical’, but it is insufficient for ‘pragmatic’ as both a way of acting and a way of thinking.

The Pragmatic Imagination draws on a deeper and more textured meaning of the word by borrowing from philosophical Pragmatism whose foundational premise was that thinking and acting in the world are integrally associated; they are indivisible and reciprocal, meaning that thinking – learning actually - depends upon empirical action in the world and action depends upon thinking. In Pragmatic Imagination, we are building a framework to understand how imagination and action can sustain a similar productive entanglement to support agency in the world. And how this is critically relevant in today’s white water world.

Pragmatic Imagination is a framework of six principles that build on each other in a manner that is intended to be useful for getting at how the imagination can be better understood, prompted into action, and then converted into work for all activities, but especially to create a new capacity for working on complex problems in ways we have not been able to do – and, to use your words, “to change the world.” In complex problems, or almost any problem, or opportunity, or interaction with the world, it is often those things which one doesn’t see clearly, or cannot foresee, or will not entertain as viable, etcetera, that are most difficult for us, yet potentially most useful. Often in focusing too hard, responsibly, earnestly, on a problem, we miss seeing the problem completely. Imagination is cognitive peripheral vision that helps us ‘see’ all of those things that are lying just out of range of what we know. And helps us discover things unknown.

The framework draws from advances in the cognitive and neuro-sciences that have allowed neuroscientists to watch the brain functioning under different imaginative activities. It draws from first hand accounts of moments of intense awareness of this kind of cognitive activity. And it draws from personal experience as participants in, and mentors of, imaginative activity. It talks about different methods used to provoke and scaffold the imagination and then looks forward to Design Unbound as a tool set for instrumentalizing the products of the imagination.

The six principles of the Pragmatic Imagination are encapsulated here:

1. The imagination serves diverse cognitive processes as an entire spectrum of activity.
2. The imagination both resolves and widens the gap between the unfamiliar (the new/novel/strange) and the familiar. This gap increases along the ‘role of imagination in cognitive processes’ spectrum from left to right. Within the range of abductive reasoning, there is a significant shift from using the imagination for sense-making to sense-breaking, where one first widens the gap and then resolves it with the imagination.
3. The Pragmatic Imagination pro-actively imagines the actual in light of meaningful purposeful possibilities and sees the opportunity in everything.
4. The Pragmatic Imagination sees thought and action as indivisible and reciprocal. Therefore, it is part of all cognitive activity that serves thought and action for anticipating, and thought and action for follow-through; and the generative/poïetic/sometimes-disruptive side of the spectrum is especially critical in a world that requires radically new visions and actions.
5. The imagination must be instrumentalized to turn ideas into action - the entire spectrum of the imagination especially the generative/poïetic/sometimes-disruptive side.
6. Because the imagination is not under conscious control, we need to find and design ways to set it in motion and scaffold it throughout meaningful activity.

Ann Pendleton‐Jullian is an architect, writer, and educator of international standing whose work explores the interchange between architecture, landscape, culture, science, and technology within complex contexts. She is currently Full Professor and former director of the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University, distinguished Visiting Professor out of the President’s Office at Georgetown University, and periodically co-teaches world building studios at USC’s School of Cinema.

ApJ’s projects range in scale and scope from things to systems of action. Notable projects demonstrating this range are: a house for the astronomer Carl Sagan and his wife; award winning prototypical bioclimatic houses – one for Tenerife; various winning or placing competition entries including a New Congress Hall in Valparaiso, Chile, and an urban design project for the Miguelete River basin sponsored by the Municipality of Montevideo. Much of her recent work focuses on empowerment and economic development through various projects including the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh and an eight-village ecosystem conceived around rural craft tourism in Guizhou province in China. Currently she is working on a new Jesuit University for Eastern Africa, including its pedagogical model, the future re-imagining of the Pardee RAND Graduate School of Public Policy, and a house in an environmentally sensitive part of the Pocono Mountains. ApJ has five authored books and portfolios, including: The Road That Is Not a Road and the Open City, Ritoque, Chile by MIT Press (’96); Games for Shanghai (’08) published by CA Press in Shanghai; and Design Education and Innovation Ecotones (’09).

Mapping the Pragmatic Imagination: An Interview with Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian (Part 1)

Every so often, you are introduced to a person and by the time the first conversation is completed, you know you have met someone who is going to be a vital part of your intellectual community for years to come. This is what happened to me when John Seely Brown, AKA JSB (of Xerox Parc fame) introduced me to Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian.  Ann is an architect and urban planner, currently at the Knowlton School at Ohio State University, but she is so much more than that. Like JSB, with whom she sometimes collaborates on research and writing projects, she has a profoundly interdisciplinary mind. They are both fearless about pursuing their interests where-ever they lead them and they consistently ignore divides between science/technology and humanities/culture in doing so. They are  also both people with a pragmatic approach -- they want to identify the most compelling problems of our time and work with others to find innovative and meaningful solutions that make a difference on the ground.

In Ann's case, problem-solving increasingly involves a design process grounded in the concept of world-building as it has been shaped by the realms of speculative fiction, production design, and participatory planning. Every time I meet her, Ann describes to me new projects she is undertaking around the world, all of it growing out of a belief that humans have the creative agency to make a difference in their own lives if they are given the freedom and resources to do so.

The two have  been working together to produce a profoundly important project, Design Unbound.  As I've discussed it with Ann across the past few years, this project  has taken a variety of different shapes -- it is epic in scope, sprawling in content, and totally original in its bold synthesis of ideas coming from all different directions.   As Ann explains in response to my first question below, the project has required them to constantly reflect on what kind of thing a book is in the 21st century, what it means to read and publish such an object, and how a book can be the beginning as well as the end point of a creative and intellectual process. We still do not know the final shape this project will take, but along the way, they have put together what they are calling a "single," a stand alone booklet-length essay on The Pragmatic Imagination.

Given that some strands of my own current research centers around what we call The Civic Imagination, I've enjoyed many conversations with Ann about the value of imagination in confronting real world problems and so I am using the publication of The Pragmatic Imagination as an excuse for an extended public discussion with her about those aspects of their project. The result was something unique -- certainly not an interview in the sense I normally feature here.  She took each of my questions as a prompt for an extended essay which spells out many core aspects of her approach and along the way she provides us a vivid model for how she thinks and works. We might see the whole exchange as two polymaths thinking about thinking.  I am so excited to be able to share her responses with my readers over the next two weeks, hoping that they inspire others to think more deeply about the value of combining play/imagination/speculation/design with problem-solving.

You can learn more about The Pragmatic Imagination here. 

You describe The Pragmatic Imagination as a “single.” Can you explain a bit more why you are releasing this segment in advance of the book proper and how it fits into your larger project? What does it mean to think of Design Unbound as a “system of books” rather than as a self-contained volume?

Pragmatic Imagination is the last chapter – chapter 19 – of the larger project Design Unbound. Designing for Emergence in a White Water World. In a sense, it is the generative idea but we had to write the entire ‘book’ to discover that.

We began this work five years ago as a project to answer the challenge of a colleague of ours. We were at an Aspen Institute roundtable that was focused on how new technological tools could be used to influence diplomacy around the world. The dialogue ranged from conversations around drug wars to weaponized computer viruses. One participant, in a moment of exasperation said something like ‘the world has just come together too quickly to make sense of it,’ and our colleague John Rendon responded that the problem is we are using an old tool set and that it was time to develop a new one. We had already begun work on what would become Design Unbound, and JR’s challenge became an interesting provocation.

Design Unbound set out to define a new tool set for the world we find ourselves in – a world that is rapidly changing, increasingly interconnected, and where, because of this increasing interconnectivity, everything is more contingent on everything else happening around it – much more so than ever before. We characterize this as a white water world in reference to white water river kayaking, where navigation – often survival, even - depends upon understanding how to skill up for dynamic contexts in which things change and emerge without respite. One can see this as a difficult context or as an adventure. We chose the latter. The super interesting thing about whitewater rivers is that they are navigable, just not under the same terms. They require very different tools, skills, dispositions, and even epistemological frames.

Design Unbound is a tool set for having agency in today’s world, whether it is personal agency or agency to make progress on complex problems. It is about being able to navigate this white water world and/or to influence it – to work in it and even on it. The kinds of tools it presents are not the tools of a carpenter or coder but tools that are directly associated with a new kind of design that is an offspring of complexity science married to architecture.

We begin in architecture because principally architecture is about designing contexts in which things happen. It is an ambidextrous endeavor in which the social and technical come together to both hold and shape peoples’ relationships to each other and to the world. From a room, a house, a complex ensemble of buildings, cities, landscapes, and territorial systems of occupation, it is only one more level of abstraction to imagine design, unbound from its material thingness and from its disciplinary boundaries, set free to work on designing contexts as complex systems/ecologies.

These might be physical contexts (smart cities), institutional contexts (education), political contexts (making progress on networked terrorism), policy contexts (poverty, homelessness, environmental vulnerabilities), or cultural contexts (the ethics of data science). These contexts can accommodate well-practiced relationships and behaviors, or they can open up new possibilities of exchange, interaction and meaning creation.

Complexity science gives us a new lens through which to view the world - viewing that leads to action. It is an epistemological lens just as Newton's and Darwin's were. We don't see it as replacing those first two (gravity still works, last time I checked, and species still adapt and evolve), but, instead, as adding a third way to make sense of things, especially today when simple cause and effect do not seem to give us answers that stick, or solutions that can adapt to emerging events.

This third lens or window draws deeply from complexity theory and specifically from the perspective of ecology science - from understanding the complex dynamics of ecosystems. A Newtonian window looks at the world as described by physics. A Darwinian window focuses on processes and optimization. The complexity/ecological window looks at the world as a context - not a thing - and that context is a space of dynamic exchanges between all of the components.

These exchanges can be material in nature. They can be social in nature – exchanges influenced by our social systems (like economics and politics). And then there are all those things that are bound up in the dynamic exchange of ideas - the ideas that motivate us, the stories we build identity and culture through. We think of these as three registers or ecologies for this new window: material, social and mental ecologies of exchanges.

This is where Design Unbound begins. It then uses case studies and reflection on those case studies to present a series of tools that can be used to understand the world today and act with agency in it, and for impact on it.

Beginning the project that would become Design Unbound five years ago, it has gone through a series of different ‘completions’. We actually thought it was finished twice before. The first soft publication was around 225 pages; the second just shy of 375 pages and this last – ‘last’, meaning it’s done - manuscript has just weighed in at 800 pages. But more importantly, design unbound from thingness and disciplinary boundaries became not only the framing concept but also the way we worked. As the book became its own project, it transgressed more and more into other fields. This means, first of all, that the audience for this system of books is going to be broad and diverse.

So we decided to divide Design Unbound into five books for two reasons. Firstly, people read differently today. Shorter attention spans and multi-tasking means that we are often reading several things simultaneously. I am certainly reading in smaller chunks and as I do so, something I am reading in one area might get stuck to something I am reading in another: global affairs with landscape ecology with fiction with . . . By stuck, I mean that they overlap on each other in my mind, creating interesting correspondences. So I see reading in smaller chunks as being full of possibility. Publishing five books of smaller size makes it easier to focus on one part of the larger work at a time; to come and go cognitively.

Secondly, because Design Unbound draws from a vast array of domains: from architecture, science and technology, philosophy, cinema, music, literature and poetry, the military, even, different books within the larger system of books will resonate with different reading audiences. DesUnbound aims to blend a polymathic reservoir of thought seamlessly with real life examples of successful design and action, but it does not expect all readers to be polymaths. So, from architects to people involved re-conceiving higher education to the public policy or defense and intelligence communities, each audience will find different books most relevant. Each of the five books has its own narrative arc within the larger arc of the full book. They each have a different framing chapter and a different set of inter-related tools.

For a while, we thought of Design Unbound a little like a manual, and we were using that analogy until a friend of ours called it a ‘system of books.’ We were having trouble describing succinctly what it was – more than a book and yet not a series in the sense of being ‘serial’ where coherence depends upon the way short installments or successive pieces of something follow one on another in a linear fashion.

Instead, DesUnbound’s coherence is dependent on the way the different books and their chapters interact with each other to create an aggregate whole. They can be shuffled and grouped differently, yet still do the same kind of work. If we think of systems: in biology, a system is an assemblage of organs or related tissues that are concerned with the same function – their coherence is given by the fact that they are all working towards the same thing. Similarly, DesUnbound is an assemblage of books and chapters (tools and lenses) that are concerned with the same function - designing for agency. In astronomy, a system is a collection of celestial bodies that act together according to certain laws of physics – our solar system, for example.

DesUnbound is a collection of books and chapters that act together according to certain concepts (not exactly laws) around the entanglement of agency and imagination. And In ecology, an ecosystem is an assemblage of components that form a complex whole by the manner in which they interact with each other and with their environment. They interact by participating in material and social exchanges. DesUnbound is an assemblage of books and chapters that are meant to interact with each other, through how different tools use other tools, creating new capacities that either tool alone does not hold. So calling it a ‘system of books’ began to work for us.

As a system of five books, DesUnbound can be read together or separately. Like a reference manual or a vinyl analog album, one can leave and return to it, picking up the needle and placing it in the groove of a specific tune or skipping around among songs. Different books will probably interest different people, although all of the books together create a rich integrated tool set. The five books present a set of ten knowledge-, skill- or method-based instruments for acting through design and two meta-tools that do work of a higher order, at the level of the ecology of the project.

These tools, separately, and together draw on Pragmatic Imagination’s conceptual framework. But they also instrumentalize the pragmatic imagination. They depend upon the imagination for fuel just as muscles working physical tools depend upon food as fuel. But they also convert the imagination into work in the real world, just as muscles convert energy from food into work. As the last chapter of DesUnbound, Pragmatic Imagination is a framework for the productive entanglement of imagination and action that supports agency in the world.

We have called Pragmatic Imagination a single in reference to the music industry. I am a great fan of the television series Nashville. It and real work on DesUnbound began around the same time. So I will admit that this influenced the thought at the time.

Like a single released before an album, Pragmatic Imagination is meant to preview the larger work, introducing concepts and themes that anticipate, but also encapsulate, the larger project. And also like a single, we feel it can stand alone because of the way in which it anticipates and encapsulates the larger project with a singular coherence.

At one point we called it a prequel but that made less sense because it is not a single part of a linear story. It is part of the whole story. It carries the critical themes. But I will say that, as a theory, the irony is that it is less like the tool-oriented chapters – the more pragmatic chapters. But it sets the stage for them. It is the foundation, the dna, the primary autotroph, of DesUnbound. The kind of world we are navigating now, the kinds of problems we want to have agency on, demand a new tool set in which imagination is a not an embellishment or adjacency to real work in the world, but the keystone capacity upon which all other work depends because it advances understanding (empathy even) and it drives novelty. As a muscle of agility, it is necessary in whitewater.

Ann Pendleton‐Jullian is an architect, writer, and educator of international standing whose work explores the interchange between architecture, landscape, culture, science, and technology within complex contexts. She is currently Full Professor and former director of the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University, distinguished Visiting Professor out of the President’s Office at Georgetown University, and periodically co-teaches world building studios at USC’s School of Cinema.

ApJ’s projects range in scale and scope from things to systems of action. Notable projects demonstrating this range are: a house for the astronomer Carl Sagan and his wife; award winning prototypical bioclimatic houses – one for Tenerife; various winning or placing competition entries including a New Congress Hall in Valparaiso, Chile, and an urban design project for the Miguelete River basin sponsored by the Municipality of Montevideo. Much of her recent work focuses on empowerment and economic development through various projects including the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh and an eight-village ecosystem conceived around rural craft tourism in Guizhou province in China. Currently she is working on a new Jesuit University for Eastern Africa, including its pedagogical model, the future re-imagining of the Pardee RAND Graduate School of Public Policy, and a house in an environmentally sensitive part of the Pocono Mountains. ApJ has five authored books and portfolios, including: The Road That Is Not a Road and the Open City, Ritoque, Chile by MIT Press (’96); Games for Shanghai (’08) published by CA Press in Shanghai; and Design Education and Innovation Ecotones (’09).

Cinema and Life Interpenetrated: A Conversation with Anand Pandian (Part Two)

This is part two of a conversation between Ritesh Mehta, my former student, and Anand Pandian, author of Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation.  

Cinema and Life Interpenetrated: A Conversation with Anand Pandian (Part Two) by Ritesh Mehta

RM: Going back to your table of contents, I think that one of the most valuable contributions of your book is the methodology and approach—which I also attempt to employ in my dissertation—of trying to see the phenomenon from the point of view of your subjects, but as you point out towards the end, return it to a universal sense so that the distinction between subject and object disappears. I found that extremely valuable. I wouldn’t be as drawn to your book if you had a table of contents that was more concrete.

AP: None of us would be drawn to any film if it insisted incessantly upon the subject-object distinction. Cinema as a mode of experience depends precisely on the confounding of that distinction between self and other. There would be no affective involvement in something like cinema if it were not possible to undo that divide. And the challenge with this book was to find a way of acknowledging that, and writing in a spirit of fealty or fidelity to that essential quality of the phenomenon, rather than, say, domesticating it or reorganizing it in the name of a knowledge that ultimately would have very little to do with the nature of the thing itself.

RM: There’s a way to do fieldwork where you subsume your observations under the tyranny of concepts, and I really appreciate that you haven’t done that. At the same time, I love how you’ve woven in a broad range of literature throughout every chapter. It’s not even literature as much as, seemingly, an inventory of influences that you’ve interwoven your observations with. They connect the daily life of cinema production that you observed with things that have already been written. I appreciate that.

AP: It was important to me to pass through the book with a certain spirit of naiveté. That is to say, could I sort of wend my way through the materials and through the story in a manner that would allow new possibilities of thinking and perception to emerge, moment by moment, rather than having everything determined too heavily from the outset? I am quite drawn to the idea of the essay as itself a kind of narrative mode of peregrination. There are many literary critics who have commented on the ways in which the essay as a narrative form might be understood as a kind of walking in writing. It was important to me to see if I could write this book in such a fashion. That is to say, could I disarm myself sufficiently with what I have at my disposal as a critic, as a knower, to really allow these circumstances to act on me, to provoke unexpected questions, associations, sometimes even leaps that may or may not be quite intelligible, again as a way of being responsive to the openness of the medium.

RM: That’s great and makes a lot of sense. But from an actual writing standpoint, though, how did you do it? You were writing throughout, I’m assuming. When you bring in Hirokazu Miyazaki [note: the anthropologist, not the Studio Ghibli founder], for example, in the chapter “Hope,” did you plan in advance that in this chapter you will bring in Miyazaki, or did you come across him unexpectedly? How did you decide to weave in the quotations you bring in from your inventory of influences?

AP: I would say that this was a very curious aspect of this process. The whole period of researching and writing this book was one in which I had to really confront my own tendencies to be overly controlling and to recognize that a lot of the charge of not only things like cinema but of these dimensions of experience—of Art, Rhythm, or even of Fate—has precisely to do with the sense of being caught up in something and you don’t know where it’s going.

So the process of writing this book was essentially a series of experiments in seeing to what extent I could allow this spirit to infect the way that I wrote. Could I set up some set of initial conditions and then just follow them through, regardless of where they led? Like that chapter on Desire, for example, I can’t even tell you how it struck me that it might be interesting to have a chapter as a sentence that never ended, a chapter like a scream. It felt intuitively like the right way of proceeding, given that the director that I was writing about here was like this. That in writing that way, I might be able to reach that idiosyncratic texture in that particular situation. A lot of the writing got worked out as I went along. I think one value in thinking about writing as a kind of walking or a kind of movement is that the analogy forces us to take seriously that with every step, with every movement, you can only work with where you are. And I think there is something liberating in that, in knowing that there are any number of things that we do, that unfold step by step, literally, rather than require everything be foretold at the outset. And indeed, that’s precisely the nature of the process as I found it here. It was an incredibly improvisational way of proceeding that I saw with these filmmakers.

RM: Is this improvisational style with initial conditions a new approach for this book, or have you tried that with your prior writing as well?

AP: I think I’ve probably always done it. I think at some level we do always do it. I think there are any number of circumstances in which we make the most of where we are. We really have no other better choice. But because in this circumstance I was writing about something that was so insistently made that way, so insistently of the moment, I wanted to try to do it more deliberately. I have learned through the process of writing that to try to work in this manner can actually deepen your insight into what you’re writing about.

Again, what are the initial conditions here? One is trying to make sense of an incredibly chaotic and improvisational process. How is it that things keep appearing in a non premeditated manner over and over and over again? This is such an open process that nonetheless results in finished films that, mind you, do fail a lot but then sometimes don’t. How do we account for the genesis or the production of order, of integrity, of unity through such spontaneity? John Dewey speaks of experience as qualitative unity. How do we make sense of the fact that things like cinema with a qualitative unity of their own can emerge from such apparently chaotic processes? Perhaps the whole book itself—I’m thinking now as you’re asking me—became a kind of experiment in trying to make sense of that problem through the very process of its writing.

RM: In which case I really admire your mind. I just find that if I had to write something like this, I don’t know if I could let myself improvise too much. If I were involved with my field notes, I don’t know if I could spontaneously work in quotations. I find it admirable that you were being experimental, writing with naiveté, as you said.

AP: This is a book that has about 110,000 words. That means that there are at least 110,000 spaces between words, any one of which is a point of entry, a point of insertion. The book as a medium is extraordinarily discontinuous. We invest books retrospectively with a kind of coherence and integrity and closedness that they actually don’t have because they are rife with openings. And that was again, one thing that was interesting about entering into cinema not from the standpoint of finished films but from the standpoint of bits and pieces, some of which were never finished. So I think that the process of doing the research was one of having to attune myself to the necessary unfinishedness of things.

RM: That’s wonderful because you’ve written this book very deeply from a personal methodological perspective. So I feel like your understanding of your own subject and your understanding of what you wanted your writing to be has been beautifully interwoven with your actual observations and findings. I have hardly heard people describe their approach your way.

I feel like people bring other frameworks to writing. For example, a lot of the literature that I cited in my dissertation was from the field of production studies, which can be described as an offshoot of cultural studies, which is very influential in communication. When these scholars talk about the film industry in Los Angeles or other parts of the world, the frameworks they bring are not about continuity, etc. They’re about difference, they’re about conflict, they’re about power structures. And those frameworks inform what they see in the field.

AP: That’s right.

RM: And I find that a little bit misleading, like putting the cart before the horse. If you are invested in being critical about the material conditions of labor and people “below the line,” which is a very legitimate concern, if you bring those frameworks and concepts with you to the field, chances are that you’ll find that. That’s been one of my critiques of production studies. Methodologically, I am also like you, invested in interpretation before critique, and I think that a lot of the work that I have seen, other ethnographies even—e.g., Vicki Mayer’s ethnographic study of television producers below the line—I found myself not being able to relate to that at all because Mayer brings with her the definition of labor as a sort of an exploitative surplus that benefits political economies. So I think that methodology determines a lot of what we’re going to write about.

AP: Yes, absolutely. I should emphasize that there is a critical project here. There are problems and it is important to be able to find our way around them, to find openings, to rework them, remake them, undo them. All these things are important. But there are some really interesting and important methodological questions around how it is we do that. My disappointment with some of the work in cinema studies has precisely to do with what you’re talking about. The problems are defined so tightly and so straightforwardly that the work can do nothing more but to reiterate the existence of those problems.

Whereas I think that one can approach the kind of texts that we write, the work that we do, as not simply representations of a situation that is out there that needs to be re-described as accurately as possible but instead perhaps as pragmatic interventions in their own right. As modes of imaginative storytelling, as occasions in which we take a set of conditions and find the right circumstances or lines that might confound them. That we begin with a structure and find a point where it begins to fall apart. I am really compelled by the idea—Deleuze and Guattari speak of it in terms of the molar and molecular—that anything can be conceived of in both overwhelmingly molar or block-like terms on the one hand and simultaneously in terms of those possibly infinite lines of flight that undo the consistency and integrity of those block-like formations. As a critic, and I do think of myself as one, as a critical observer of various dimensions of contemporary cultural life, I feel that what I can do best is to seize upon some of those lines of flight or escape, and ride with them a bit, and to show that something really isn’t as integral as its power-laden purveyors might make it out to be. That’s the kind of critical project this book pursues.

To put it very concretely, I try throughout the book to actually undo my own authority as a scholarly observer. I deliberately confound the clarity of my own analytical understanding of what’s happening, not to write a deliberately obscure book, not to write a book that puts forward deliberately confusing messages, but instead to ask the question: “Can we arrive at a more creative and possibly more radical form of critical practice by disarming ourselves a bit, and learning to think with concepts, ideas, circumstances, challenges that are utterly foreign to the ones that we take for granted”? If the purpose is to pluralize our modes of analysis, to open up our capacities of perception, to expand our critical vocabularies, that requires a more vulnerable observer. And a vulnerable observer is someone who must enter into a scene without the ability to wrap it all up with what they came with.

RM: I have a lot of empathy for that approach. For my dissertation, I was responding to the production studies scholars by trying to show that my subjects, who were student filmmakers in film school in Los Angeles, had more agency than what the critical scholars would deem them to have. But I had to go in with that hypothesis and try to see whether various instances of interaction and utterance during the filmmaking process confirmed, denied, or added another dimension to those mini hypotheses, which would then lead to my interpretation and grounded theory. However, if I went in thinking that student filmmakers are going to be churned out by film school into the media industries as future labor, then I would just be using one more set of subjects as an example that confirms production studies’ larger critical project. To me, that’s not the way to do things. That feels very disingenuous.

AP: When a commercial filmmaker says that so much of the force of cinema, so much of the action of cinema, so much of the pull or charge of cinema depends on the extent to which it can leave the viewer asking, “What comes next?”, “What comes next?”, “What comes next?”, what do we do with that? Do we see that as a straightforward moment of manipulation, of pulling the strings, of having these subjects of cinema come along with those strings? Or can we at all take seriously that sliver of indeterminacy that the question holds, the sense that we may not actually know what comes next. This is the value of thinking of cinema as something that is woven together, something that is full of gaps and fissures, moments when one truly does not know what comes next, rather than always anticipating and projecting forward to what will come next, the more conventional, analytical, suturing move that robs that moment and that question of any kind of potency.

RM: Going back, again, to the Table of Contents (you see, I am obsessed), is there a blurring across the modes of experience? Is there interpenetration across these “modes of experience”? So, does your chapter on Desire, for example, about the screenwriting process, also contain examples of what you call Imagination?

AP: Of course.

RM: So how do you decide to frame one set of examples and experiences of production under Desire and others under Imagination? How did you make those decisions?

AP: Do you want me to make sense of why the chapters have the kind of framing that they do?

RM: Yes. So how is the chapter in which you talk about the idea of Dreams—coming up with story ideas—is that different from how you understand Imagination playing out?

AP: I knew for a long time, even when I was doing the research for this book, that it would follow the process. I knew it would have to begin near the beginning and end near the end. I knew I was invested enough in the trajectory of the filmmaking process as a process, that it would have to track these stages.

But I didn’t want these chapters to amount to nothing more than “this is how this is done.” For me, what’s at stake in this work is not simply how films are made but how their making comes to matter for how it is that we live. And what I found is that there is an organic relationship between the kinds of experience that occasion cinema and the kinds of experience that films make possible. So, what I was trying to do with the material was to find a way of moving across that line: literally moving from one side of the screen to the other. Can we say something about the way in which films work, the way in which they work on us, by trying to make sense of how it is that these materials become invested with those capacities?

So, why Dreams? Because this director is constantly talking about dreams. He was really very Freudian in his thinking. He was constantly interpreting dreams. And it turns out that there is a very dreamlike quality to his films. And it turns out that the whole process of writing for him and his crew was itself dreamlike in its unfolding. Why Time? Because there was something about that director being lost in the moment that stood out for me as more essential than anything else about his filmmaking practice. So in each case, I suppose, the conceit was to see if I could find a kernel of experience that would allow me not only to make sense of how these filmmakers were working, but to tap into the ways in which films work on us as well. Can we actually build out from the experiential openness of something like an immersion in time, of something like being lost in dreams, as a way of saying something about how a film can leave us with precisely those kinds of openings?

So, I think I landed on those particular ideas—of Imagination, Light, Color, and so on—because those were the ways I could move most effectively from the kinds of experience that were charging those processes as they were unfolding, and to the charge that the films themselves carried forward to viewers.

RM: I like what you said about moving across the screen from the production side to the side of life. That makes a lot of sense.

AP: As you said that, I was literally imagining, can you leap through a screen? Imagine standing behind a film screen and jumping through it. That’s the endeavor of a book like this.

RM: And that itself is a very cinematic proposition!

From the online companion Chapter on Rhythm - Editor interview

Rhythm3 from Anand Pandian on Vimeo.

From the online companion Chapter on Light - "Light invites an epic scale"

Light2 from Anand Pandian on Vimeo.

Cinema and Life Interpenetrated: A Conversation with Anand Pandian (Part One)

Ritesh Mehta, a recently minted Annenberg School PHD (My advisee) and a regular contributor to Movie Maker Magazine, pitched me recently about doing an interview for the blog with Anand Pandian, the author of  Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation, a work which Mehta feels represents a bold new experiment in academic writing and a ground breaking contribution to production studies. How could I refuse? Mehta's conversations with Pandian runs over the next two installments. You can read Mehta's review of the book here. Cinema and Life Interpenetrated: A Conversation with Anand Pandian (Part One)

By Ritesh Mehta

The first thing you stop at when you leaf through Anand Pandian’s book Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation—other than its Foreword by the great American editor and sound designer Walter Murch, who finds another avatar of his filmmaking mantra of “closed openness” (p. x) in Pandian’s field sites in and around “Kollywood,” “the studios and byways of the Kodambakkam area of western Chennai” (but also on location in Switzerland and Dubai)—is its table of contents.

You glimpse and take in the chapter titles, “Desire” and “Fate,” “Light” and “Color,” “Pleasure” and “Wonder,” among others. You begin to hope that this ethnographic work on the production cultures of Tamil cinema is going to prove quite different from other ethnographies not just of Indian cinema and television but of various global media industries. You begin to entertain the notion of ethnographers and anthropologists being philosophers and novelists. You begin to think about how phenomenology works alongside ethnography both in the field as well as while writing. And you begin to wonder whether the experiences and utterances—discourse and practice—of Pandian’s subjects represent agency or forebode circumscription, or some glorious or god awful interpenetration of the two.

One of his most fascinating informants is Logandurai, whom the book opens with. A farmer who sings fragments of a song from a popular Tamil film even as he toils in an orchard far away from the rush of Chennai. Pandian juxtaposes the meanings of the lyrics in Logandurai’s imaginary with the humble material conditions of his life. In doing so, he sets the premise of his work in his general observation that “cinema here [in Tamil Nadu] bends itself towards ordinary life, while ordinary life hankers after cinema.” Thus begins his series of “experiments in cinematic experience: trials undertaken by certain Indian filmmakers and also by an anthropologist wandering and writing in their midst.” (pp. 10-17) I won’t elaborate further and instead will let our conversation attempt to grasp at Pandian’s own grasping of the unfurling entanglements between cinema and life.

Ritesh Mehta: Since we are approaching this exchange as a conversation rather than an interview, allow me to first gush just for a bit. I’ve been obsessed with this book the past couple of weeks. I read just a bit and have to set it aside, since it just fills me in the way movies fill me: I am in the mindspace of evocation and signification. In fact, I found it challenging to come up with a set of prompts because I’ve wanted to linger in the book’s lifeworld without further interpreting, critiquing or even reflecting on it. Thank you for allowing us to linger. In our conversation, though, I’d love to hear your responses to my proto-responses, so if anything, you can help me and our readers arrive at a sense of the incredible, unique work this book is doing.

For me, the book has been about “imponderabilia” and “heteroglossia,” and I don’t readily name drop Malinowski and Bakhtin. I see in your pages the inscription of the wagging of tongues of a smorgasbord of cinema creators, producers and workers, as well as your sieving through and shifting among and alongside their minds and bodies. So the book is as much about immateriality as it is about variegated materiality with regard to creating cinema. As I continue reading through your “experimental vignettes,” I get the sense that you have synchronized an anthropological orchestration for your big themes, which I think are Continuity versus Flux on the one hand, and Possibility versus Embeddedness on the other. I found these themes, these contradictory modes of living, to be getting work done for your cinema makers because they are in fact such heady and rooted contrasts. My immediate thought was: that’s India.

  I love the ways in which you’ve wondered about this as well. How a screenplay that begins in Dreams (Chapter 2), themselves fluctuating but effervescing ultimately into a narrative with continuity, can end up completely at the mercy of Fate (Chapter 18), of a box office opening that might have seemed throughout the filmmaking process as full of profitable and pop cultural possibility but is ultimately embedded in the lifeworld of a myriad of throaty thrushes in theaters: Tamil audiences and their sansaara. You return your observations about Tamil film production to the eternal cycle of creation and destruction that is known from within life itself.

Going back to the table of contents, you’ve described what Rhythm, Voice, Space, and Art mean in different and useful ways throughout the book. For instance, you refer to them as “modes of experience” as well as the “formal properties of cinema.” But it strikes me they’re also what philosophers and metaphysicians call universals: mind-independent entities that are available for all of us to partake in, which make human beings similar if not identical to one another. The prospect of wrestling with universals in an ethnographic work about a regional cinema—a cinema you call “marginal” even—I find incredibly exciting. Thinking back to The English Patient, a film that not so coincidentally <strong>Walter Murch edited, what inspired me the most about the movie when I saw it two decades ago, was its depiction of the desert. Even though it was about a very particular desert—the one in 1942 Libya—it evoked the idea of being a desert in general, everywhere: the quality of being vast, the property of being without maps, the disposition of being wind. In the novel and later in the film, the desert was evoked as a universal that I could partake in. In your book, the particularly rhythms, voices, speed, and fate of Tamil film producers are evoked as universals that they partake in.

So thank you, once again for this work and for listening to me wax ineloquently. My initial questions are what I think the book does not seem to be about, concepts that I would have expected but did not find--in a good way. I wanted to point these out and get your reactions. 

I was provoked by one of your opening questions in the book: “What happens when everything begins to look like film?” Or when everything starts to look like a “cinematic scene.” On the flip side, I like how you point out that “cinema draws its force from the affective lives of its makers” and you quote Coomaraswamy in saying that “craftsmanship is a mode of thought.” One of the reasons I am running this on Henry Jenkins’ blog is because one of the first classes with Henry at USC was on medium specificity. Because of the way you describe the connections and interpenetration between cinema and life, would you say that your book bypasses the debate on medium specificity? Is your book about the medium neutrality of cinema? Or do you treat cinema as a medium in the way media scholars do?

Anand Pandian: There are certainly many moments in the book when I treat cinema as a medium in the way that cinema scholars do, because in part what I’m doing is thinking through these moments in Tamil cinema in relation to what media scholars have said. For example, if you think of Baudry’s ideas around the apparatus theory, or you think of Mulvey’s questions around the phallocentrism of cinema… there are many arguments that have been made with regard to this particular medium—cinema—that I found useful to think with, with regard to both the films that these filmmakers were making, and the way in which they were making them and how they were thinking about them. So on one level, certainly the endeavor here is to think with film studies and to ask the question, What can an anthropologist, approaching this thing we call “cinema” as an ethnographer, from the standpoint of an ongoing emergent production practice, tell us with regard to these essential questions around the ontology of the cinematic image; the relationship between image and spectator; the ways in which cinema can be understood to carry ideologies in its body, in its materiality; the relationship between thinking and feeling when it comes to spectation? There are any number of questions that scholars have posed with regard to the medium in particular that I try to reach as an ethnographer.

But having thought through that and having wrestled with those problems, what I kept finding time and again is that the questions that kept emerging in those production contexts seemed to blur the distinction between cinema and other kinds of things: the divide between cinema and other kinds of arts (painting, sculpture, or visual effects work in a digital setting, or the composition of music or dance), the distinction between cinema as a medium and these other media that we think of as contrary media of expression, that distinction begins to break down. But even more than that, because what one is dealing with when one is looking at the making of film are people who are positioned in a world that includes the film but exceeds the film, the world that contains that world in a sense, but is obviously much bigger, because that is a frame that is on a location or a studio somewhere, that is surrounded by ever so many other things, the more basic distinction between art and life, between creative endeavors and ordinary endeavors, itself began to break down… such that what I began to arrive at was a sense of the creative process that might even encompass the cinema, that might even assume particular forms in regard to the making of film, but certainly had resonances and relationships far beyond that particular domain.

RM: That’s why I think your approach refreshingly bypasses the debates that have happened on medium specificity. It seems as though you do address them but also step out, show the larger picture and how the distinctions that you mention above blur. You have a different way of talking about light, color and sound than some of the proponents of medium specificity.

AP: If I could also add one thing, this has also to do with the way I came into cinema. I didn’t write this book because I have had a lifelong fascination or even love for cinema in particular. It’s that I was deeply involved in the ordinary life of rural people in South India over the course of a few years for my dissertation research and turning that research into a book. I found that I couldn’t think about that life except in relation to these bits and pieces of cinema that were slipping into it constantly. My entry into cinema as an object of investigation was through these fragments that permeated ordinary life in India, that were of a piece with ordinary life. What is the medium then? The medium there was the countryside, and cinema was just one means by which that medium found a certain kind of expression.

RM: That makes complete sense to me. Growing up in Mumbai, I had a similar sense of how for many people for whom cinema may not be an important part of their everyday experience, it’s impossible not to engage with the fragments. You’re constantly surrounded by these fragments: they are hurtling at you when you live in a city like Mumbai. So I imagine it’s similar in many parts of Tamil Nadu as well.

You brought up the word “ordinary”— on page 2, you talk about cinema being “ordinary.” This reminded me of one of my favorite articles that I read as a PhD student: Raymond Williams’ 1958 piece, “Culture is Ordinary.” The first four paragraphs remind me of your writing. He describes a bus ride from an urban area to an industrialized countryside where he grew up. He talks about how the countryside changes as he goes higher and higher into the mountains, and about culture is woven into the landscape and the meanings into the land. It’s in a way a Marxist exploration without being Marxist upfront. His thesis is that “culture is ordinary” in that it is about a whole way of life. It represents old meanings that we are born into and use as well as the new meanings that we express. But what interested me was that I didn’t find too much direct talk about the word “culture” in your book. Many readers who know that you’re an anthropologist might find that intriguing. I was wondering if you could comment on that. Is this a valid observation?

AP: It’s a very interesting question. One of my favorite books by Raymond Williams is “The Country and The City,” which in some ways is an account of the changing relationship between culture and cultivation in British literature that is an investigation of the image of the British countryside, and in particular of the agrarian countryside as it comes in and out of focus as a site of desirable life over the course of a lengthy period of time in English literature. Williams is quite helpful in thinking through the materiality of something like culture, of reminding us that culture is a mode of practice, that it involves not only the ascription of certain ideals and attention to certain kind of symbols, but the way in which those ideals, symbols, those venerated qualities, are tied into concrete ways of living in, engaging and working to transform the world that one finds oneself in, which is his materialism, as an analyst, as a thinker.

So, certainly, yes, “culture” as an object of analysis may not be explicitly present in this book. But I would say that there is no question that the practices of certain kinds of filmmakers are essential here: what holds together the way in which an editor thinks and works with cinematic material as opposed to the way a camera man thinks and works with cinematic material, as opposed to the way a musician or composer thinks and works with cinematic material. Those differences are essential to the way the book is organized, the way it’s written.

And there is, in a way, an argument the book is making that we cannot make sense of the ways in which these different elements of cinema work on us if we don’t adequately understand the way they are put to work through the practical engagements of these different technicians. Perhaps not culture then in the sense of “high culture,” culture in the sense of “ideology,” but perhaps culture in the sense of poesis, of a practical work of creative activity, is essential to the way the book is organized.

RM: Right. My point in bringing up these two questions is simply to say that in a way it’s liberating to not use those words. Because people who have written a lot about “culture” and who have certain understandings about culture, or medium specificity for that matter, if they see those same terms in the book, that might imply a different way to process the book as opposed to when you talk about them indirectly and not label them as such. I think that’s useful and productive.

AP: This is the reason why the book is organized the way that it is, the reason why it has these rather abstract elements—like desire or light or sound—as organizing rubrics rather than the studio floor, or the recording booth… Obviously, the table of contents could be much more concrete than it is. It’s because as an anthropologist, I have come to recognize and try to acknowledge the value of thinking with the concepts that come out of the experience of others. That is to say, rather than trying to apply my own concepts, or concepts that I am attached to as an analyst to these different situations, I try to allow my own thinking to bend itself to the ideas and concepts of the people that I encounter, those that the ethnographic experience seems to be organized around.

So when one is working with, say, a camera man, you can make sense of his or her experience in really any way you want. We have all kinds of tools at our disposal to say what it is they are doing. But the interpretive effort with this book was to think as closely to the grain of their own thinking as it is embedded in the way in which they work with this material, whether it’s light or sound or color or time, and to see how far one could run with these thoughts that emerge from a practical milieu.

RM: I’m writing this post for Henry Jenkins’ blog, and Henry is your premier fan studies scholar. Let me read to you a paragraph from one of his chapters currently under review, and I’d like to get your reaction in relation to your chapter on Imagination, where you talked a bit about Tamil cinema fans.

“I’ve long argued that fan cultural production was born from a mixture of fascination and frustration. Fans engage closely with texts because they are fascinated. They continue to rework them because they are frustrated with some aspect of the original. Yes, fans poach. They take what they want from texts they did not create. And fans resist. They often rewrite stories so that things come out differently. But fans also engage with the text on terms not of their own choosing, so that the process looks very much like what cultural studies calls “negotiation.” (Jenkins, forthcoming)

I was wondering about your understanding of how Tamil fans negotiate based on Henry’s description, and how does that connects to your idea of “imagination” as a phenomenon.

AP: I appreciate the attention to openness and indeterminacy in what you read and in Henry’s thinking. I might still ask the question, “Fans of what?” What if we were to set aside the assumption that a film is first and foremost a text and instead ask the question, “What form or what body does the film assume or in what form or body does the film become most significant for its fans?” Here, the body of the hero becomes essential. Because in Tamil cinema, you have fans, you have cinephiles who are fans of particular actors and directors or even editors for that matter. You have technicians who have their own legion of fans. But the way in which those technicians are venerated is almost a reflex of how those heroes are venerated.

So the question of fandom brings us back most centrally to the hero’s body and how that body is conceived. The thing that is important to keep in mind here is that body is both this-worldly and other-worldly. It taps and channels energies and forces of devotion and attachment that aren’t entirely secular, that partake of the divine, that bring practices and rituals of worship and veneration into play, that occasion modes of engagement that may be more about devotion than about negotiation. That is to say, less about carving out a space for myself than about submitting myself to a force that is bigger than me. Power assumes different forms and faces in different contexts. Certainly one way to understand fan clubs as they operate in India is as domains of politics and political engagement, and there are ways in which these clubs devoted to one star as opposed to another star operate and allow for the expression of the political ambitions of those who run them. I did meet quite a lot of fans as well and I talk about them in that chapter. But I think to reduce these clubs to that kind of politics is to rob their experience of its essential texture. Because their mode of engagement is, in fact, religious.

RM: One of the core themes across Henry’s work, not just in fan studies but also in media literacy, in industry studies, is “remixing.” Henry has found a plethora of examples of remixing and appropriation practices by fans. Is that quite different from devotion?

AP: That’s a fascinating question, actually. Because as we know, the body of the god in Indian Hinduism is not a unitary body, and there are ever so many ways in which that body travels: it moves through the space of the city; it possesses people. There are ever so many ways in which one can participate in divinity. Now, we could call that remixing. It’s interesting. To call that remixing, for me, lends a little too much value or attention to the cleverness of the remixer. If you look at these videos on YouTube, you’ll see these videos of people acting out these scenes in films of their favorite actors—I’m not sure if the idea of remixing captures enough that sense of fidelity, of participating through a certain kind of corporeal practice in the power and aura of this other being.

From the online companion Chapter on Imagination -- Fan reception at a film release

Imagination2 from Anand Pandian on Vimeo.

From the online companion Chapter on Art - an action sequence

Art2 from Anand Pandian on Vimeo.

Fostering Civic Engagement in a Networked Era:An Interview with Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis (Part Three)

A real strength of this collection is a movement between theoretical pieces proposing conceptual models for thinking about civic media and engagement and more case-study based pieces which document specific design practices or implementations of civic media within local communities.  You are trying to bridge the theory-practice divide, in other words. What value do you think the conceptual work brings to design practices and applications? And conversely, what insights do you see emerging through design that modifies or challenges existing conceptions about civic engagement? It is remarkably difficult to combine theory and practice. The more we do this work, the more we realize that it’s about juxtapositions, not hybridity. The book aspires towards theory-informed practice and practice-informed theory. But it’s not necessarily looking for a hybrid form.

Too often, we see attempts at hybridity as just being bad practice or bad theory. But we both live that tension. We are primarily academics, trading in research and writing. We were each granted tenure at an academic institution based on this work. But we are also both practitioners, building programs and tools designed for immediate social impact. Each of us can say, unequivocally, that our academic work has deeply informed our practice, and vice versa. But the worlds of scholarship and practice are still quite separate. When we work across domains, we are engaged in a kind of rapid switching.

The poet Charles Baudelaire wrote about the flaneur, the urban wanderer, who sat in a Parisian café looking out at the crowds of people on the sidewalk. He was both of the crowd and apart from it, a spectator and a participant. But to gain that critical perspective, Baudelaire wrote, he needed to remain alienated from both.

In many ways, this theory/practice divide is similar. It’s a place of anxiety, of being detached from both worlds, while also knowing that the greatest insights come from that detachment. So, we are deeply invested in bringing together scholarship and practice, but we don’t want to remove the anxiety that defines the in between space.

We want practitioners to understand the histories and theories of civic media, and we want academics to feel the messiness of social reality and practice. But we actually want them both to never get comfortable with habits of mind or practice. The main benefits of bringing theory and practice together might just be that it destabilizes both, creating a possibility space that remains fluid.

One of your projects here is to bring work about media literacy towards the center of the study of civic media. Why is it important to understand civic engagement in relation to media literacy? What would it mean to bring a Civic Media perspective into the classroom?

For a long time, the field of media literacy has struggled to articulate a vision beyond the teaching of critical thinking and production skills. It has focused on teaching young people how to critically analyze and critically produce the media. But how these skills and dispositions translate from the classroom to the real world has not been clear. Civic media is clarifying in this regard.

The process of making and participating in civic media represents a media literate subject. It requires a level of critical thinking and production that is, by definition, beyond the classroom. In fact, in a recent article on civic media in liberal arts education, we make the argument that civic media transforms the project of higher education from the dissemination of knowledge to the sharing of “usable” knowledge, wherein critical media skills are applied directly to matters of public impact.  Our project in this book, and elsewhere, is to consider the ways in which knowledge in education translates into social action.

Eric, much of your early work had to do with the development of games as a particular form of civic media, and you were a key figure in the serious games movement. I know you’ve started to shift your focus from games to play more broadly defined. Why?

Games are systems that structure players’ interactions typically with a goal, and specific rules and mechanics for progressing towards that goal. I spent a lot of time making and thinking about games that foster civic engagement by creating meaningful interfaces between public institutions and individuals.

The games I studied and even the games I made, taught me a great deal about how civic systems work. They taught me about the motivations people have (or don’t have) for engaging in civic process and civic life more generally. I am still deeply invested in the possibilities that games have to meaningfully structure civic life.

But what I’ve come to realize is that what’s important about the game is not the game, but the kinds of interactions it enables. Games ask people to play towards achieving a goal. They present a logic whereby a player might feel a certain freedom to experiment or explore towards achieving a goal that is decidedly separate from everyday life. They also present a logic of human systems whereby quality is not measured by efficiency of moving through it, but in fact how meaningful the system’s inefficiencies are. Games present us with unnecessary obstacles that motivate play and increase interest not only in achieving the goal, but in the act of playing itself.

So, as I continued to work in this unlikely intersection of games and civics, I started to ask how these meaningful inefficiencies found in game systems are being practiced in civic life in all sorts of unexpected ways. From playful performances in public spaces to methods of public management that integrate unorthodox feedback loops, or even, when games get designed and played to facilitate public process.

So, quite distinct from gamification, which has become a business trend wherein game mechanics are used to efficiently motivate people to achieve stated goals, meaningful inefficiencies are the elements of civic systems that prompt play for play’s sake. It is a way of maneuvering around the traps of commodified engagement, to motivate a system’s thinking that is generative, as opposed to limiting.

Paul, you’ve been the leader of the Salzburg Academy of Media and Global Change for a decade. In some ways, this Academy represents an experiment in bringing people from around the world to live, learn, and work together. How have these experiences informed your work on this book and other projects? Why is it important to test our ideas about civic media in a global context rather than one that is grounded in national particulars?

For a decade now, the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change has gathered young media makers from around the world to explore how media can respond to global social problems. We’ve had over 750 young people and 150 faculty and scholars come through the program, all of whom have sought to make connections across borders, across cultures and across divides.

The Salzburg Academy is indeed an experiment--one that has informed much of our thinking about the intersection of media, activism, and social change. The Academy has focused on topics as wide ranging as terrorism, migration, rights of journalists, and freedom of expression. Each year, as people from around the world gather in a learning community, we are reminded about the importance of human connections in media.

As the flow of information is increasingly fluid across national borders, these gatherings are reminders that human connection requires more than digital connectivity. The importance of people coming together to face challenges as a cohesive unit cannot be underestimated, where diversity is embraced, and where differences become assets. At the Academy we bring students from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Pakistan, Argentina, Mexico, South Africa, Palestine, Canada, England, China, Slovakia, Sweden, Kenya, and the United States, among other places, and ask them to think about media as a tool for inclusivity, equity, tolerance, and justice.

To this end, what the Academy has taught us about the need to experiment in a global setting is that as populations continue to move, and cultures continue to integrate, media-based initiatives need to embrace global diversity. When we engage on a human level, we can think expansively about media and its application in the world.

We’ve seen so many alumni go on to engage in social change work that is often guided by their experiences in Salzburg, and sustained by the network that still supports them. The Salzburg Academy offers the space and time to articulate those processes with a group of devoted, passionate, and diverse people, devoted to striving for common good with the media as their tool.

We spent three weeks together thinking about the current crises around refugees and migration. What roles might civic media platforms and practices play in helping to work through the cultural shock produced by these massive population shifts?

Our work this summer in Salzburg was focused on media, migration and the civic imagination. We explored how the media too often rely on distant and de-personalized stories to explain (and exploit) the issue, ignoring its nuance and deeply personal nature. In order to combat the “objectivity bias,” students at the Academy were asked to make personal the issue of migration by reimagining narratives through the lens of personal stories and popular culture. The goal was to overcome some of the xenophobic sentiments and harmful stereotypes perpetuated by and through the media.

This work was shared in an online publication called Move: Media, Migration and the Civic Imagination. The site highlights over 20 multimedia essays, created by diverse groups of students, working across their own unique understanding of the topic to reinvent how migration is portrayed.

Our work at the Academy sought to put civic media into action by mobilizing young people’s critical analysis and production of media. The civic media lens enabled us to think beyond the tools and specific applications of media, and to consider how individuals, groups and entire communities can actively reshape the stories they consume and produce, especially on matters of global import.

This was not about the informed global citizen, it was about the active and critical global citizen able to use and reuse the media tools at their disposal to effect social change.

Fostering Civic Engagement in a Networked Era: An Interview with Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis (Part Two)

There was an early discourse that read digital media in terms of “virtual communities” largely unmoored to physical geographies and unrelated to the locations where we live, work, and vote. To what degree is this book part of a larger move to reintroduce “location” and “locality” into our understanding of how online communities operate? To a large extent, we want to mobilize civic media to look across online or offline divides. In 2011, one of us (Eric) wrote a book called Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World. The reason for writing this book was to do precisely that.

While one of its chapters was on civic engagement, it was more concerned with the qualities of urban environments. The book critically addressed how locality or location-awareness (both human and machine) was impacting urban form. What cities look like and how people interact within them was being impacted by the increasing amount of located data found within them.

In Civic Media, we pick up those arguments again. But instead of focusing on questions of urban form, we focus on how people are coordinating and cooperating to get things done with media, in space and across space. We focus on how the texture of located communities influences online interactions, and vice versa. We question how power, through access, digital literacy, and institutions, defines who uses the media and to what ends. The concept of civic media necessarily interrogates false binaries of physical / real, online / offline, and located / distributed. This is the generative work of the term.

Many early conversations about civic media assumed a fairly simple link between the ideal of the “informed citizen” and the emergence of information technologies. Yet, many of the examples running through your book are focused less on civic engagement as a structure of knowledge and more as a structure of feeling. So, what place should there be in the study of civic media for more touchy-feely concepts like community or empathy or the imagination?

We wouldn’t call a structure of feeling “touchy-feely.” Indeed, we see this move away from the informed citizen as a move towards the affective, and/or experiential aspects of civic engagement.

Knowing does not necessarily lead to acting. What motivates young people, for example, to participate in civic life is not primarily the understanding of an issue, but the experience, or promise of the experience, of acting on that issue.

Creating or sharing memes, connecting within a social network, even playing a game—these can all be civic actions disconnected from work-a-day rational self-interest or interest in cause. These actions can be motivated by the desire to “act with” and “to feel a part of,” and in some cases have no connection to a particular knowledge base.

This is what is inspiring about the range of civic media forms; knowing is only one piece of experience. The frame of civic media has the potential to unlock civics from its long dependence on rationality.

To some degree this book represents an attempt to define or at least solidify a field of researchers focused on civic media, many of whom are appearing together here for the first time and who reflect a broad range of different disciplines. What can you tell us about the tribes you are bringing together here? What disciplines have had the most to say on these topics? To what degree does the interdisciplinary conversation a book like this represents add something that would not exist if everyone remained in their disciplinary spaces?

Academic disciplines are not designed to solve problems in the world. They are designed to create generalizable knowledge, disciplined by methodologies and theories. Applied social research is often difficult, because the social world, with all of its complexity, does not easily succumb to disciplinary structures. So the promise of interdisciplinary work is prioritizing problems to be solved over knowledge to be made.

Civic Media brings together scholars and practitioners from a range of disciplines, including Philosophy, Sociology, Communications, Media Studies, Computer Science, Urban Planning, Art, Government and Law, to answer the question “What can civics be?” While the media scholar might ask “how is civic life mediated?” and the sociologist might ask “how are the structures of civic life changing?” and the artist might ask what are the forms that civic life can take?” when each speaks only to those asking similar questions with similar methodologies, knowledge refines, instead of generates. We see civic media as a generative project, made possible only by the cross pollination of intellectual perspectives and traditions.

“Engagement” has been described as a buzz word of our times, one as likely to be used by commercial industries (“fan engagement”) as by governmental agencies set up to increase citizen engagement. So, what do you see as the relationship between these two discourses about engagement or indeed, are they two separate discourses? To what degree do commercial understandings of engagement spill over into the work of governmental agencies or nonprofit organizations?

You’re right, engagement is an annoyingly “buzzy” term. But we still find it to be productive. We run a lab called the “Engagement Lab,” where we investigate the interfaces between individuals, communities and institutions and we strongly believe that “to engage” is a transitive verb. People engage in nouns: people, places and things. They are typically not engaged by nouns.

In other words, engagement is relational, it just doesn’t happen to you. When commercial industries invest in customer engagement or fan engagement, they are looking for a way for engagement to happen to people. And sadly, even when public institutions use the term, they are looking to “do engagement,” to make people engage with a service or process, but not to enable people to act together.

But just because the term is overused, we don’t believe we should abandon it. Engagement means caring; and there is a difference between attentiveness to a product or service and caring. One way of understanding that difference is that caring is relational. We take care because of how others perceive our actions, or we care for others through some structured reciprocity. Engagement in the business and (sometimes) government sectors has come to mean extreme attentiveness, but the frame of civic media places it back into the realm of caring.

Fostering Civic Engagement in a Networked Era: An Interview with Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis (Part One)

In spring 2015, I ran a series of guest posts on this blog to celebrate the launch of The Civic Media Project website, which Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis, the Co-Directors of Emerson College’s Engagement Lab,  had developed in anticipation of their MIT Press book, Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice. Well, that book is finally out and in the world.

The new book includes essays by some of the key thinkers on contemporary media and politics, including W. Lance Bennett, Beth Simone Noveck, Beth Coleman, Renee Hobbes, Roman Gerodimos, Elizabeth Soep, Molly Sauter, Ceasar McDowell, and Joseph Kahne, among many others. My research team contributed an essay exploring superheroes, the civic imagination, and contemporary youth activism -- an extension of the argument we developed through By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism.  The book moves between conceptual statements about the current moment in the development of civic media and more focused case studies of projects in the U.S. and around the world.

Here’s how Gordon and Milhailidis described their understanding of the concept of Civic Media:

Civic life is comprised of the attention and actions an individual devotes to a common good. Participating in a human rights rally, creating and sharing a video online about unfair labor practices, connecting with neighbors after a natural disaster: these are all civic actions wherein the actor seeks to benefit a perceived common good. But where and how civic life takes place, is an open question. The lines between the private and the public, the self-interested and the civic are blurring as digital cultures transform means and patterns of communication around the world.

As the definition of civic life is in flux, there is urgency in defining and questioning the mediated practices that compose it. Civic media are the mediated practices of designing, building, implementing or using digital tools to intervene in or participate in civic life.

This past summer, I had the privilege to spend time with Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis at the Salzburg Academy for Media and Global Change. Paul has directed this summer program for the past decade and Eric regularly participates as part of the affiliated faculty, engaging students with both theoretical and design-focused workshops. This past year, they brought together undergraduate and graduate students from thirty different nations to reflect on the changing media landscape, to develop a deeper understanding of the mechanisms for fostering social change and political mobilization, and to put their emerging grasp of media literacy to work by collaborating to produce an online magazine, Move, which explored the current refuge crisis and global migration more generally. I was proud to be the keynote speaker at this program and to have my research group run a series of workshops and seminars with the students concerning our work on the civic imagination.

You might also want to check out this essay the two wrote for the current issue of the Journal of Digital Media Literacy dedicated to how we help students make the transition from voice to influence.

What became clear to me from my time with these two remarkable scholar-practitioners was how deep and original their thinking was about the future of civic media.  They both knew how to create a collaborative environment where original thinking and creative experimentation took place, and they both pushed everyone involved to dig deeper and question established thinking about the nature of civic engagement in a networked culture.

Returning to the book today, I am struck by the ways that its project is an extension or amplification of what they brought to the students during this summer program.  I can't wait to introduce this book to my students at USC; it provides resources that can help redefine how we teach civic and political life.

While we were there together, we hatched the plan to do an interview with Eric and Paul about the Civic Media book. Across the following three installments, we criss-cross the core themes that animate the book and suggest further developments in their thinking.

You begin the book with a core question: “What does civic engagement look like in a digital age?” I can imagine some traditionalists having issues with this formulation, since it assumes a link between media/communication infrastructure and civic engagement/practice. So, what’s the case for thinking about civic engagement through the lens of civic media more generally and digital media in particular?

We start the book with a question about appearances. What does civic engagement look like when people are connecting to their various communities online? When people gather in public squares or head to the voting booth, the meaning of such actions appear to be clear. They are civically engaging. But when people connect to each other via their phones or computers, independent of the reason or purpose of such connection, the actions might appear more like self-indulgent distractions than civic engagement.

So, at the start of the book, we don’t assume a link between media/communication infrastructure and civic engagement/practice; we actually assume a distortion in appearances, and we encourage a certain comfort with that distortion. From there, we seek to reframe civic engagement using the lens of civic media. Without claiming that civic engagement in democratic cultures is fundamentally different, we claim that when you expand the frame of civic engagement to include a myriad of practices previously ignored, the practice field of civic engagement changes. And, inevitably, as you expand the field of practice of any domain, you will slowly and empirically expand the definition of that domain.  

How are you defining “civic media” in this book? To what degree can we describe particular media platforms as “civic” as opposed to specific media practices? How do we decide that something is NOT civic media?

We define civic media as the “technologies, designs, and practices that produce and reproduce the sense of being in the world with others toward common good.” We offer this intentionally broad definition to accommodate what we see as a growing range of civic practices. And we hope that the term is generative, not restrictive – that it sparks the imagination about what it might include. But this isn’t simply a casual investigation.

There is urgency in defining the term, as there is danger of these emerging practices of civic engagement simply getting lumped into larger media trends, or on the flip side, getting written off as anomalies narrowly defined. The term civic media suggests an “acting with” as a means of achieving a common good. It is inclusive of the range of intentional actions that people take with and through technologies, designs, or practices (aka media).

As for what the term excludes: media with civic content that is passively consumed and media actively consumed that stands to benefit only the individual actor. So, on one hand we would likely exclude an effort like iCivics, which is a great example of classroom games with civics content for middle school kids, and we would exclude something like Pokemon Go, which is a highly interactive, place-based game, but playing it (at least as it most commonly used) stands to benefit only the individual actor.

In both cases, however, there can be emergent uses that would move them into the civic media category. There is something unique about civic media - not in the technologies or the tools themselves, but in the ways people are using them.

Some would argue that many of the core platforms of the web are profoundly anti-civic or non-civic (or at least anti-social) in their effects. You will find plenty of critics of Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, and other sites in terms of damages done to civic life. Can we reconcile such critiques with the idea that at least some uses of these same technologies may actively contribute to civic engagement?

Absolutely. Tools facilitate actions. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are tools that can be used for a range of activities. Just as a hammer can be used to build a house and to knock someone over the head, social media can be used for mobilizing a social justice campaign and bullying a peer with hateful speech.

But, as Marshall McLuhan said, technologies are not valueless: their form has implicit or explicit meaning. For example, the design of Facebook values broad connectivity over intimacy. And while it might be used for intimate conversations, one could argue that the tool predisposes its users towards particular outcomes. Such is the case with civic media.

While tools are malleable and multi-functional, they do carry with them certain values that compel users towards particular outcomes. Consider the domain of civic technology. The tools designed and implemented by government are meant to facilitate or streamline government processes, from paying parking tickets to providing input on urban plans.

These tools are designed for particular purposes in particular contexts and while they can be misused or appropriated, the technology largely shapes social interaction. The category of civic media is inclusive of these single function technologies, but is not limited to them. It is not a descriptor of tools. Instead, it provides a context to analyze the intentional actions that people take with tools, designed or modified for civic outcomes.

Comics and Canons: An Interview with Bart Beaty (Part Three)

You make an interesting point that R. Crumb has been at a disadvantage in contemporary value judgements because he produced short stories rather than graphic novels. In literature, we can think of authors such as Edgar Allen Poe or Flannery O’Connor who have entered the canon as short story writers, and certainly playwrights can enter the literary canon and not simply novelists. So what might this suggest about the ways that the canon may be limiting our understandings of the range of options within comics as a medium? To me, the Crumb example shows how much more narrow the comics studies canon is than the literary canon, because I don’t think that there are as many opportunities for Crumb as there are for Poe or O’Connor. The primacy of the novel in literature departments is a late arriving phenomenon - literature departments focused on poetry and drama for decades prior to the turn towards the novel, so there are obvious spaces for writers in other forms.

Comics studies has championed the graphic novel nearly to the total exclusion of all other types of comics (consider how little comics studies focusses on comic strips, despite their much longer lineage and higher general cultural visibility). So Crumb risks being left out of a lot of current discussions simply because he does not fit the norm of what we do. That to me is a real problem with how we approach the study of the field because it writes out almost all of the work that was produced in the first fifty years of the comic book format, and, frankly, the majority of it in the second fifty years as well.

Jack Kirby poses a different set of issues in your account, as do other superhero creators, because his reputation is grounded in popular and commercial criteria more than in the art world. Thinking about comics in terms of canon formation raises issues about the relationship between academic judgements and those constructed by fans or other more populist institutions.  How might we describe the criteria fans have used to identify the most important artists and how do they differ from academic criteria? One could argue that a similar split exists between novels that are taught in literature classes and “classics” that generations read and like but do not get much respect from literature professors -- Anne of Green Gables, Treasure Island, the Wizard of Oz, etc. Or we might think of the role which westerns and their directors played in the early emergence of film studies (or later, melodramas) seeing an exploration of the tension between genres and authors as a central issue defining the field.

There is a really big gulf growing between comics scholars and comics fans, or at least between certain types of scholars and certain types of fans, and I do wonder how much of that will close over time. While we’ve been talking a lot about graphic novels, the fact is, as we point out in The Greatest Comic Book, there is a really substantial emphasis on superhero comic books in contemporary comics scholarship.

It too can be somewhat narrow in its interest. I’ve heard or read maybe a dozen papers on Ms Marvel, for example, a very recent comic book with a Muslim teenager as the protagonist. There are a lot of scholars who want to talk about this title and the way it addresses important cultural debates, and that seems very natural and very relevant. For the most part, the vast bulk of superhero comics goes unremarked upon by superhero scholars and the scholars set up their own canon, and Jack Kirby occupies the top space there.

What is interesting to me about superhero artists is that each generation will develop their own favourites and the turn-over is extremely rapid. It is a very star-driven industry, and stars can fade quickly. John Byrne and Frank Miller were the most popular comic book artists when I was a teen, but by the time I was twenty it was Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld - artists that I personally felt little connection to. The change was quick.

Kirby has endured better than most others, partly because he has a large cadre of supporters proclaiming him the “King of Comics” and who explain his importance to later generations of fans. The criteria that seem to most drive Kirby to the top is the sense that he generated all of these incredible characters who are still popular to this day, and that he completely revolutionized comic book storytelling.

That latter is striking for me, because it is the type of thing that becomes less self-evident to readers over time. Kirby’s dynamism is most striking in contrast to the staid comics that DC was producing in the 1960s, just as Godard’s cutting was shocking in comparison to the traditions of French cinema of his day. In an era, half a century later, where those advances have been internalized by everyone that followed they become harder to see. I think this is one of the great losses that occurs when we focus only on a very small canon - the breakthroughs are less evident and need to be accepted on faith. Many of my students, who weren’t even born when Jack Kirby died, have a lot of trouble seeing what is so different about his Fantastic Four because they have no exposure to anything else from that period to compare it to.

You write about avant garde comics, comics which are understood within an “aesthetic of difficulty”, a standard they inherited from the modernist tradition in film and literature. What does it mean to read comics through an avant garde lens when so many people conceive of it almost exclusively as a popular art form?  How are artists and readers negotiating those contradictions?

When I was writing Unpopular Culture, which is about this tension, several of the cartoonists that I write about in that book got angry with me when I referred to their work as “avant grade” or “unpopular”. I mean, really viscerally angry with me. I thought one was going to hit me.

It seems to me that comics is one of the few art forms that modernism forgot. Yes, there was George Herriman, but there were very few other examples of cartoonists drawing on modernist traditions. Certainly in the American comic book modernism seems to have had almost no influence at all. Meanwhile, film, painting, literature, music, drama - all of these forms went through a modernist phase. I think that this is one of the reasons that comics were looked down upon - there was almost no one working in the field who sought to cultivate a serious readership. When Michael Chabon writes about comics and modernism in Kavalier and Clay it really does seem like a fantastical element.

Nonetheless, there are a small but growing number of cartoonists who are interested in these issues. In the US we might go back to Raw as the beginning of that, and you can see this level of difficulty in the work of an artist like Gary Panter. That tradition has continued through Paper Rad, the artists involved in Kramer’s Ergot, and so on. To a large degree this is the fringe of the alternative comics scene. A lot of it is that rare form of comics that is highly influenced by contemporary art practices, and a lot of it seems more at home in a gallery than in a bookstore.

I think that there is still some resistance to this tendency - some people get their backs up about it because what they like is the idea that comics is a less judgemental space, one that is more open and accommodating. When Kramer’s Ergot did their issue that had the retail price of about $100 a lot of readers got upset about that; they argued that it was exclusionary to produce a huge oversized and expensive limited edition comic book. Avant gardes have always put some part of the audience on edge and they are genuinely exclusionary and that sits poorly in the comics world because it is relatively small.  I don’t think that the average cinema-goer gets angry about the films of Jonas Mekas - they simply ignore them. In the smaller and more insular comics world it may be more difficult to ignore these kinds of provocations and interventions.

Some of the sharpest critics of the literary or art world or cinematic canons have been women and minorities who argue that their contributions have systematically been dismissed or marginalized within existing practices of canon formation. And, sure enough, your research shows that their contributions have been undervalued within comics studies as well. So, what’s the best path forward towards a more inclusive and diverse understanding of comics? Are we better off rethinking the criteria by which canons are formed or rejecting the idea of canons altogether?

There is a part of me that believes that comics studies does a little bit better than some other domains in thinking about gender and racial difference simply by virtue of the fact that it is so focussed on the past thirty years, which has been a time of greater - but insufficient - inclusiveness in the field. In this way the historical myopia of comics studies can actually be reconfigured as a feature rather than as a flaw.

Moreover, there is a clear push in these areas. I could cite Hillary Chute’s book about women who do autobiographical comics, the anthology The Blacker the Ink, Carolyn Cocca’s new book on gender and the superhero, and Cinema Journal’s roundtable on diversity and comics studies to name but a few. If one is inclined to be positive of canons and canonicity in comics you can note that, because the field is still so relatively new, that there is a great deal of flux and that it is still easy to make space. Marajane Satrapi is an excellent example of this. Persepolis was one of the most taught and most studied comics within only a few years of its translation into English.

The flip side would be that we still have an awful long way to go on the diversity front, and we risk arriving at a very constricted sense of diversity that simply tries to integrate difference into the existing structures without actually stopping to reflect on how practices of exclusion have historically operated in the comics industry and within comics studies.

You talk about the concept of “world comics” as a way of developing a more encompassing understanding of the medium. How might we define a “world’s comics” approach? What kinds of works would this allow us to discuss that are excluded from current understandings of the medium? Are world comics necessary understood as the graphic novel equivalent of the international arts cinema or is there a way to create such a category that would include works from both avant garde and popular culture traditions?

One of the things that I find most frustrating about comics studies is the geographical and cultural blinkers that exist on all sides. I think that the easiest way to be an unread comics scholar is to write about foreign language works. If you write about works that haven’t been translated yet, you can really expect few people to read you. I think that one of the best recent monographs on a single cartoonists is Fabrice Leroy’s Sfar So Far, but because it is written in English and Sfar is best known in France I’m not sure that it has been widely read (even though Sfar’s comics have been reasonably well translated into English).

I’m right now working on an article about two books that are unlikely to ever appear in English (one of them is by Sfar, ironically) and part of me wonders if anyone will ever read the piece. The same is true about work on certain forms of manga, and even more true about comics from the global south. We can be extremely parochial. Of course, this is a complaint that is common across the board. My colleagues in Comp Lit will make the same observation about world literature.

Today I think that comics studies lacks a strong comparative tradition, and one of the reasons for this is that I think a lot of us worry about lacking the competency to do that work. One of my favourite cartoonists is Jiro Taniguchi - I have dozens of his books in French and English that I’ve read multiple times. If you asked me to write a book simply to express my admiration for a cartoonist, I would pick him. I am somewhat reluctant to write about him in depth, however, because I am acutely aware that I lack the cultural understanding to talk about him in the context of Japanese cartooning.

A lot of the writing on Satrapi that I don’t like is the writing that misses obvious connections between her work and that of many of her French contemporaries, and I am keenly aware that that is likely the type of work that I would produce about Taniguchi. So I wind up saying nothing, and, unfortunately, for the most part nothing gets said about him.

I really don’t think that “world comics”, if we can call it that, mirrors the art house, however, because it is often some of the most popular foreign language comics that wind up translated. Manga is a great example of this, where blockbuster after blockbuster have arrived in English but far fewer indy-style comics have been translated.

That said, certain blockbusters are unknown. I think few Americans would have any idea about how unbelievably popular Zep and his character Titeuf are in French-speaking Europe. Those books have sold more than 16 million copies but have never appeared here. I mean, Titeuf has an asteroid named after him, and the character is almost completely unknown here.

The logic of translation is incredibly hit and miss in comics, and it makes comics studies tricky. When I translated Groensteen’s The System of Comics I was acutely aware that a lot of readers of my edition of that book were going to be lost by the casual way he drops in references to works that are exceptionally well-known in France and completely unknown here. When I worked later with Ann Miller on The French Comics Theory Reader we were much more attentive to footnoting those kinds of things.

The other project that I’m working on at the moment is really addressed to a lot of these questions. With Frederik Køhlert I have a grant to research the trans-national reception and discussion of Charlie Hebdo. That magazine is an example that raises all kinds of questions and issues about cross-cultural competencies. There are literally moments where Frederik and I would sit in my office reading old issues of Charlie Hebdo and ask ourselves “what does that even mean? Who is that?”. I mean, at the basic denotative level we don’t know the references to French politicians in the 1970s, let alone what the specifics of the jokes might be. So far it has been some tough slogging, but it’s also the kind of work that both agree needs to get done in comics studies.

Comics and Canons: An Interview with Bart Beaty (Part Two)

Archie would probably end up on nobody’s list of the “greatest comics,” but it may well be one of the most pervasive comics in that many comics readers pass through an Archie phase at one time or another, at least those who start reading comics in their childhood.  Is Archie a “plausible text” in the sense you are discussing here and if not, why not? I chose to work on Archie Comics precisely because I thought it was “implausible”. Indeed, I thought it might be the most implausible text that I could have suggested, and that was the reason that I suggested it!

The series that Twelve-Cent Archie appears in from Rutgers is focused on each volume highlighting an important text. It is an avowedly canon-building publishing program. When I was invited to contribute one of the first books to that series I was quite reluctant to do so, because I really didn’t want to help build that kind of enterprise for many of the reasons that we lay out in Greatest Comic Book (which is a bit of a deliberate expansion of Archie, and a comment on the series). I quite clearly remember saying, “A series like this would never include a book on something like Archie Comics”. To his eternal credit, the series editor, Corey Creekmur, immediately responded that it would and that he wanted me to write it. So my big mouth got me in trouble.

The problem then was obvious: how do I make Archie plausible? I knew that I wanted at least one of the arguments of the book to be a critique of notions of greatness, of importance, but I wasn’t sure exactly how to stretch that out to 80,000 words. The fact is that Archie Comics are very standardized - that is a huge part of their appeal for their readers - but that made them a challenge to approach. So much of that book was determining how to talk about innovation within standardization and the subtle differences that become apparent only in routines.

Twelve-Cent Archie is very much a book that only a full professor would write. If one of my own graduate students had suggested it to me I would have counselled them against it. I have chaired a lot of hiring committees and I have seen how tough it can be for scholars working on non-traditional topics to get past the initial screening; this would have been a career killer for an early career academic. I think it’s notably also the only book that I have written that I didn’t receive research funding for - I didn’t even ask, really, because I could see that writing on the wall.

Why might such a work be worthy of serious study and what can it tell us about value judgements in comics more generally?

After the Archie book came out, it was widely reviewed - particularly here in Canada. I wound up winning my university’s research prize for it and I still recall sitting on the side of the stage with my university’s senior leadership sitting in the front row of the auditorium as my dean talked about my book about Archie. The other recipients were all trying to cure cancer, or end homelessness, and there I was getting the same award for a semiotic analysis of Betty Cooper’s hair. It seemed to me that I had taken the idea that is so common in the natural sciences - that humanities scholars are frivolous - and turned up the dial all the way to eleven.

That said, I get almost an email a week about that book, almost all of them from people who have never read any other scholarly work. Archie Comics have a profound resonance for millions of readers, and they are amazed to see someone take it seriously. Of course, I also get weekly emails from people accusing me of being an obvious drain on the public purse…

You noted in Comics vs. Art that comics have not necessarily benefited from a general tendency in the arts to think about hybrid forms as “particularly complex works that unite disparate elements, thereby accruing values attached to each.”  Perhaps comics have, instead, been evaluated according to somewhat older arguments about medium specificity which distrusted hybridity. See, for example, Rudolph Arnheim’s critique of talking films as “unnatural” and “mongrel” because “two media are fighting with each other” and no consistent set of aesthetic standards can apply. Artistic distaste for comics dates back to the early 20th century where these ideas about artistic purity were dominant and they have been hard to escape. In many ways, the attempt to read graphic novels through a post-modernist frame would seem to be an attempt to rethink those judgements, with mixed results. So, how might we think about the aesthetic value of comics in relation to this older tradition of seeking medium specificity?

More than any other question I think that this is an issue that my work has always been grappling with. From the beginning, some of the most important and influential comics scholarship has been interested in this question: what do comics do that other media don’t? And how do they operate? We can think of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics as key exemplars here, but there is really a whole host of scholars who turned to this question very early on in the history of comics studies. This isn’t surprising: medium specificity was the subject of a lot of early film criticism as well, from Eisenstein to Bazin and so on. It seems to be a stage that most fields go through.

One of the books that I had hoped to write would have taken this topic head on. I tentatively called it “Comics Off the Page” and I was interested in examples where cartoonists worked in non-comics media. I was inspired by seeing “Happy Hooligan is Still Moving”, the dance that Art Spiegelman choreographed with Pilobolus Dance Theatre in New York. I thought I could shed some interesting light on how comics work by examining how they interact with things that people don’t think of as comics. Unfortunately, that project really bogged down. I couldn’t find an interesting way to talk about it without simply getting into long descriptive passages of the works, most of which aren’t available to readers. I think that it works well as a lecture - I’ve had a lot of success presenting some of the preliminary thoughts - but it falls apart on the page. Ironic, given my proposed title.

My new project, with Ben Woo and Nick Sousanis, seems to be working better. It’s called What Were Comics?, and last year we received a really sizeable grant from the Canadian government to do the work. We’re interested in looking at the history of what comic book were over time. This has helped lift the discussion out of abstraction. Instead of thinking “comics could be this or they could be that”, which is an area where Nick particularly excels, we’re a lot more focused on dealing concrete shifts and showing what actually did happen.

One of the things that I’ve learned in talking about these projects is that most people view comics in a more restricted way than I do. A lot of people seem to regard comics as what you draw on bristol board and then publish in comic books. Webcomics has shifted this a bit, but it hasn’t shifted it to the point that comics are seen to be really in dialogue with other art forms. Painters borrow freely from comics, much more it seems than cartoonists borrow from contemporary painters. I think some of this has to do with the way that MFA programs teach (or, more accurately, don’t teach) comics, but it is striking how isolated comics can still be in the world of arts.

Across several of your books, you note a number of attempts by authors and artists -- most directly in terms of Art Spiegelman --  to promote their own legacy. What strategies do you think have been successful for comics creators as they have sought to demonstrate their status as auteurs worthy of entry into the canon of graphic storytelling? How do these approaches resemble or differ from those deployed by artists working in other media -- painting, cinema, literature?

I think that the institutions of the comics world are much weaker than they are in other art worlds. The steps towards becoming an important painter seem to be really clearly laid out: get a degree, get a gallery, and so on. There are so few examples of cartoonists becoming successful that it is not so clear what the route is.

Once upon a time it was clearly: get a commercially successful daily strip. All of the “greats” from the first half of the twentieth-century, in the United States, were strip cartoonists. Many were beloved, and many were household names - real superstars in the culture. Obviously that route is vanishing quickly.

Spiegelman showed a very different path, which was create “one great work”, and a number of people have successfully followed that model. It’s a model that is very akin to literature.

The flip side would be Lynda Barry, who struggled in semi-obscurity for a long time to the point that she considered quitting before Drawn and Quarterly shone a new spotlight on her amazing body of work. That’s also very akin to literature, unfortunately. A critical hit will provide a foundation for future work, and then the issue becomes follow-up.

Interestingly, in the more mainstream area of comics production reputation building seems to be more similar to contemporary filmmaking. The ideal trajectory might be to self-publish and build a reputation, get hired to write or draw a low-level superhero title, turn that into a success and do higher profile work until your name is more important than the characters you write. Then you jump to Image, launch your own title and cash in, I guess.

I think that there remains a bifurcation that we used to refer to as mainstream and alternative, and the collaborative and (generally) solitary approaches that are favoured by each indicates different pathways to longevity.

Comics and Canons: An Interview with Bart Beaty (Part One)

Comic Studies is one of the areas of research which have really captured my attention and imagination in recent years.  We are seeing comic studies panels included in more and more academic conferences, ranging from the Modern Language Association to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, not to mention comic studies panels as a featured element at San Diego Comic-Con (and other such gatherings around the country). Comic Studies has been the focus on special issues of many established journals as well as several journals focused fully on this topic. There has been a record number of new publications about comics over the past few years coming from many of the most distinguished university presses.  There are distinguished research facilities such as the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State University, which is a mecca for anyone wanting to research this topic. There are a growing number of college courses focused around comics and graphic novels, including my own here at the University of Southern California. Bart Beaty, a professor at the University of Calgary, has been a major force behind many of these efforts. To date, Beaty has published 13 books on comics and graphic storytelling, including major translations of French comics theory and original research in comics history, theory, and criticism. He has been one of the most thoughtful writers about the cultural debates around comics (UnPopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1980s; Frederic Wetham and the Critique of Mass Culture; Comics Versus Art). His most recent books include Twelve Cent Archie and with Benjamin Woo, The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books.  Here, Beaty and Woo share their thoughts about the emergence of a canon in comic studies and specifically about how faculty decide which books to study and teach, given the emergence of a new academic field around what was once seen as a highly disreputable medium. The authors offer compelling case studies of a range of different candidates for consideration as the best or most important work to emerge from graphic storytelling, using each to illustrate different principles around which canon-formation might occur, but also raising questions about what's being left out, what's not being given the consideration it is due. This is an important book for anyone who wants to understand how cultural hierarchies emerge and shape our relations with media.

This interview can be seen as a continuation of that project, as Bart and I circle back through some of the key exemplars from that book, and ask some further questions about cultural capital and the value of studying comics within an academic setting.

Some have worried that a core canon (Spiegelman, Ware, Bechdel, Satrapi, Gaiman, Crumb, Moore, Sacco) has emerged in comics studies prematurely -- that too much of the early writing defining the field circles around a small number of writers and works and as a consequence, we are constraining our methodologies and theories to reflect that limited sample. Would you agree?

This is the subject of so much of what Benjamin Woo and I wrote about  in our book The Greatest Comic Book of All Time!, and I absolutely do agree. In our first chapter we attempted to put some data behind what seems to be a pretty common understanding about comics studies: that it has been thoroughly concerned with a small handful of creators and works published over the past thirty years. In the book we surveyed the field of scholarly publishing on comics in order to demonstrate just how narrow the work being done can be. What we found is that comics studies is disproportionately concerned with a very small handful of creators and texts in comparison to cognate fields. So, yes, I absolutely agree with that.

I also think that you touch on something more important here, though, which is the theoretical and methodological restriction that are currently being applied to comics. I think I would first say that to my mind there is a much greater theoretical diversity within the field at present than a methodological diversity. Consider empirical approaches to comics. While there is an increasing amount of work being done using empirical methods it is notable that most of the key players in that area can be brought together at a single conference next year in Bremen. To take another example, if we consider how much work is being done on comics that would require an ethics application because it relies on human subjects, I think the number of projects would be extremely small.

The vast majority of comics studies work being done in the English-speaking academy stems from faculty and students trained in literature departments, and it relies on the kind of interpretive close-readings that are still so paramount within those departments. That seems to have had a tremendous impact on the shaping of the canon: it is much easier for a graduate student to convince a committee that the work of Alison Bechdel or Chris Ware is “sophisticated” enough to be akin to contemporary literary fiction that it would be a credible subject for a dissertation.

How might we encourage comics scholars to move beyond such a canon?

For me that is the million dollar question. When I was asked to give the keynote address at the International Comics Arts Forum in Columbus two years ago part of me wanted to call my talk “Comics Studies: You’re All Doing It Wrong”. Needless to say, I didn’t do that, but I’m sure that subtext was picked up by many in my audience.

One of the things I argued in that talk was a paraphrase of Fredric Jameson’s famous dictum that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. I quipped that it was easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the dominance of literary methods in comics studies.

Given that the vast bulk of comics studies occurs in departments of literature, and faced with the reality that a literary canon exists and that it structures the way that those departments teach and research, we really are faced with two choices. The first is to simply accede to the logics of canonization while pushing the boundaries. We can argue that Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and Marjane Satrapi are every bit as deserving of serious study as Phillip Roth, Toni Morrison, and Zadie Smith and try to force those authors into the discussion.

In a lot of ways, this is what film studies scholars did in the 1960s - they demonstrated that Bergman, Godard, and Kurosawa could be studied in a manner that was akin to the study of literature. This is a perfectly valid approach and it has gained us, as comics scholars, quite a bit. I think that to the extent that courses in comics studies even exist today in many universities is a testament to the work that was done to advance this particular way of thinking.

The other option is the much more difficult one - possibly an impossible one. When we argue that our understanding of notions of inherent quality are simply ideological constructs that have obscured our understanding of how culture operates is more vexed, and to suggest that we fundamentally reshape our curricula, indeed the very basis of our disciplines, is just a non-starter for most people. It is an almost impossible task. In my own department the suggestion that there are not certain writers who “have to be” taught makes people think that you’re completely naive.

Your own work has been expansive in its choices of objects for study -- ranging from a strong focus on Eurocomics to a book centered around Archie. How do you personally decide which comics are worthy of your scholarly attention?

It’s my sense from talking to my colleagues and working with my students that many of them come to the work that they want to talk about first and foremost. So many of the Honours students that I supervise come to me and say “I want to write my thesis about Blankets” or “I want to write about Jessica Jones”. It’s only after some discussion that they step back and arrive at the theory that might structure their analysis, or the method that they might best use to illuminate these works. The concern I’ve always had with this approach is that I think it tells me more about the critic than the text under discussion.

Personally, I’ve not yet written a book because I was interested in the comics themselves. With Unpopular Culture, which was about European comics in the 1990s, I wanted to talk about the way I saw the comics cultures of Western Europe evolving in real time. I thought that there was a remarkable transformation taking place, and that was what interested me. I wound up talking about certain comics because of the way that they highlighted certain tendencies. Some readers have suggested to me that I must really like the work of Lewis Trondheim because he is the only artist who gets his own chapter in that book, but the reality is that he is just so unbelievably prolific that he made the easiest case study with which to summarize the themes of the book (though I do enjoy a great deal of his work, if I’m being honest).

Twelve-Cent Archie is really the only one where I picked the topic before figuring out what I would say about it. Indeed, I was really worried that when I sat down to do the research I wouldn’t find sufficient material to proceed. Generally, though, I’m not that interested in promoting certain comics with my work. I don’t read the work of Rob Liefeld much (though I did read some Deadpool around the time the film was released), but Ben and I thought he was the best example of the a certain type of commercial comics, so we wrote about him in Greatest Comic Book. I will say, also, that that chapter shocked some people. Two of our anonymous referees thought it was self-evidently pointless to include a chapter on such an “insignificant” creator, which is a perfect example of how ideologies of quality obscure the field and the kinds of questions that we allow ourselves to research.

Art Spiegelman has talked about the process of reading comics as graphic novels as “a Faustian deal because the medium gets tainted by its aspirations towards legitimacy.” Would you agree with that assessment? What is gained or lost when comics are read through such a strong literary lens?

I absolutely agree. When I moved to an English department in 2010 (I had previously taught in a Media Studies department) I indicated that I could teach courses on “Comics” and my department chair wanted me to teach on “Graphic Novels” instead. I objected that that wouldn’t permit me to teach, for instance, comic strips and I was met with some departmental resistance. We settled on “Comics and Graphic Novels”, which strikes me a bit as “Ice and Frozen Water”, but the concession got the course on the books. Six years later I was able to get “and Graphic Novels” dropped.

The central gain of the graphic novel for cartoonists has been the ability to get them into bookstores and before a broader public, and, really importantly, to get them reviewed in The New York Times and The Guardian and The New Yorker. I do agree that without the success of Maus, and the creation of the graphic novel as a publishing category, that comics would be in a much weaker space reputationally. The graphic novel allowed us, as comics scholars, to shoehorn our work into the curriculum over time. That is a huge advantage.

When I began working on comics as a graduate student in the mid-1990s there were literally no peer-refereed journals in the field. There was a single scholarly conference (ICAF). No professional organization. Few courses. No programs. Moreover, we had active resistance from groups like the MLA and SCS. If my memory is correct, the first SCMS comics panel didn’t occur until the one that you were on in London. That was in the early-2000s.

In the late-1990s the MLA routinely rejected proposals for comics panels out of hand. Today, both of those organizations, and others, have growing comics studies areas and interest groups. So much of that is because of the graphic novel as a gentrifying idea. No matter how problematic the term can be, it has allowed us to win a number of tactical battles and advance our cause. At this point I’m very much in favour of winning any tactical battles that we can.

Digital Dreamers: A Conversation between Jose Antonio Vargas and Henry Jenkins

Last week, I participated in a plenary conversation at the Digital Media and Learning 2016 conference at the University of California-Irvine. My thinking partner for this exchange was Jose Antonio Vargas, the founder and CEO of Define American, a non-profit media and culture organization that seeks to elevate the conversation around immigration and citizenship in America; the founder and editor of #EmergingUS, a digital platform that lives at the intersection of race, immigration, and identity in a multicultural America; and a filmmaker. I was thrilled to have this chance to reconnect with Vargas. As we both note at the start of the conversation, we had developed a special relationship a decade or so ago, when he was starting as a reporter at the Washington Post and I was often consulted as a source for his stories about video games and about the role of new media in the 2008 presidential campaign. We lost touch with each other, so I was surprised, along with everyone else, when Vargas came out as undocumented in a cover story in Time magazine and have watched with close attention and distant admiration as he has emerged as a key figure in the debates around immigration reform in America over the past few years.

During this same time, I have moved to California and found myself more and more writing about issues of race/racism and social justice, after spending the first part of my career largely avoiding such topics. So, in this exchange, we both share something of our personal journeys and then talk about the role of media -- old and new -- in creating the context where today's debates around immigration reform, Islamaphobia, and racialized police violence have been taking place, and we engage with the diverse audience of researchers, educators, and community leaders drawn to the MacArthur Foundation sponsored event. Since the conference organizers have made a video of the event available, I wanted to share it with my regular readers here.

If you would like to read more of my own recent writings about growing up as a white southerner and how this has impacted the way I think about race, see this piece about a family photograph and this one about the debate around the confederate flag.

Below is another video produced in association with the DML conference -- in this case, Howard Rhinegold interviews Sangita Shresthova and Gabriel Peters-Lazario, my frequent collaborators, as they describe a workshop they ran focused on world-building and transmedia for social change.

GeekOut Interview: Transmedia Worldbuilding for Civic Engagement from Connected Learning Alliance on Vimeo.

If you have not already registered to attend our Oct. 21 conference, Transforming Hollywood 7: Diversifying Entertainment, please do so. Tickets are going fast, and we think this is going to be a really significant discussion about how we may produce a more inclusive culture both behind the camera and on screen. I will be sharing videos of the event here sometime down the line, but you will want to tell your grandchildren you were there when it happened. :-)

Why Study Fan Archives?: An Interview with Gail DeKosnik (Part Three)

As we think about the challenges of developing a more diverse and inclusive media culture, you suggest that some archives do not simply collect existing works but are generative, actively shaping the culture that they collect, through various mechanisms. So, what role do you think fan archives have played in encouraging more cultural production by and about people of color?

Fan fiction archives are not merely repositories for works that already exist in the world; rather they are what Wolfgang Ernst calls “dynarchives” ­­ archives that change and expand with the proliferation of the cultural genres that the archives are built to store.

I go a step further than Ernst and argue that fan fiction archives are generative ­­ they incentivize fans to produce more of what is being archived ­­ and when archives host writing festivals, events, “ficathons,” and fic “exchanges” like Yuletide, they explicitly call upon a community to write more and more of a certain subgenre or category of fanfic.

In Chapter 4 of the book, I discuss a number of fan writing challenges, most of them staged by the group “dark_agenda,” that called upon fans to write stories about characters of color. These “archive events” seek to challenge the dominance of white characters in the larger Western Mediascape, the Western Media Archive as a whole (by which I mean the entirety of U.S.­ and European­produced audiovisual media texts, which all too frequently feature white leading characters, with non­white characters often supporting, propping up, or “pedestaling” them).

These writing challenges invite fans to reflect upon the ways that fandom, which is motivated by deep interior and individualized feelings, can be very heavily influenced and even structured by the biases and prejudices of the media industries. I view these challenges as challenging fans to try to link their politics (for example, a belief in racial equality) to their fannish practices, and to bring into being, if only in fan fiction, a mediascape that has more equal representation of races and ethnicities ­­ to help imagine and create the kind of mediascape that they think should exist in the world.

You were part of a generation of fan scholars who were, in many cases, introduced to the field through Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. One shared trait among many of you was the application of performance theory approaches to thinking about fan cultural production. What do we learn if we think about fan productions as performances rather than or in addition to being read as texts?

Francesca Coppa’s great essay in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, which I teach at least once every year, is really the basis for much of my thinking around how performance studies and fan studies intersect. As I write in the book, I consider Coppa’s “Writing Bodies in Space” and Kurt Lancaster’s book Interacting with Babylon 5 to be the foundational texts of a line of scholarship that merges performance studies and fan studies.

Building on their work, I argue in Rogue Archives that fans’ desire to perform and re­perform, and differently perform, stories and characters that many people know and have in common, which is a fundamental drive in both theater making and fan fiction writing, has led to the rise of a different imperative in cultural preservation than any that existed before.

In other words, because digital culture makes constant re­performance possible to produce and share very widely, digital archiving has had to develop to account for that highly active performance culture. And digital archiving itself is not static, it evolves, and makes its own repertoires, and has had to alter and refine its own performance technique and its own technical levels of performance (as in “high ­performance”) as it has tried to preserve the explosion of creative output from Internet users.

If you attended a festival of plays where every play was being performed as many ways as different people could think to stage them, and where there was an infinite capacity for new stages to be built right away, and for new versions of each one of those plays to be staged, and if you tried to somehow preserve all of those, every iteration and variant of every play in that ever­ expanding festival ­­ that’s what Internet fan fiction archivists have been trying to do.

The prevailing logics of digital networked cultural production are quite different than those of print culture: digital culture is a performance culture, while print culture thought of itself as a text culture, a static culture, where works were “locked” into place and they were either “official” or “unofficial.” Everyone knows that it’s much easier to archive texts than performances. Well, now, digital archivists have to be in the business of archiving performances, not texts.

You dig back deep enough into fan history to describe the moment of transition towards digital fan culture and the resistances some fans had to moving away from a print­-based and face-­to-­face conception of fandom. What can we learn by understanding those resistances more fully? And how might we connect them to issues about digital equity and access more generally? What role did fandom have in overcoming the digital divide between male and female users and what might this suggest in terms of strategies for confronting other kinds of digital divides and participation gaps?

As you (Henry ­­ and also Cynthia Jenkins) told me in your interview for the book, fans who were active in real­world spaces, in face­to­face fan groups, meetings, and cons, at the time that the Internet was initially becoming a site of fandom, were quite attentive to issues of unequal access, to the “digital divide” between fans who had routine access to computers and the Internet (say, at their jobs) and fans who did not.

You and many others recalled that many fans whose fannish world had been defined wholly by print zines and in­ person interaction felt shut out, excluded, from this other world of fandom that arose in this virtual, online space. The temporalities of those fan worlds were dramatically different: fan conventions like Escapade took place once every year, new zine issues were published maybe twice a year or maybe monthly, but on the Internet, fan discussion took place daily.

So fans who had computer access printed out fan discussion threads and took those pages to meetings and passed them around, and they organized donations of computers to fans who couldn’t afford them, and there were cons at which some fans would set up a few computers in a room and demo Internet fan sites for fans who had never been online, and show them what participation in that world looked like.

Fans of that period, the early-­to-­mid­’90s, seemed to do a great job at outreach and onboarding, organizing tutoring events and equipment donations ­­ people who are working on issues of the digital divide and new literacies today can really learn a lot from that era of fan history.

At the same time, as I write in the book, there was a ton of strife between “print fans” and “net fans,” for many many reasons, because they experienced and defined and practiced fandom so differently (though, I note, many fans straddled both worlds and both identities).

In the past, researchers have thrown up their hands when asked how expansive fan archives really are given the difficulty of accurately counting these dispersed and partially underground collections. Yet you and your team have been using new tools and techniques to give us some more accurate data in response to this question. Can you give us a progress report on what you are finding?

I was fortunate enough to apply for, and receive, a $50,000 grant from the Hellman Fellows Fund, as well as some smaller grants from the Townsend Center for the Humanities and the UC Berkeley Senate Faculty Committee on Research which allowed me to fund a research team composed of myself, my colleague Prof. Laurent El Ghaoui (a statistician on Berkeley’s

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty), computer science Ph.D. and undergraduate students, and Ph.D. and undergrad students from humanities disciplines as well. I called that team “Fan Data,” and we worked for more than a year to build data scrapers that could “count” Internet fan fiction archives. I wanted to ascertain how large fan fiction archives are in terms of number of stories, number of authors, number of reviewers, etc., and I wanted to graph their growth over time, and I wanted to quantify their rates of productivity ­­ how many new stories were uploaded to each archive per month.

We scraped Fanfiction.net and the Archive of Our Own, mostly, but also did some interesting analysis of a Usenet X ­Files fan fiction community, the Gossamer archive (the largest repository of X­Files fanfic and the largest single­fandom fic archive, to my knowledge), and several H arry Potter LiveJournal communities. All of our visualizations can be found in the Conclusion to R ogue Archives.

Unfortunately, those scrapers aren’t available to the public, and I’m not sure that they should be, as we don’t want loads of people running scrapers on active websites all the time. (Apologies to FF.net and AO3 if our team caused any of the archives we scraped any inconvenience or interruptions of service!!!!).

I would love to conceive of some way that maybe my team could one day launch a service that would periodically measure these archives, ideally with their administrators’ permission (we did get the Gossamer archivists’ permission), and release that data to the public on a website. Perhaps we could ask scholars to pay us a nominal fee for conducting similar scrapes and creating visualizations of other websites with vast amounts of user­generated content.

Those are dreams I have for the future, but given that I can only pay researchers to work on such projects with grant monies, and grant applications take incredible amounts of time and don’t always (or often) meet with success, I have to weigh the costs and benefits of furthering my data science/digital humanities (DS/DH) research against doing more traditional scholarship (i.e., reading books and journal articles, studying cultural texts/objects/performances, perhaps conducting interviews and transcribing them, and writing essays or chapters). Because grant applications for DS/DH take SO much time, I do a lot more traditional humanities scholarship than DS/DH scholarship.

That said, I am committed to advancing DS/DH. I will be publishing another DS/DH article soon, in which I share the results of using a topic modeling tool on Twitter, for the controversial hashtag #CancelColbert. I like to work with graduate students interested in DS/DH methods, and a colleague of mine, Prof. Keith Feldman in Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies department, and I are collaborating with a number of grad students in our working group, The Color of New Media (which focuses on scholarship at the intersection of critical race studies, gender and women’s studies, transnational studies, and new media studies), on a book project called # identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sex, and Nation, which will feature DS/DH research in some capacity ­­ potentially on a dedicated website that accompanies the publication of a print book.

I also got some teaching grants to support a seminar that I’m leading this fall, called “Making Sense of Cultural Data,” that brings together what I call “Data Science Professionals” or “DS Pros” and undergraduate and graduate students, to help students conduct their own original research projects, both individual and group projects, using leading­edge data science tools.

My goal with that course is to envision a new kind of curriculum that invites technical and non­technical faculty and students to collaborate and teach one another and learn from one another.

I think that the worlds of data science (text analytics including topic modeling, network analysis, geospatial mapping, new forms of image search, etc.) and the worlds of the arts, design, and humanities really need to come much closer together. We can’t have data science only ask and answer questions that matter to corporations and government bodies ­­ it has to ask and answer humanistic, social scientific, artistic, and design questions, too. And we can’t have arts/humanities/social science/design scholars ignore the potentials of data science; we have to get these scholars to embrace and love what data tools and computational approaches can offer them.

At least some students need to have a foot in both worlds, going forward, so that the “two cultures,” as C.P. Snow would say, can speak to one another and conduct new, original, and important research.

Abigail De Kosnik is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM, bcnm.berkeley.edu) and the Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies (TDPS, tdps.berkeley.edu).  She is the author of Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (MIT Press, 2016).  She has published articles on media fandom, popular digital culture, and performance studies in Cinema Journal, The International Journal of Communication, Modern Drama, Transformative Works and Cultures and elsewhere.  She is the co-editor, with Sam Ford and C. Lee Harrington, of the edited essay collection The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (University Press of Mississippi, 2011).

Why Study Fan Archives?: An Interview with Abigail De Kosnik (Part Two)

Given the sheer volume of fan works produced, it is perhaps not realistic to imagine every text will be saved, so what are some of the ways the community has sought to determine which texts are worth preserving for future generations? Is what you call “the selective tradition” an inevitable development given the sheer expansion of cultural production or are there alternative ways of thinking about the value of assembling and preserving cultural works?

Actually the way that data storage is developing, more and more storage is becoming available at lower and lower prices. As long as digital networked preservation is a going concern, I think that fan archives can actually be comprehensive ­­ I think that potentially everything that takes the form of digital data can be saved! At least from a technical perspective.

What I emphasize in the book is that actually, labor is a far scarcer resource than technology. So, while it will be technically feasible to preserve many fandoms’ output in their entirety, what if there comes a day when people cease to care about saving digital cultural production? I think that it’s possible that even now, many people believe (falsely) that everything they do online is preserved somewhere, by the companies that run the social media platforms on which they participate, and don’t really sense a need to do anything to save their posts or their fan works, or others’ fan works.

But only fan labor has made possible the multi­fandom archive Archive of Our Own (AO3) and the great single ­fandom archives that preceded it, such as Gossamer and Trekiverse. These archives are all non­profit fan­ owned and fan­ operated sites.

Fanfiction.net is for­ profit and definitely does not operate as an archive ­­ it has freely deleted fan works several times in its history. Tumblr is not an archive for fan works. YouTube is not an archive for fan works. For ­profit corporate­ owned sites have no commitment to the long­  term preservation of fans’ cultural productions.

Only when fans own their own servers, as the famous AO3 rallying cry goes ­­ and only as long as fans are willing to do the work of building and maintaining the archives that live on those servers, and interfacing with their users and with the press, and putting redundancy measures in place, and making policy decisions and recruiting fellow volunteers and all of the other responsibilities involved with running an archive ­­ will fan archives exist.

So while I don’t think that fan fiction is too large a genre to completely archive, I do fear that at some point, the preponderance of corporate ­owned social media may lull fans into thinking that they don’t have to appoint themselves archivists of their communities’ material. If fans stop volunteering to fulfill this important cultural role, then fan works will cease to be archived in a reliable way.

You’ve written much here and elsewhere about issues of fan labor. Who does the work of producing and maintaining these archives? What kinds of rewards do they receive for their efforts? What are alternative ways of thinking about how to compensate for this labor?

In my interviews with fan archivists, I was struck by how passionately they felt about digital preservation of fan works, how important they thought it was, how deeply they thought about how the structure and functions of their archives. All of the fan archivists that I spoke to had strong technical skills ­­ that’s one reason that I call them “techno­volunteers,” they volunteer because they have an intuitive sense for how technology could be used to make enduring cultural archives, if only a volunteer stepped in to make that happen ­­ but not all, or even many, of them were professional programmers.

The reward of archiving, it seems, is largely the endurance of the archive itself, because what all archivists talked about was how appalled they have been at seeing fan works, or even large fan archives, disappear. Another reward that many interviewees spoke of was the relationships they got to build because of their archival activities, and also what archiving had taught them about the diversity of fandom.

As for compensation, well, almost every archivist said that their fan archives cost them money, because they have to pay for server space or simply because they have to pour time and effort into these non­income-­generating projects. But the compensation that I would like to see for fan archivists is simply greater recognition. I wish that fans valorized their archivists the way they valorize their favorite fan artists and authors and vidders.

Techno­volunteers tend to be invisible because many users assume that online archives are automated to the point that nobody in particular needs to actually own and operate the archives, and make regular decisions and oversee them and steer and guide and maintain them, and that simply isn’t the case. Even a highly automated archive has at least one person, and usually more, working hard behind ­the­ scenes, at the “back end.”

In other words, I argue that digital archive users tend to confuse the “servers” (the people who volunteer to serve them by building them working archives) and “servers” (the hardware that serves up fan works on demand). Fan archivists are humans, not machines. They deserve as much respect and admiration as prominent fan creators.

Can you say something about your own archiving practices in relation to the production of this book ­­ for example, you’ve conducted a large number of oral histories that are potential resources for constructing the history of fandom as a community quite apart from your specific uses of this material. What do you see as your obligations as a researcher in terms of the material you have collected?

I’m very happy to report that we donated both the audio files and the transcripts of all of our interviews ­­ under the title “Fan Fiction and Internet Memory,” which was the official title of our oral history project ­­ to the University of Iowa Libraries, because those Libraries have a special collection of “Fandom­Related Collections”: http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/sc/resources/FandomResources/. (When I say “our” oral history project, I want to credit my fellow interviewers, Andrea Horbinski and Lisa Cronin, as well as Adam Hutz, Kelsey Wong, and all of our transcribers ­­ all of my team members were UC Berkeley graduate or undergraduate students at the time we conducted the interviews and got them transcribed.) While our interview archive hasn’t yet been ingested, I hope to see it listed on that page soon! And eventually, I would love to work with U. of Iowa to get our transcripts available online for other researchers to use.

Abigail De Kosnik is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM, bcnm.berkeley.edu) and the Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies (TDPS, tdps.berkeley.edu).  She is the author of Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (MIT Press, 2016).  She has published articles on media fandom, popular digital culture, and performance studies in Cinema Journal, The International Journal of Communication, Modern Drama, Transformative Works and Cultures and elsewhere.  She is the co-editor, with Sam Ford and C. Lee Harrington, of the edited essay collection The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (University Press of Mississippi, 2011).

Why Study Fan Archives: An Interview with Abigail De Kosnik (Part One)

Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse's Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Internet Age introduced a new generation of fan scholars and their work: as a cohort, these women were deeply embedded in the fan communities about which they wrote ("aca-fans"), they had come of age with digital media, they combined ethnographic and textual modes of analysis, they were as interested in how fan fiction was produced as they were in why it was produced, and they introduced a range of new theoretical paradigms.

Abigail De Kosnik wrote one of the essays from that collection that I return to most often in my own writing and teaching, and I've been lucky enough to get to know her as a friend and thinking partner in the years since the book appeared.

While other fans (academic and otherwise) had suggested connections between fan fiction and various literary texts that appropriate and remix characters from existing works, De Kosnik's "Archontic Literature" framing was the first to systematically explore those connections, linking the study of fandom to larger conversations about how writers relate to cultural and historical archives, a topic she returns to in her current book to stunning effect. While other writers have explored a range of fannish practices, including, most influentially, fan fiction writing, fan video practices, and now, in recent years, fan activism, Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom, which MIT Press published this week,  focuses on fan archiving practices as central to the evolution of digital cultural practices more generally.

Here, she combines oral history, recovering some key chapters in the evolution of online fandom, with a rich theoretical exploration, one that is particularly drawn to metaphors from performance studies.  I can only describe Rogue Archives as a tour de force. The book dramatically expands the range of theoretical texts and traditions that fandom studies might draw on for contextualizing the production, circulation, archiving, and consumption of fan fiction; De Kosnik makes understanding fandom’s labor in preserving its cultural memory central to many core debates about digital culture.

She writes here, among other things, about the archive and the repertoire, the instability and ephemerality of digital memory, ongoing debates about canons and alternative ways of constructing cultural traditions, the performative and bodily dimensions of fan fiction, different kinds of fan performances, debates about free and immaterial labor, fandom’s transition from print-based to digital practices, alternative temporalities of media consumption, and notions of authorship in fandom. She yokes these various strands  via the two different meanings of archive she proposes – in terms of the material practices through which fan fiction is preserved and rendered accessible to a larger group of readers and the archive as the set of previous texts which readers and writers draw upon in processing new stories. This is going to be a very important book, not simply for fandom studies, but across a range of other disciplines that she draws reconceptualizes in the pursuit of her project.

What follows is the first of three installments of an interview with De Kosnik about the book and its contributions to our understanding of fandom, archives, digital culture, and popular memory.

Through the years, fandom studies has investigated a wide range of fan practices ­­ fan fiction, fan vidding, Wizard Rock, Cosplay, Memes, etc. but there has been relatively little focus on fan archiving practices, which to some may seem like a largely technical issue. So, why study fan archives? What do these practices tell us about fandom? What might the study of fan archiving practices contribute to information science more generally? In what ways are fan archives illustrative of other memory practices within digital culture?

Fan fiction archives were among the first high ­volume, high­ traffic Internet archives to be built. Plenty of people were using the nascent Internet and World Wide Web (in the early ’90s) to construct enormous archives of information that were free and open online, but fan fiction archives were, as far as I can te ll, the most active of these early digital archives ­­ because fan fiction was being written and uploaded (or sent in to archive administrators) at a fast and furious rate.

Fan fiction archives can teach information science about what it means to try to preserve culture in the moment of its unfolding, cultural forms at their peak production levels. Information science understands a lot about preserving cultural objects that are old, that have taken on great significance in the time since their release, but preserving digital culture means archiving texts, images, video, and motion graphics a s they are circulating, when they’re the most relevant, not when they are already relegated to “the past.”

Fan fiction archives led the way in the effort to try to effectively store, and make available, digital cultural works as they were being generated. What archivists of both physical and digital objects share is a need to keep and maintain those objects because they are important, and they are in constant threat of being lost. And digital objects are even more prone to sudden disappearance than physical ones ­­ a hosting company can decide not to host your fan fiction works anymore, or an archivist can “flounce” from their archive and simply shut it down, or a social media platform can opt to delete fanfic stories without notifying anyone, or servers can simply crash.

Fan fiction archivists got into the digital preservation game so early that they definitely encountered all of these dangers and more, and have collectively created many defenses against digital loss and disappearance that all archivists can and should learn from.

You open the book with a compelling statement, “memory has gone rogue.” In what sense are the practices you describe throughout the book “rogue”? For example, the recent Paramount/CBS Guidelines for Star Trek fan films have specific stipulations about how fan films can be stored and transmitted (streaming but not in a material format such as video or dvd). What’s at stake in this effort by the studio to dictate fan archiving practices?

I argue that cultural memory has “gone rogue” because so many digital cultural preservation projects are run, not by large state­sponsored museums, libraries, and archives and trained Library and Information Science professionals, but by amateurs, hackers, volunteers, pirates, and fans.

People who have no formal training or professional experience as archivists, but who have some understanding of how networked technology can be used to store digital works and keep them available over long periods of time and are passionate about actualizing this potential, have taken it upon themselves to design, build, and maintain online repositories.

I’m thinking of people like Brewster Kahle, who founded the massive Internet Archive, anonymous pirates who have created some of the most robust, most accessible film libraries in the world (though they are illicit), and media fans, who have sought to preserve their own communities’ vast amounts of cultural production. People like these are leading the fight to preserve culture digitally; their discoveries and best practices are paving the way for future online archival efforts.

Unfortunately, the very media corporations that have the most to gain from digital media being archived and made widely available to future generations (for example: Paramount depends on the Star Trek fandom continuing on forever, which means that it depends on fans being able to access as many Trek texts as possible, both official and fan­made) seem to often be hostile to preservation projects and do not seem to prioritize long­term storage and circulation at all (as in the example that you gave).

Towards the end of my book, I discuss the fact that fans have basically “taken license” with media texts for a long time ­­ in other words, fans aren’t waiting, and never were waiting, for corporations to finally see the wisdom in appending Creative Commons licenses to their products so that finally fans could be “authorized” to transform with attribution and circulate noncommercially. Rather, fans have simply taken whatever license they wished with media products ­­ they’ve remixed them however they’ve wanted, shared them as widely as they wanted to, safeguarded them however they’ve deemed necessary.

Fan creativity only promotes media commodities and keeps interest in them alive, so far from fan archivists doing any harm to media companies by flouting their rules regarding fan works, I think that these volunteer archivists are working hard for the benefit and profit of these companies by inventing effective archival techniques for their fellow fans’ output.

Fan fiction has often been described as transient, disposable, and perhaps most damningly, only of interest within a particular social circle of friends. Even many fans would argue that most of what gets produced is not especially good by traditional standards. So why should we care whether the archive of previous fan works is preserved or not?

I think that it’s likely that every reader of fan fiction has very strong opinions about what makes a fan fiction story “good” or “bad.” But in my view, one of the greatest ethical lessons to be learned from participating in fandom is that one can’t judge the quality of fan works for others. What strikes one reader as a terrible, trope ­ridden, immature fan story may strike another as just the kind of story that they want to read at a given moment in time. Even a story that is full of misspellings and bad grammar can offer a compelling version of characters and their dynamics, or a fascinating plot line, or really lively dialogue.

And I don’t mean to suggest that plot lines have to be fascinating, or dialogue has to be lively ­­ actually, I very much enjoy fanfics that work like mood pieces, or tone poems, in which very little happens and very little is said, and we just get some insight into a character’s state of mind.

In other words, fan fiction archives specifically work to offer fans the greatest possible multiplicity of approaches to, and versions of, media universes, so that every fan may choose which fan stories “work” for them (and different types of stories may “work” at very different points in a fan’s life). Fan fiction archives promote this ethos of acceptance that there is tremendous diversity in cultural tastes and preferences.

Fan fiction archives’ mission is to preserve all fan works for all fans, not to judge which are “worth” saving and which are not worthy. Fan critics can debate which fan works, in any given universe, are the “best,” but fan archivists strive to preserve all of the works, as much as they can ­­ because they value their fandoms as important and significant living cultural communities, and they feel that every corner of their cultures is worth safeguarding.

Abigail De Kosnik is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies.  She is the author of Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (MIT Press, 2016).  She has published articles on media fandom, popular digital culture, and performance studies in Cinema Journal, The International Journal of Communication, Modern Drama, Transformative Works and Cultures and elsewhere.  She is the co-editor, with Sam Ford and C. Lee Harrington, of the edited essay collection The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (University Press of Mississippi, 2011).