Next Step, Join In! Launching the Atlas of the Civic Imagination
/Next Step, Join In! Launching the Atlas of the Civic Imagination
Sangita Shresthova
Thinking back, the vision for the “Atlas of the Civic Imagination” took root over dinner at a Nepali restaurant in Austria in 2016, when our Civic Imagination Project team ran a civic imagination module at the Salzburg Academy for Media and Global Change, an annual academic program that brings together 70 students from many countries for three weeks. Our module at Salzburg that year consisted of a “Sparking the Civic Imagination” keynote lecture, delivered by Henry Jenkins, and a series of three workshops, developed by our team,and carried out by Gabriel Peters-Lazaro (Gabe), Henry Jenkins and myself (see Gabe’s write up of the module).
As we reflected on our experiences halfway through the Academy over (pretty delicious) plates of momos and curry, Gabe, Henry and I kept circling back to the Atlas, a fledgling idea that we had just piloted. More specifically, we had come to Salzburg with a very early prototype of a tool that would allow us to map, visualize and otherwise connect the stories and accounts of imagination being used in civic spaces. Cobbled together using scalar (an authoring digital platform), google maps and extremely helpful interns to help with data entry, we had asked the students to geo-tag and upload the stories they created during our “Remixing Stories” workshops so that we could visualize them on a “Big Map”.
Despite the many technical glitches we encountered and the unsustainable levels of manual data processing we needed to make it work, the “Big Map” of stories the students collectively created that day convinced us that our Atlas idea had legs. It also dawned on us that an Atlas might, in fact, do more than map and organize participatory imaginations. It could also help connect and start dialogues with people engaged with the imagination in civic and political spaces.
That night, I left the restaurant filled with a hope that we would one day be able to able to make the Atlas a functioning and useful reality. Fast forward four years, I am so excited to share that we have finally made it happen.
What is the Atlas of the Civic Imagination?
An initiative of the Civic Imagination Project, the Atlas of the Civic Imagination is an user-driven site that invites communities and individuals to share their experiences with the imagination in civic spaces. We see the Atlas as a space that helps us:
● share experiences and stories,
● learn from what others are doing,
● connect with other practitioners, and, eventually
● gain applicable insights through dialogue and analysis.
The experiences contributors share could be connected to running our civic imagination workshops. They could also grow out of other work. As a project, we are also using the Atlas as a space where we add our evolving observations from the workshops we continue to run with communities. Our hope is that the Atlas will become a space where we collectively amplify, generate ideas, collect experiences, map locations, and analyze stories generated through artistic, civil, community, learning, and other efforts.
In its current form, the Atlas grows out of our long-standing partnership with the folks at the National Writing Project, who generously worked with us to repurpose their “Writing Our Future” initiative which supports “online youth publishing projects.” Because of this connection, the architecture of the Atlas comes with built in features that allow us to work with a broad range of communities, including activists, organizations, and youth in educational contexts. It also gives us, and those who choose to contribute, significant curatorial control, which we hope will help us build trust and encourage participation in the long term.
How do people participate?
Signing up to contribute to the Atlas is pretty simple, and anyone can sign up. There are two account types. Facilitators administer geo-located sites and approve submitted stories and articles. Storytellers author content. A facilitator can oversee many groups of storytellers. They can also create a storyteller account to submit their own content through their own site.
This blog post is our first public announcement about the Atlas (gulp), and we are still learning about how people will want to use the Atlas and what we will need to do to support it. So far, we have noted that folks seem to want to use the Atlas in two ways:
Facilitators, who run one of our six Civic Imagination Workshops, want to share the outcomes of their workshops on the Atlas. They can do this by having their participants upload stories directly. They can also author a summary of their workshop on their behalf, as educator Jimmeka Jackson did in “Discovering A DIFFERENT WORLD with Content Worlds.”
People involved with communities, companies, organizations and networks working with the imagination in civic and political realms use the Atlas to add their own approaches and experiences to the Atlas, and through this join the larger conversation. Case in point of this is Janae Phillips’s account of a workshop on privilege and Harry Potter that she ran in Tucson, Arizona.
Through such and other, yet to be discovered contributions, we see the Atlas of the Civic Imagination as a space that encourages informal connections that may event, one day, inspire action.
Infinite Hope Workshop
To make things as easy as possible for facilitators, the site also includes instructions for our “Infinite Hope - Imagining a Better World” workshop, a future-focused workshop highlighting the power of stories as tools for fostering civic imagination and inspiring real world change. As this title suggests, the focus is on world-building, that is, thinking about what alternative worlds might look like, reading them in relation to our own, and deploying them as a means of expressing and debating visions for what alternatives might be to current conditions. We invite you to run a workshop and share your experiences through the Atlas.
We find that this frees participants from the constraints on the imagination which are posed by a relentless focus on existing constraints which limit the possibilities for change, which results in activists self-censoring themselves.
Highlighting the importance of civic imagination, the workshop leads participants through an exercise of building a future world in which both real and fantastical solutions to cultural, social and political challenges are possible, ultimately leading them to strategize how we may be able to get to this imagined future starting today. The workshop begins with a big picture brainstorm. Working backwards, the participants then break into smaller groups to share insights and build on these imagined worlds to brainstorm character-based narratives of social change set in the shared future world. After working out their stories, the groups are then given a short amount of time to prepare a presentation of their narrative. Encouraging spontaneity and creativity, the final share backs given participants an immediate platform for sharing their stories, creating a sense of community between participants and leading to group dialog and reflection.
In effect, the workshop helps participants brainstorm the full range of possible directions they could go. Many of the political veterans in the organizations we work with have been initially skeptical of what they saw as the ‘escapist’ dimensions of our approach, but they have often rethought this opposition when they see how this approach re-energized participants.
More Opportunities
We are also developing additional prompts and activities that respond to our current physically separated realities and will be sharing those in this space shortly.
So, please do join in, contribute, and help us launch the Atlas of the Civic Imagination!
(And, do let us know if you run into any problems, we are still learning about Atlas’s possibilities and limitations.)
Sangita Shresthova is the Research Director of the Civic Paths Group based at the University of Southern California. Her work focuses on intersections among popular culture, imagination, performance, new media, politics, and globalization. Her recent research has focused on issues of storytelling and surveillance among American Muslim youth and the achievements and challenges faced by Invisible Children pre-and-post Kony2012. She is also one of the authors of Popular Culture and Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change and By Any Media Necessary: The New Activism of Youth, both released by NYU Press. Her first book on the transnational dimensions of Bollywood dance (Is It All About Hips?) was published in 2011.
