Take Part in a Collective Storytelling Challenge and Inspire Others!

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Take part in a collective storytelling challenge and inspire others!

Sangita Shresthova

In the midst of the profound turmoil that has affected us all over the past weeks, our Civic Paths group brainstormed ways in which the civic imagination could be helpful to us and others. To come up with ideas, we first turned inward to understand our own unpredictable responses to fast shifting realities. We acknowledged the shock, grief, anger, uncertainty, fear, dread, and confusion. We then turned to what we had learned through our work on the Popular Culture and Civic Imagination casebook (featured here over the past weeks) to understand how we might begin to respond. This led to an exploration of how imagining and using imagination to connect with others could, in some small way, comfort us and help us see things differently, even for a moment.  

Growing out of this, we are excited to launch “Reflections from the Future”, a participatory storytelling challenge that invites people to take a minute to imagine a future far beyond our current moment and share this imagination to inspire others to share their visions too.  The collection will also become an enduring archive that preserves our imaginations at this current time. 

We invite participants (that is all of you!) to submit their responses to the prompt below, via a simple form. The responses will then populate the Atlas of the Civic Imagination, a creative archive of our visions and aspirations. Accessible to all, this archive will then inform others to create, analyze and act. We chose the Atlas for this because we are committed to including perspectives from many places and walks of life. In fact, we are currently building out ways to submit in other languages (reach out of if this is of interest).  

So, please join us! Respond to the prompt, participate, and help us populate the collection. 

You can respond directly (just fill out the form). You can also share the prompt with others (students, community members, friends, and colleagues). 

We know accessing imagination and hope is hard right now. We also believe it matters and leave you with a quote from Vaclav Havel that we return to often:

“Hope... is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success….. The more unpromising the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” (Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace, pp. 181-182)

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Take part in a collective storytelling challenge and inspire others!

Link to challenge prompt is here!

2060: Reflections from the Future

Often, as people imagine future changes that lead to a better world, they start by imagining a crisis -- something that forces existing precarious circumstances to their breaking point, causing people to come together and try something different. Right now, our world is confronting a painful health crisis of unprecedented proportions and it is predicted it will be followed by an economic crisis of the same scope and scale. Recognizing this, let’s use this moment to initiate a process of reflection and intervention and bring our imaginative selves to the realities we face today. 

Draw on what inspires you, respond to our prompt, and contribute to a collective brainstorm that taps our imagination at a time when imagining takes courage. All responses will become part of 2060: Reflections from the Future, a public and shared collection that connects our current hopes, concerns, and aspirations.  Artists, thinkers, and community leaders working in various fields and formats with then also bring our collective visions to life.

BRAINSTORM PROMPT:

Think about the current moment, your situation and what you see around you - your fears and concerns. Take a deep breath. Inhale. Exhale. Now, think about something that inspires you. This could be a story from anywhere (popular culture, folklore, faith, childhood, etc.).  It could be non-fiction, fiction or even fantasy. It could be something you have noticed happening around you recently. It could be a person in your life. Hold on to your inspiration as you start to turn to the future. Imagine it is now the year 2060, that is 40 years from now and the world is as you would like it to be. What’s possible? What could this future world look like? What are you curious about? What could it feel like? Imagine how people may live, engage, move around, learn, communicate, take care of themselves etc.. Imagine how things work and are organized.

Now, answer these questions create your response and add to the brainstorm:

  • Think your hopes for 2060. Set the scene by describing your future world briefly.

  • What are three keywords that you would want to have define this future world?

  • What is a key thing that has changed between 2020 and 2060? And, why?  

  • What will people want to remember when they think back on 2020?

  • What story, thing, event, or person inspires you? Describe it and tell us why it resonates.

COMPOSE YOUR RESPONSE

Here are some ideas about what you could do to respond (mixing and matching is welcome):

  • You can answer our questions directly,You can author a short creative response based on our prompts, and/orYou can create a scenario inspired by these prompts.

We welcome participation at all levels - short, long, simple or complex.

Share your response in any format you like - write, draw, record audio, make a short video (anything else works too, but note that the google form submission option only supports text and links). 

SUBMIT YOUR RESPONSE

MOST POPULAR OPTION - FILL OUT A FORM

This is the quickest and easiest option. Collect your content (prepare it ahead of time so you can paste it in) and share it with us via this google form. The upside of this option is that it is quick. The downside is that you cannot format your story. You will also be limited to adding text and links to images, video and other media. We will add your response to the collection for you.  

CREATIVE FAN AND GROUP COORDINATOR/EDUCATOR OPTION - UPLOAD TO ATLAS

This is a slightly more involved, but more direct option. Collect your content (prepare it ahead of time and paste it in). Submit your story directly to the Atlas of the Civic Imagination. To do this you will need to create an Atlas account. Once your account is approved, you can generate a group/code that will allow you to contribute stories (as a storyteller). You can also use the code to invite others to contribute stories directly (as storytellers). Though it involves 2 steps, this set up only takes a few minutes and is great for those who are coordinating groups of storytellers. It is also great for those who want to get more creative with their multimedia stories! You will also have the ability to edit your contribution and add media (audio, video, images) directly.  

About Us: Over the last 6 years, Henry Jenkins’s Civic Imagination Project team, based at the University of Southern California, has worked with communities all over the world to develop tools for unlocking the imagination and harnessing unbridled creativity for real world action because we believe that we need hope and imagination to mobilize and sustain our collective efforts. Our group believes that to make the world a better place everyone needs to be able to imagine what a better world looks like, even now, especially now. 

Track the project through the Atlas of the Civic Imagination.