Navigating Civic Imagination Partnerships (Part 2)
/A Memo on Regeneration
Since 2020, the world has undergone dramatic change. 2020 was a moment of crisis, characterized by broken systems and plagued with problems such as climate change, racism, wealth inequality, and a global pandemic. However, it also presented an opportunity to repair or replace broken systems, leading to a better world. The politics of 2060 range from progressive (socialism, for example) to radical and even revolutionary. The unprecedented transformation that was necessary to create a regenerative world is symbolized by the fire in “Prison TikTok,” which burned down the prison and was the catalyst for a reimagining of criminal justice.
As we hypothesized, the concept of “regeneration” has implications for the environment and beyond. Environmental sustainability is evident in food production, architecture, and transportation in 2060. Food production is characterized by sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty, a movement aiming to end food insecurity and care for the environment by giving communities autonomy over their own food production. We can see these principles at play in the community gardens of “Portals,” the invention of a cheap and nutritious meat-substitute in “Sustainable Animal Agriculture,” and the urban farming in “Community Farm.” Moreover, recycling, composting, and government subsidies help to reduce waste, as indicated by the composting and reduction of food waste in “Community Farm” and the use of the meat alternative byproduct as feed for animals in “Sustainable Animal Agriculture.”
Architecture has been made more environmentally friendly by using sustainable building materials such as bamboo rather than toxic ones like concrete and by incorporating principles of energy conservation into design. Buildings regulate their own temperature, and there has been a reduction of embodied energy in the built environment. Finally, new technology has decreased the environmental impact of transportation. There has been an increase in public transportation, including high-speed rail. At the same time, there are fewer cars and an increase in electric cars as well as non-mechanical forms of transportation, such as bikes and water bikes. Additionally, people need to travel less because life is more local than before. These new forms of transportation help combat pollution, particularly air pollution, as we can see in “Portals.”
In addition to transportation technology, there have also been considerable developments in communication technology. These developments have materialized in entertainment in the form of simulated experiences, such as virtual reality and augmented reality, in the development of artificial intelligence, and in technological solutions to current social problems. For instance, in “Sex Workers,” online sex work is used to mitigate stigma and violence against sex workers, and workers build their own internet to facilitate the creation and circulation of open-source knowledge. In “Prison TikTok,” incarcerated folks use TikTok dances as a form of communication during the prison uprising, and the freed inmates teach young people how to creatively organize and protest online so they can continue to challenge unjust systems.
One major principle of a regenerative world is community, and all of the data we collected reflected this theme: from the community garden of “Portals,” to scientists working with a local community in “Sustainable Animal Agriculture,” to the sex worker community in “Sex Workers,” to the community housing in “Universal Design,” to the community-centered justice reforms in “Prison TikTok,” to community food cultivation in “Community Farm.” The unity and togetherness of community foster a sense of peace and harmony in 2060, and society is characterized by cooperation. This cooperation is evident in the collaborative labor of sex workers in “Sex Workers” and the co-living situations in “Sex Workers” and “Universal Design.” Furthermore, transparency is an important value, as indicated by the emphasis on open-source knowledge and consent in “Sex Workers,” and research participants advocated practices such as combatting disinformation online and the participatory budgeting of communal wealth.
However, community in 2060 is not homogenous but rather diverse and inclusive, so solidarity across difference, based on mutual trust and camaraderie, is crucial. What is more, the individual still plays a key role in society, as evidenced by a focus on the self (“self-employment,” “self-care,” “self-expression,” “self-sustainability,” “self-improvement,” “self-love”), a desire for personalization (“personalized healthcare”), and the value placed on privacy in “Sex Workers.” And despite the predominance of decentralized power and communal solutions to problems, some research participants still see a role for government in 2060, whether this means regulating markets (for housing and corporations) or protecting the environment.
Because the society of 2060 is diverse, equity is critical for bridging disparities in privilege. The most obvious type of equity is the equitable distribution of material, immaterial, and economic resources. Material resources such as food, housing, healthcare (including mental healthcare), and transportation are distributed equitably, as well as immaterial resources such as knowledge and art. Economic equity has been achieved through the redistribution of property and wealth, income equality, and an end to debt. From “Sex Workers” we can also see that all labor is valued, that there is less emphasis on money, and that bartering and cryptocurrency are used as a means of exchange. In addition to wealth equality, 2060 is characterized by equal access, particularly for the differently-abled, as we can clearly see in “Universal Design,” but the question of access also extends to access to healthy food, as highlighted in “Portals,” “Sustainable Animal Agriculture” and “Community Farm.” Participants further expressed a concern for racial equity, especially for Black and Indigenous folks, and there is a stress on geographic equity, both in terms of decolonization (no borders in “Portals,” “land back to indigenous peoples,” “challenging America’s soft power”) and urban/rural divides. There is also gender equity in 2060. There has been an end to sexual harassment and assault (“no more Harvey Weinsteins”), as we can see in “Sex Workers,” and there is paid menstrual and parental leave for all genders. Lastly, there is sexual equity in 2060, as evidenced by the decriminalization of sex work in “Sex Workers,” and religious equity, as we can see in the resolution of Hindu/Muslim conflicts over beef consumption in “Sustainable Animal Agriculture.” Closely related to equity is the theme of justice. This is expressed primarily in terms of the abolition of prisons, as seen in “Prison TikTok,” and of the police, as in “Sex Workers,” and the criminal justice system was replaced by one of restorative/transformative justice in “Prison TikTok.”
Conclusion: Challenges Working with Civic Imagination Partners
Rather than publishing a traditional report on regeneration, as they had done in the past, the company decided to hire a Gen-Z artist to transform participants’ stories into a graphic novel about a settlement in Antarctica incorporating themes from these narratives. I loved this idea, but when I saw the final product, I had some concerns. First, in the original story “Sex Workers,” the Antarctica settlement was founded by a group of global sex workers seeking to escape criminalization, violence, and oppression. However, in the graphic novel, the settlement was founded by right-wing billionaire Elon Musk and his then-wife, electronic musician Grimes, which ran contrary to the progressive impulses of the workshops and their resulting stories. However, more importantly, sex workers had been entirely erased from the narrative and replaced by a brief mention of sex trafficking.
Since its emergence in the 19th century, the anti-trafficking movement has been based on racism, xenophobia, and colonialism (Kang, 2015). Within this movement, white, middle-class organizers have frequently conflated sex work with sex trafficking because they believe that no woman would willingly perform sex work. Debates over sex work and sex trafficking intensified during the feminist sex wars of the 1980s and 90s, when radical feminists used sex work, especially pornography, as both symbolic and emblematic of the abuse and exploitation of women under capitalism. Scholars such as Kathleen McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin argued that all sex work is rape, which ironically contributes to the myth that sex workers cannot be raped. More recently, mainstream feminists have formed coalitions with evangelicals around the issue of sex trafficking (Bernstein, 2010). Today, the mainstream anti-trafficking movement continues to conflate sex work with sex trafficking, arguing that systems of oppression such as racism, sexism, and poverty prevent women from consenting to sex work. Although our choices are all constrained under capitalism, it is dangerous to deny marginalized women all agency, and these lines of thought lead to public policy that harms sex workers, especially marginalized ones (Mitchell, 2016).
One such set of laws is the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Acts (SESTA) and the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), which the U.S. government passed in 2018. This bill package amended the “safe harbor” section of the Communications Decency Act to make platforms liable for content posted by users that promotes or facilitates prostitution or sex trafficking. This shut down advertising sites and other online resources sex workers used to screen clients and keep each other safe, making working conditions more dangerous for everyone in the sex trade, whether they enter by choice, circumstance, or force. As a result, sex workers saw a decrease in income, access to safety resources, and online spaces for community building and political organizing and an increase in exposure to violence and exploitation—and these outcomes were worse for more marginalized sex workers (Fuentes et al., 2025).
As a sex workers’ rights advocate, I had been organizing against these laws since 2017 with the Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles (SWOP LA), a local sex worker activist organization, so I broached the erasure of sex workers from the graphic novel with one of the Gen-Z partners of the company. This woman was sympathetic to my position. She admitted that she had not been crazy about the addition of Musk and Grimes to the story, but that this had been the addition of the Gen-Z graphic novelist. However, she told me the Gen-X founder of the company had decided to replace sex workers with a reference to sex trafficking.
When I spoke to the founder, she dismissed my concerns outright. She told me that she had met with a group of Indigenous anti-trafficking activists who had informed her that the sex industry, rather than systems of oppression such as colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy, is responsible for the disproportionate disappearance and murder of Indigenous women. Accordingly, she had unilaterally removed sex workers from the narrative and replaced them with anti-trafficking discourse, and she refused to consider sex worker perspectives on the issue. I was distraught and withdrew from further participation in the project. I considered taking my name off the report I had written, but I decided that, whatever the company decided to do with my work, I stood by my research and analysis.
Although the graphic novel was never released, the lessons of this collaboration for civic imagination practitioners are twofold. First, as Miller (2020) reveals in her analysis of GamerGate and the alt-right movement, the civic imagination is not inherently progressive. It is a tool that can be used for reactionary as well as progressive ends. Likewise, in their introduction to We Are Civic Media, Shresthova et al. (forthcoming) write:
We realize that without moral integrity (characterized by a caring attitude) or ethical awareness (being mindful of the impact one’s actions have on a broader, sometimes remote, community) [...] the practices we connect to civic media may not be genuinely civic. Absent these vital components, these same tools lauded for their civic potential can transform into platforms for intimidation and abuse, silencing dissent and facilitating the spread of hatred, conspiracy theories, and inaccurate information. (n.p.)
As activist-scholars we must take care that the methodologies we employ are not used to actively harm the communities that we care about. We must also be careful when working with civic imagination partners. This is especially true when working with for-profit partners, when we may have little control over the final output of our research. The demand for profit, or other concerns, can cause our work to be used in ways that brings harm to marginalized communities, like sex workers, and we may have little recourse when this happens. The civic imagination can a powerful instrument for social justice, but it must be exercised deliberately and with adequate caution.
References
Bernstein, E. (2020). Militarized humanism meets carceral feminism: The politics of sex, rights, and freedom in contemporary anti-trafficking campaigns. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 26(1): 45-71.
Fuentes, K., Levitt, L., Soriana, K., Rowland, A., & Wit, N. (2025). SESTA/FOSTA as de facto hate policy: Combatting carceral investments and uplifting community-based solutions. Sexuality Research and Social Policy. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13178- 024-01075-3
Kang, L. H. Y. (2015). Surveillance and the work of anti-trafficking: From compulsory examination to international coordination. In Dubrofsky, R. E. & Magnet, S. A. (Eds.), Feminist surveillance studies (pp. 39-57). Duke University Press.
Miller, J. (2020). For the horde: Violent “trolling” as a preemptive strike via #GamerGate and the #AltRight. In Jenkins, H., Peters-Lazaro, G., & Shresthova, S. (Eds.), Popular culture and the civic imagination: Case studies of creative social change (pp. 214-222). New York University Press.
Mitchell, G. (2016). Evangelical ecstasy meets feminist fury: Sex trafficking, moral panics, and homonationalism during global sporting events.” GLQ, 22(3): 325-357.
Shresthova, S., Sinker, D., Nyaupane, P., Madej, S., & Maclay, C. (forthcoming). Editors’ introduction. In Shresthova, S., Sinker, D., Nyaupane, P., Madej, S., & Maclay, C. (Eds.), We are civic media (n.p.). Northwestern University Press.
Biography
Lauren Levitt is a postdoctoral researcher at the XCITE Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of California Riverside. Her book, Sex Worker Solidarity: Networks of Caring and Sharing (NYU Press, 2027), examines how sex workers and sex worker organizers in New York and Los Angeles create non-biological kinship structures and engage in non-capitalist caring and sharing practices to manage precarity, stigma, and criminalization. Her current project explores how sex workers create cultural content to represent-themselves, build community, and organize politically.