[Commlist] Collective Storytelling Challenge

Henry Jenkins's civic imagination research group is launching a global, 
collective storytelling initiative to encourage progressive thought 
about the current crisis.

You can read more about it here --

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2020/4/12/take-part-in-a-collective-storytelling-challenge-and-inspire-others-by-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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