From 2017 to 2021 I was a member of the Civic Paths Research Group at the University of Southern California. During that time, I was involved in planning and facilitating workshops using the group’s storytelling methods, and I developed and led future building workshops for external organizations (Peters-Lazaro & Shresthova, 2020). Although these workshops provided deep insights, balancing stakeholder interests often proved difficult. In this post, I present one of these workshops as a case study to illustrate some of the challenges posed by the civic imagination methodology. I conclude that practitioners should exercise caution when working with partners, especially when they do not have final control over how their work will be used, because the civic imagination can be employed toward conservative as well as progressive ends.
In August 2020, at the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic, I was contacted by the director of a global strategy company specializing in providing insights by and about Gen-Z. This company had already published a series of free reports on social issues as promotion for their paid consulting work for major brands. They wanted to create a new report on the topic of regeneration, sustainability broadly construed, and they contracted me to conduct a series of future-building workshops on this theme. In collaboration with the Civic Paths Research Group, I adapted a workshop from Practicing Futures: A Civic Imagination Action Handbook (Peters-Lazaro & Shresthova, 2020).
The original workshop, “Infinite Hope—Imagining a Better World,” asks participants to collectively imagine alternative worlds and how we might get there. In this workshop, participants first brainstorm what a better world might look like as a whole group before breaking out into smaller groups to create “character-based narratives of social change set in the shared future world” (Lazaro & Shresthova, p. 114). Participants then share their stories with the larger group before reflecting on them together. I adapted this workshop so that it could be conducted online, and in September of the same year, I led two, 140-minute storytelling workshops on Zoom with a total of 30 Gen-Z thought leaders from 17 countries along with three other facilitators.
Based on these workshops, I created a speculative report about life in 2060, and the company decided to create a graphic novel based on participants’ stories. One of the stories from the workshop had been about sex workers creating an autonomous community in Antarctica to escape criminalization, oppression, and violence, and this Antarctica settlement was used as the setting for the graphic novel. However, the sex worker founders were replaced by right-wing billionaire and his then-wife, musician Grimes, undermining the progressive message of participants’ stories. Moreover, sex workers were entirely erased from the narrative and replaced with a reference to sex trafficking, which reinforced the mainstream anti-trafficking movement’s conflation of sex work and sex trafficking that leads to harmful legislation negatively impacting everyone in the sex trade. This was especially upsetting for me as a sex worker advocate. Altogether, this demonstrates that conflicting imaginations, as well as funding pressures and agendas, may lead to the distortion of certain perspectives in civic imagination work and even potentially cause harm to marginalized groups. Therefore, practitioners should take care when working with partners, particularly for-profit ones. The remainder of this post details the methods of the workshop and its results.
Building a Regenerative Future: The Workshop
After a brief introduction to the workshop, participants engaged in an ice-breaker activity. In advance of the workshop, participants were asked to come up with a story from a book, film, TV show, song, or any other pop culture format that helped them imagine a regenerative future. During the icebreaker, participants introduced themselves and shared their inspirational story with the group. After the icebreaker, I told participants, “As we can see, fictional narratives and storytelling are powerful tools that help us express our experiences and connect with others, and we are going to be using collaborative storytelling in this way today.”
Next, I introduced the concepts of the civic imagination and worldbuilding, and I asked participants “to imagine a regenerative world set in the year 2060” where “things are as they could and should be.” Using online presentation software Mentimeter, participants created word clouds based on the following questions:
What values should shape the world of 2060?
What are the key characteristics of life in 2060?
What will we want to remember when we think back on 2060?
Participants then reflected on these word clouds as a group.
Following the Mentimeter activity, we asked participants to brainstorm how the world of 2060 would be regenerative in terms of food, transportation, work/labor, housing, and care (e.g., childcare, senior care, health care, self-care, etc.) in a Google Doc. Participants were then divided into groups of five, and they were asked to invent a story based on one of the subthemes from the group brainstorm about something that had happened between the present and the year 2060 that helped move us toward a regenerative future. We specified that all stories needed to include:
A character (human or other), group of characters, or a community;
A conflict (an issue that comes up in the story);
A resolution to the conflict or a partial resolution that is reached through the narrative.
Participant moderators took notes on the stories in a collaborative Google Doc for each group.
After the groups completed their stories, they created mood boards representing their stories using scrapbooking software Are.na, and each moderator had one minute to present their group’s story, followed by five minutes of group discussion. Then, using Google Jamboard, participants reflected on the process by answering the following questions:
Did you notice any common themes in the stories?
What moments stood out to you?
How did change occur?
Finally, we asked participants what they noticed about these answers and if anything struck them as surprising or interesting.
Both workshops were recorded and transcribed using Rev.com. Using these transcripts as well as the word clouds, Google Docs, mood boards, and Jamboards from the workshops, I wrote a workshop summary. Finally, after thematically coding the narratives according to an emergent coding schema using qualitative data analysis software NVivo, I analyzed the stories and wrote a speculative field report, which was published on Medium and is reproduced in a slightly edited version in the following section.
Fieldnotes from 2060: The Results
Below are a series of fieldnotes describing events that occurred between 2020 and 2060 to move us toward a regenerative world, followed by a memo describing the key principles and dynamics of 2060 based on these fieldnotes, as well as a series of workshops conducted with 30 young people from around the world.
Portals
A young girl who is involved with her community garden is visited by her future self with a gift that will serve as the solution to her car-overrun city, which is destroying the garden and its community’s ability to grow their own food via debilitating pollution. The gift is the ability to create teleportation portals, free for everyone to use and key in the dissolution of borders (at least in the sense we currently view them).
Sex Workers
Two online sex workers (from different countries) meet digitally and decide they need to start their own community away from current government/societal structures because of the oppression and violence they face due to the criminalization of sex work. The two move to Antarctica to start a new community for sex workers and also create their own internet that provides open-source knowledge to all. In time, a larger community of sex workers moves to the community. Their new society (based in the principles of sex work) serves as a model for the rest of the world on ethics, community, safety, and consent.
Sustainable Animal Agriculture
Climate change has devastated the agriculture industry and created a worldwide food shortage. The son of a farmer moves to the city and gathers a group of engineers to work with his farming community and find a way to end the food crisis. They develop a method to mass-produce cheap, nutrient-rich cultured meat – a more sustainable alternative to animal agriculture that will curb crop shortage by cutting back on the amount of crops needed to feed animals. Byproducts from growing meat in labs can be repurposed as animal feed for animals on farms. The lab-grown beef ends the violent beef-related religious conflict between Hindu/Muslim communities (who hold different stances regarding whether it is acceptable to eat beef).
Universal Design
A young woman with visible and invisible disabilities struggles to find affordable housing in Los Angeles that accommodates her physical and emotional needs. As a wheelchair user, she needs an elevator or ramp to navigate the physical space of a building. As a woman on the Autism spectrum, she needs to live in a place without the risk of sensory overload – be it flashing overhead lights, jarring doorbell sounds, overly bright rooms, or unstable temperature. The woman, along with a community of peers with audio, visual, emotional, mental, and/or physical disabilities who have been displaced by gentrification, work to create a radically inclusive, radically accessible co-op using principles of universal design. Every person’s experience with disability is different – this co-op caters to each member’s individual needs and does not settle for one-size-fits-all accessibility solutions (i.e., not everybody who is deaf communicates or interprets communication the same way).
Prison TikTok
A prison inmate named Michael gets his fellow prison inmates together to start an uprising using TikTok. To the outside world, the inmates are making trends with fun dances and catchy sounds, but in reality they are sharing coded/secret messages and instructions to other prisons. The key message is to collect wood from the woodshop until they have enough to burn down the prison and escape. An executive at TikTok catches onto the plan and decides to help them by putting the videos on everyone’s For You Page to advance the uprising and gain outside support. As the prison Michael and the inmates are being held at burns down, the evil warden stays inside to try to put out the fire and dies saving the evil system he served. Michael, his fellow inmates, and all the freed prisoners come together to create a new system based in restorative justice, rehabilitation, and education rather than the current carceral system based on punishment. Michael and his fellow freed inmates also begin to teach young people how to organize and protest online so they can continue tearing down unjust systems.
Community Farm
A group of young professionals in their twenties to thirties who live in a large city are struck by a global pandemic. The pandemic also places corporations into a land-grabbing scheme where they buy land at predatory prices from farmers hit by the pandemic’s effect on their labor. This results in the prices of produce going up, which also creates obstacles around access to fresh food. It is also hard to have fresh food in an apartment building in a busy city. The community decides they want to have a more circular economy where they grow their own food, reduce the amount of waste, and compost the small amount of waste they do have. In return for having the smallest amounts of waste, the government will give people money, which in turn will help the economy be more self-sufficient. They also will know exactly where their food is coming from.
References
Peters-Lazaro, G. & Shresthova, S. (2020). Practicing futures: A Civic imagination action handbook. Peter Lang.
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.
