Capítulo 14. Transmedia, Speculative World-Building and the Civic Imagination

Capítulo 14. Transmedia, Speculative World-Building
and the Civic Imagination

*Henry Jenkins

University of Southern California

In Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (Jenkins, 2006), I introduced the concept of transmedia storytelling, using the example of The Matrix as a film franchise that also extended its fictional world to animation, computer games, comics and other media. Transmedia, however, needs to be understood as an adjective; it needs to modify something (Jenkins, 2017b). In the case of The Matrix, transmedia modifies “storytelling” or perhaps “entertainment”. But, increasingly, transmedia has been applied to other categories, such as education, activism, social change, documentary, journalism or branding. What these different practices share is some kind of structured relationship between elements that are spread across multiple delivery systems, deploying the affordances of different media, in order to construct some kind of unified experience for the participants. The public plays an active role in gathering and processing the dispersed elements. Ideally, the act of collective intelligence makes assembling and assessing the various parts translate into collective action. For Hollywood, transmedia systems have evolved from the three films and associated media that constitutes The Matrix to something like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which draws its inspiration from decades’ worth of comics stories, involves several dozen feature films, and in the next round, increasingly builds on interconnected television series to introduce new characters and explore dimensions of the story world.

But today I am focusing on the ways that transmedia contents and logics help inform contemporary civic practices. Young activists are making change by any media necessary, often using low-end media that is broadly accessible-from social media to cardboard, tempera paint or magic marker, street art, and political protests-to get their social justice messages out to the world. Because their resources are limited and they are trying to make change at younger ages, they are using whatever they can get their hands on. In our book By Any Media Necessary (Jenkins, Shresthova et al., 2016), we map the strategies and tactics of these newer social movements, and since the book has come out, we’ve seen even more younger people around the world deploying multiple media platforms to create integrated messages that address and inspire diverse participants to line up behind their causes (See also Costanza-Chock, 2014). We are increasingly interested in the ways that these grassroots movements are tapping into the cultural power that is created by Hollywood’s own transmedia storytelling practices as a means of expressing their shared civic imagination.

To understand what I mean by the civic imagination, we need to start with the civic, which I use to refer to a shared set of norms, values, commitments we make to each other as members of a community (Jenkins, 2019). The civic emerges in and through shared social and cultural practices. The civic is the foundation to which we return as we seek to resolve disagreements and work through tensions that might otherwise disrupt the ongoing life of our communities. The civic might be described as our latent capacity to work together towards common goals. The civic repairs the damage to the social fabric that often emerges in the process of political struggles over the distribution of power and resources. The political includes struggles over public policy, for example, but might also include other power struggles, such as those between management and labor, or between producers and consumers. In the current moment in America and in democratic struggles around the world, political frictions are grinding down the civic. Historically, presidents reached out to opposing parties after they achieved election, shifting from the political to the civic as a means of social restabilization and the reintegration of those who lost the election. I don’t mean to idealize this. Of course there many groups that have been marginalized or excluded from the dominant understanding of the civic. And so, the challenge of our current moment is to broaden what constitutes civic discourse and empower those groups that have been the victims of systemic discrimination. Consider the aftermath of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Donald Trump has refused to cede the power and sowed distrust in the political process, culminating in an insurrection at the U.S. Capital, further damaging the foundations necessary for the democratic process. The core goal of the usc Civic Imagination project is to help to rebuild this civic infrastructure by modeling processes by which communities can come together, productively discuss shared values and aspirations, and spark new formulations of the civic imagination.

We are interested in the functions that imagination plays in relation to the civic and the political and in what resources communities draw on as they articulate their visions for social change and collective identity.

Before we can build a better world, we need
to imagine what a better world looks like

Popular culture often provides the most vivid images of alternative worlds or alternative futures. Solarpunk, for example, is a new movement in science fiction that seeks to model what it might be like to live in a more sustainable environment, to create representations of worlds where people live in closer harmony with nature, to dramatize the process by which climate change is halted and even reversed rather than destroying human life as we know it (Imaginary Worlds, 2020). Solarpunk can be read then as science fiction in the service of the environmental justice movement. And only a thin line separates this speculative fiction from various manifestos and proposals that seek to incite conversations about what kind of world we might like to live within (Klein, 2017 & 2019). Similarly, we might think about Black Panther as modeling an alternative Africa, one which challenges dominant conceptions for the diverse nations that inhabit the African continent. Drawing on Afrofuturism, it depicts an African nation that was never colonized, that has maintained control over its own resources, that has a highly developed technology, that has overcome tribal divisions, and that now offers leadership to the world. An African-American student once explained to me that Black Panther’s Wakanda, with its pan-African aesthetic, represents the motherland of his imagination, given that as a descendent of slaves, he cannot trace his roots to any specific nation-state or tribe: he needs a composite Africa to claim allegiance to because his history had been stolen from him. In both of these cases, these imagined worlds are provocations to think about our own world and its opportunities in different ways.

We must imagine ourselves as civic agents
capable of making change

Consider, for example, Emma Gonzales, one of the leaders of the March for Our Lives, which has been a leading force against gun violence in America in recent years. She was a student at a Florida high school which was the target of a school shooting (Jenkins & Lopez, 2018). She went overnight from taking public speaking classes to leading a national protest movement. Here, I am interested in her iconic bomber jacket which she decorated with a wide array of different patches (nasa, the Cuban flag, Black Lives Matter, among others) representing her intersectional identities and the various other movements with which she has affiliated herself. Other young activists have followed her model, with individualistic mixes of patches on their jackets, to reflect the inspirations from which they draw their strength as civic agents. Or consider the ways that many different ad campaigns have celebrated emergency workers through superhero imagery, increasingly connected to the wearing of the mask to protect others from infection during the pandemic. In each case, these icons —the bomber jacket and the mask— come to stand in for identity and civic agency.

You need to imagine yourself as part of
a community with shared interests

Here, we might point to the ways that the Occupy movement around the world deployed the concept of the 99% in order to build a collective identity in the struggle against wealth inequality. Here, we might also point to the ways that the Guy Fawkes mask used by Occupy and Anonymous before that, hides one’s personal identity and signals one’s participation in a larger movement. We might also think of examples of collective joy, such as protests staged in Mumbai and elsewhere against Modi, that deployed a shared vocabulary of movement drawn from Bollywood dance (Shresthova, 2020). These cultural resources express membership within a collective struggle and signal the shared interests of the participating community.

We need to imagine a process of change

In the past few years, we’ve seen the Black Lives Matter movement and the environmental justice movement represent revitalization of long-standing struggles, enjoying new success in the streets and through the political process alike. Both start with an insistence that change is possible and necessary if they are to overcome existential threats.

We have to forge solidarity with groups whose
perspectives are different from our own

The so-called “Squad” in the U.S. House describes a political alliance between a group of new members —younger women— who come from different racial/ethnic backgrounds and different parts of the country but have agreed to work together in support of progressive change. These women have been vilified by the right and celebrated on the left —becoming the focus of their own comic book series, for example— but both sides recognize the solidarity they have forged. Or consider the ways that K-Pop fandom has functioned as a force in American politics in 2020 (Lee, 2020). These fans have a shared cultural identity through their taste in music. Because the K-pop artists often appropriate aspects of Blackness through drawing on pop and hip hop sounds and images in their performances, there was an active online discussion, led in many cases by Black American women, over the ethics and politics of this appropriation. Coming out of these exchanges, these American K-Pop fans were educated about racial justice issues and put their force behind supporting Black Lives Matter or disrupting Trump rallies.

For those who are most oppressed, you have
to imagine freedom, dignity, democracy, safety,
participation before you can directly experience them

This idea comes from work on the radical Black imagination (Kelley, 2003). Here, we might think about the case of Palestinians marching the occupied territory shouting “Sky people, you can’t take out the land”, dressed like the Na’vi from James Cameron’s Avatar (Jenkins, 2010), or Hong Kong protesters marching through the streets singing “Can you hear the people singing?” a song from Les miserables which has become an anthem for their democratic aspiration. In both cases, popular culture offers them vernacular to experience through their imagination what they are still fighting to achieve in reality.

Around the world, young people are speaking out for change and in many cases, they are doing so using rituals, dance moves, images, sounds, stories, and practices drawn from popular culture. Across time and across cultures, people have drawn on all kinds of stories —folk tales, historical epics, religious narratives— to explain their values, their traditions, and their desire for further change. In the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC, there is a statute of George Washington, constructed decades after his death, to commemorate his status as the Father of his country. I call this statue “Cosplay George” because he is represented wearing a toga and sitting on Apollo’s thrown with an idealized body straight from classical sculpture. This image was chosen to suggest the American Revolution represented the restoration of classical democracy for a group of men who had been educated at elite schools, whose shared culture came from the Classical era, and who often expressed their protest in pen-names drawn from Roman orators and Greek heroes.

What they did to the Classics, what the Black civil rights leaders did with the Bible, this is what youth around the world are doing with Hunger Games, Harry Potter, Handmaid’s Tale, or superhero sagas. And it is because the civic imagination matters, that the struggles over monuments in America matters, as groups demand the removal of statues of Confederate generals in the South or the rejection of Native American mascots in American sports or insulting Black brand icons on consumer products. In each case, struggles over representation reflect deeper struggles over who gets to imagine themselves as having the power to change the world or as belonging to the larger civic community. This is a struggle over who gets to tell your story and who gets to be the hero in our shared narratives. 2020 saw a number of representational breakthroughs for Native American communities who have long struggled with invisibility —a total absence of representation— which has led almost a quarter of all Americans to believe that American Indians no longer exist, seeing them only as figures within western movies (https://rnt.firstnations.org). By the end of 2020, the first Native American woman was appointed to a Cabinet position in the newly formed Biden administration.

More and more of these struggles around the world are using the language of popular culture. My research group started thinking about the civic imagination when we researched the Harry Potter Alliance, which is an international organization of fans of the fantasy books by J. K. Rowling. Among other things (Jenkins, Shresthova, et al., 2016), the group hosts the Hermione Granger Leadership Academy, which brings young activists together to share tactics for social change. In 2020, the Academy was held, like so many other things, on Zoom. In the summer, when Black Lives Matter protests took over streets in major American cities, young people of diverse backgrounds came together in a spirit of joy and creativity to imagine what a better world might look like and how they might work together to achieve it. The Alliance also produces study guides that tap a broad array of other media franchises —Black Panther, Doctor Who, Welcome to Night Vale, Pokémon, Star Wars— as that are shared with fan communities, educators, activist groups to increase social awareness among young people.

If you look at the contemporary protests —for example, the women’s marches that followed Trump’s inauguration— you will see many participants expressing themselves through signs that reflect different popular culture franchises —from Hamilton to Star Wars— as well as grassroots cultural practices, such as the Pink Pussy hats that reflected crating skills applied to social change. It is through the bridging of these different cultural mythologies that the solidarity within this movement was most fully expressed.

My own interest in this topic goes back to my mentor John Fiske, who wrote the book Media Matters, Race and Gender in the U.S. Politics (1996), which tried to draw connections between popular culture and political change together. His book caused a lot of controversy as he saw popular culture as providing the bridge between the micropolitics of everyday life and the macropolitics of political protest. Today though, politics and popular culture are being discussed in the same breath almost everywhere that you look and Fiske’s book seems especially prescient. Some are calling it narrative change —change the core narratives of the culture and you may start to shift core beliefs and values. Others speak of cultural acupuncture— identify pressure points within the culture and use them to alter the circulation of ideas (Jenkins, 2012, 2017a). The Pop Culture Collaborative (https://popcollab.org) has brought together major funders to help support minority artists as they intervene in popular culture to foster a more pluralistic society. At Arizona State University their Center for Science and the Imagination (https://csi.asu.edu) insists that everyone has the right to imagine their own future. They are using speculative fiction to encourage debates around how we might best address the threat of climate change. There’s a movement towards speculative journalism where journalists make various use of the conceptual tools of science fiction to help people develop shared visions of social change and then use reporting to identify the people working now to achieve those alternatives (Carlson, 2020). And more activists are inspired to use science fiction stories to dramatize the stakes in their own social justice struggles (Imarisha & Brown, 2016; Lavalle & Adams, 2019). As a consequence, the line between journalist, science fiction writer, fan and activist has increasingly blurred. All of these groups are working to achieve a better future now.

Increasingly, world-building has become a core practice, moving from a tool used by science fiction writers and production designers to a resource for confronting real world problems. I have learned much from my usc colleague Alex McDowell (Jenkins & McDowell, 2015), a veteran Hollywood production designer, who has turned his world building skills to use in helping to think through real world problems with diverse experts and stakeholders (https://worldbuilding.usc.edu). I have also learned much from my friends, John Seely Brown, formerly head of Xerox PARC, now an educator and social change advocate, and Ann Pendleton-Jullian, an architect, who sometimes partners with McDowell and sometimes pursues her own initiatives, doing world-building for social change, including important work in alliance with the indigenous peoples of the Yukon. Their book, Design Unbound (Pendleton-Julian & Brown, 2018), draws important links between transmedia world-building and real world change.

All of this provides the backdrop for the work we are doing through the usc Civic Imagination Project (https://www.civicimaginationproject.org). Our approach is rooted in what I call participatory cultures, cultures where people take advantage of the affordances of new media to produce and circulate messages, to exert greater control over the means of cultural production and to help shape the civic and political agendas of their communities. Our current work on participatory culture and the civic imagination builds on research on fandom communities and practices that I have pursued across my career. In addition to the research on current activist practices that I outlined above, we have been partnering with community groups across Red and Blue states in America and elsewhere around the world conducting workshops that foster skills in world-building and remixing as a means of enhancing the civic imagination and expanding collective agency. We use these techniques to take soundings regarding political tensions in the United States, but we also see them as giving something back to these communities by creating stronger civic bonds, helping these groups to identify their shared agendas and to identify next steps to help build a better world together.

Sangita Shrestova and Gabriel Lozaro-Peters (2020) describe these workshops in greater detail in Practicing Futures, sharing both instructions on how other groups might run their own and fieldnotes on specific insights we drew from some of the groups we’ve worked with as we prototyped and field-tested our methods. These techniques have been successful in work with middle scholars and senior citizens, with coal miners and sex workers, in mosques and churches.

Everywhere we go, people seem to be surprised by deep and fundamental agreements about what a better world looks like even as they have sharp divides about the best methods for achieving such a world or even if building a better future is still possible. Everywhere we’ve gone these techniques have helped people to understand and appreciate their neighbors better. We’ve developed six different workshops. In “Remixing Stories”, participants identify stories that inspire them, which speak to the cultural traditions that are most meaningful to them, and then we encourage them to work with people from other cultural traditions to remix the stories. In this process, they learn what each participant values and strive to find the common ground that might unite them. We conducted this workshop at the Salzburg Academy in Austria with students from more than 20 different countries. This has proven our best vehicle for bridging differences.

At the same time, we often do a workshop called “Infinite Hope”, where participants brainstorm what the ideal world of 2060 might look like. There’s nothing magical about the year 2060—it is simply far enough ahead in time that we can imagine current political divides have been worked through and alternative solutions to shared problems have emerged. And yet, it is also close enough in time that people can still recognize what such a world might look like and imagine themselves living there. Having built this world, they then construct narratives about how these changes were achieved, stories set somewhere between now and then, and in this way, we get a sense of how people envision the process of social change. We then perform the stories for each other, embodying the civic identities necessary to bring about change; we debrief on the nature of the change-making process and turn the workshop over to local community organizers who help the group identify the next steps they are willing to take to achieve their collective visions for the future.

At a time when monuments are the site of political struggle across America, we ask groups to envision what other monuments might look like, what shared values they might express, what histories they might commemorate, and what processes might allow us to develop a better collective identity by working through new images that can stand for our communities. Right now, the monuments debate is shaped by a logic of negation, as old symbols are torn down and put away, rather than a logic of inclusion, as we search for new cultural landmarks by which shared understandings might emerge.

We realized early on that as we imagine alternative futures together, we need to respect the past, the traditions that are meaningful to participants, the memories they want to maintain, the values they want to bring with them into this new world. We’ve discovered that sharing memory objects represents a powerful ritual which helps people over the threshold into our other activities. People bring objects that represent some element of their past and share the stories with each other. The result creates a degree of intimacy and trust that is necessary for the rest of the process to work. And the process is always profound in terms of the human connections it constructs within the group. We’ve been collecting these stories, mapping this stories, trying to understand what kind of objects are significant for people, from pieces of technology like the typewriter, to jewelry, to baby teeth, to baby blankets.

Prior to the pandemic, all of our workshops depended on us being face-to-face on the ground in actual communities, and often our workshops have historically taken a day or more. With Covid-19 we saw a need for shorter activities that parents could do with their children. So if you go to the Civic Imagination Project website you can now find our popular culture and civic imagination toolkit which is a series of activities encouraging speculative engagement with popular stories intended for parents, for teachers, for community groups, but particularly for families that are all locked in together to exchange stories with each other (https://www.civicimaginationproject.org/toolkit).

Increasingly we are exploring how we might take the insights we’ve gotten from our civic imagination workshops back to Hollywood, which is in our backyard in Los Angeles, and use them to create an approach that can inform media production at every stage. If popular culture provides the resources out of which we foster our civic imaginations, how do we use it, how do we create a dialogue with media producers to help us imbed better messages, more compelling and more inclusive messages directly into the stories that Hollywood is producing. So we actually began with a partnership with media producers in Pakistan who had already made Burka Avenger, which has been a very popular superhero story where the protagonist dresses in a Burka and fights for women’s rights. They’ve conducted more than 30 workshops across Pakistan seeking to better map how everyday Pakistanis understood their national identity. Even in Pakistan, people understood their country as “NOT India” rather than as having its own identity. Their goal was to foster a more multicultural expression of Pakistani national identity (Shresthova & Peters-Lazaro, 2020).

One of our students, Lauren Levitt (2020), advised on the Regeneration Project (https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://regenerativefutures.co/_
_;!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!5i4YAvE8POoujnijoXIP-qMqYSTKoCZ2OXM05LKmwO_-BVeVoaKgp7-Z6rHpqbY$), bringing young leaders from different parts of the world to construct alternative futures together. She helped the group produce a report which is now being shared with policy makers. Magalis Videaux, a Los Angeles-based educator and artist, has created an Imagination Lab, “an experiential learning model and programmable play-space”, at the Critical Design and Gaming School in South Central Los Angeles (https://www.civicimaginationproject.org/advisory-group), where she uses civic imagination workshops along with technological tool kits to work together to build a better world. A few years ago, we worked with Univision Fusion on a project at the border between San Diego and Tijuana centering on the wall at a time when candidate Trump was promising to build bigger and better barriers between our countries (Lopez & Yang, 2020). Photographers in Mexico produced images of what the wall looked like from their side of the border and we shared these postcards with Americans, asking them to think about what messages they wanted to send back. The result was an installation project that has toured art festivals and museums, encouraging reflections on the border wall debate. And this is only the beginning.

Throughout these remarks, I have explored some of the ways that various groups have tapped resources from popular culture in order to work towards social change on the ground. I have argued that social change is linked to how people imagine themselves, their communities, the process of change, and the alternatives to current situations. We have seen world-building in particular move from the toolkit that media makers use to construct transmedia franchises to a set of practices people can use within grassroots communities to identify shared visions for a better world and begin to work to achieve them, and I have described some of the ways our usc Civic Imagination project has built on our observation of these processes to develop workshops that help bring communities together. With our latest publication, we are offering models of successful practices we hope other groups, including those across Latin America, might use to foster new kinds of civic imagination in their communities.

References

Carlson, E. (2020). Speculative Journalism Can Help Us Prepare for What’s to Come: Could It Also Promote Misinformation? Nieman Reports. https://niemanreports.org/articles/speculative-journalism/

Costanza-Chock, S. (2014). Out of the Shadows, into the Streets: Transmedia Organizing and the Immigration Rights Movement. mit.

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—— (2012). “Cultural Acupuncture”: Fan Activism and the Harry Potter Alliance. Transformative Works and Cultures, 10. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0305

—— (2017a). From Culture Jamming to Cultural Acupuncture. In M. Delaure & M. Fink (Eds.), Culture Jamming Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance. New York University.

—— (2017b). Transmedia Locations and Logics. In B. W. L. Drthy Kurtz & M. Bourdaa (Eds.), The Rise of Transtexts: Challenges and Opportunities. Routledge.

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—— (2019, April 17). A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2019/04/17/green-new-deal-short-film-alexandria-ocasio-cortez/

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