Imaging Futures

Previous Mellon Collaborative Fellowship

Fellows: Melissa Gilliam, Patrick Jagoda, Thenmozhi Soundararajan
Course: Imaging Futures: Speculative Design and Social Justice

Fellowship Description

This interdisciplinary project brings together New York-based Transmedia artist and theorist, Thenmozhi Soundararajan and two faculty from Ci3’s Transmedia Story Lab, adolescent health researcher and physician, Melissa Gilliam (University of Chicago, Biological Science Division-founder of Ci3), and game designer and scholar, Patrick Jagoda (University of Chicago, English & New Media Studies) as they explore significant social, cultural, and political issues that will impact possible human futures through a series of experimental and interactive digital narratives.

The project seeks to explore significant social, cultural, and political issues that will impact possible human futures. We aim to do so by creating a series of experimental and interactive digital narratives. This project does not assume “the future”: a monolithic concept that often comes from technologists and policymakers. Instead, we explore what alternative futures might look like when imagined by and with marginalized communities.

The three phases of the project will use storytelling, filmmaking, and digital media technologies to curate the voices of activists, community leaders, artists, youth, and others to enter this participatory conversation in the discussion of resources and trajectories of the human species. The lynchpins of this project are a series of digital narrative productions, an experimental course that combines elements of a seminar and a workshop, a crowd-sourced documentary, and an interactive platform.

The early twenty-first century has unfolded as a time of unique challenge and opportunity. The next generation of adults will be racially and ethnically diverse and connected to digital technologies; yet they will come of age amid deep insecurities. Psychosocially, this generation faces a society where violence (at home, in schools, on the streets of Chicago, and around the world) seizes media headlines; in the wake of the Great Recession, financial security remains more elusive than ever; and nations fail to agree on whether and how to conserve our environment. Against this backdrop, communities of color in the United States and globally argue that their lives matter.

Yet, this anxiety is not shared by all. Futurists like Ray Kurzweil, Peter Canton, and Peter Thiel look forward with excitement as they predict an Internet controlled by the brain, mobile technologies that deliver personalized medicine, and cheap on-demand transportation. Even so, growing inequalities in wealth, education, and access to technology means that only a small minority will imagine this future and even fewer will participate fully.

Thinking about the future as a perpetually in-process and undetermined concept opens up the possibility for powerful interventions. Future orientation, defined as consciously self-constructed and represented images of the future, contains cognitive (e.g., thinking about the future), motivational (e.g., planning for the future) and affective (e.g., being optimistic or pessimistic about the future) dimensions. Higher future orientation has been linked to lower risk behaviors (e.g., alcohol, HIV acquisition, and drug use). Thus, perhaps being a futurist also contains a therapeutic dimension.

This idea drives “Imagining Futures.” Our hope is that in creating this platform for marginalized communities, they can begin to engage in topics of the future, and eventually even shift future possibilities for themselves and for our society as a whole.

Course

Imagining Futures: Speculative Design and Social Justice

Winter 2017, Tues / Thurs, 12:00 – 1:20pm
Logan Center for the Arts / Gray Center Lab at Midway Studios

ENGL 21110 / 31110; cross-listings ARTV 21110 / 31110, CMST 21110 / 31110

This experimental course seeks to disrupt dominant narratives about “the future”: a monolithic concept that often comes from technologists and policymakers. Instead, we explore what alternative futures might look like when imagined by and with marginalized communities. Beginning with movements such as Afrofuturism, we will read speculative and science fiction across media, including short stories, manifestos, journalism, critical theory, novels, films, transmedia narratives, and videogames. These works will help us think relationally between the historical present and imaginable futures.

Rather than merely analyzing or theorizing various futures, this course will prepare students in hands-on methods of “speculative design” and “critical making.” Instead of traditional midterm essays and final research papers, the work of the course will consist primarily of blog responses to shared readings, coupled with short-form, theoretically-founded, and collaborative art projects. These projects will imagine alternative futures of climate change, gender, public health, finance, policing, and labor. The work will be challenging, transdisciplinary, and will blur expectations about the relationship between theory and practice at every turn. As such, it is not a course for the craven; it is a course for students who wish to explore the complexities of collaboration and the sociopolitical possibilities of art. Undergraduate: (B, H) Graduate: (20th/21st).

Survey:
Gray Center Fellows, University of Chicago Professor Patrick Jagoda and artist-activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan, have launched their online survey as part of their project Imagining Futures. We invite you to please take a moment (approx. 15 minutes) to take their survey and share your vision of the future.
Follow link to fill out survey: https://www.equalitylabs.org/imagining-futures/

Course projects:
For their final projects, students in the Imagining Futures: Speculative Design and Social Justice course created games of various types exploring subject matters such as immigration, parenting, surveillance and prison. Images and descriptions of these projects can be found here: https://imaginingfuturesblog.wordpress.com/final-group-projects/

Fellows

Patrick Jagoda

Patrick Jagoda specializes in media theory, game studies and design, science studies, and twentieth and twenty-first century American literature and culture. Alongside this position, He is the co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab. Jagoda also serve as co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Critical Inquiry. He is Chair of Cinema and Media Studies, faculty director of the Weston Game Lab, and director of the Media Arts and Design program at the University of Chicago. Professor Jagoda has helped develop game studies and game design at the University of Chicago, including as a co-founder of the Fourcast Lab collective that designs alternate reality games about topics such as climate change and epidemiology. Along with the English department, he is also a professor of Cinema & Media Studies and Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Chicago, as well as an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.

Patrick Jagoda works on fields of digital media studies, game studies and game design, and twentieth and twenty-first century American culture, literature, and design. He is currently co-editor of Critical Inquiry and Director of the Media Arts and Design program and the Weston Game Lab. Jagoda was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Among his design work, he co-directed and co-designed Terrarium — an alternate reality game that received the IndieCade award for the best Location Based and Live Play Design.

Jagoda’s books include Network Aesthetics (University of Chicago Press, 2016), The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (MIT Press, 2016, co-authored with Michael Maizels), Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and Transmedia Stories: Narrative Methods for Public Health and Social Justice (Stanford University Press, 2023).

Network Aesthetics examines American narrative, visual, and interactive artworks that encourage a critical and transformative engagement with the network as a dominant category of life since the mid-twentieth century. Though networks seem more appropriate to fields such as computer science and mathematics, they have also occupied a central place in the humanities. The book undertakes a comparative media analysis of the way that popular cultural forms, including the novel, film, television serial, videogame, and transmedia narrative have kept pace with science and mediated our experience of networks.

Experimental Games explores the rise of “gamification” in American culture. Gamification, a term that derives from behavioral economics, is the use of game mechanics in traditionally non-game activities. Though gamification is the starting point, the core of the project focuses on an aesthetic study of digital games that deviate from an instrumental and behaviorist approach, experimenting instead with more complex affects, experiences, and possibilities of play. Each chapter of the book focuses on a key concept for game studies, including experimentation, choice, control, difficulty, failure, and improvisation.

Transmedia Stories is an open access and multimedia book that explores how narrative methods taken from the humanities can be used in areas ranging from the social sciences to public health to activism. This work draws on over a decade of collaborative game design, community storytelling, and creative workshops that yielded everything from short-form autobiography documentaries to video games co-created with BIPOC youth on the South Side of Chicago. The book examines forms for sociopolitical intervention that include story circles, digital storytelling, narrative video games, transmedia history, speculative design, and alternate reality games. The core cases demonstrate how design thinking and participatory culture have not grappled sufficiently with cultural difference, including along lines of race, gender, and sexuality.
Beyond scholarship, Jagoda has co-launched several university-based digital media labs, including the Weston Game Lab and the Fourcast Lab, and previously the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and the Transmedia Story Lab.

MELISSA GILLIAM

Dr. Melissa L. Gilliam became Boston University’s eleventh president on July 1, 2024. Dr. Gilliam is an esteemed and award-winning interdisciplinary researcher in medicine, public health, and the humanities. Dr. Gilliam joined Boston University from The Ohio State University, where she held the Engie-Axium chair and served as executive vice president and provost overseeing 15 colleges and six campuses and the Office of Academic Affairs, including undergraduate education, graduate education, international affairs, diversity and inclusion, external engagement, online learning, and information technology. She placed a keen focus on issues of access, affordability, and reducing student debt.

Prior to this, Melissa Gilliam MD, MPH, was Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Pediatrics at the University of Chicago. She is the Ellen H. Block Professor of Health Justice. In November 2012, she launched Ci3 at the University of Chicago to create research to describe and address the intersections between inequitable systems (e.g. education, economic, health) and the well-being of adolescents and young adults. Ci3 works with and on behalf of young people marginalized by race, class, and sexual orientation taking an asset- rather than risk-based approach to addressing sexual and reproductive health, educational attainment, physical safety, and economic security. Ci3 uses storytelling, game design, and technological interventions to empower young people and create policy change domestically and internationally.

THENMOZHI SOUNDARARAJAN

Thenmozhi Soundararajan is a New York-based transmedia artist and theorist. As one of the founders of community digital storytelling, Soundararajan has used narrative art and media to further social justice and human rights causes in the United States and abroad. With the support of entities such as the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and MIT’s Center for Civic Media, Soundararajan has brought together scholars, artists and activists to combat caste-based violence in India using transmedia narrative art through her project #Dalitwomenfight.