May 16, 2018

The Civic Imagination Project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, has accepted as its mission an effort to stimulate discussions within communities across America and around the world about our shared values, about our hopes for the future, and about the models we use to think about the process of social and political change. We conduct workshops where participants are encouraged to imagine the future together, using techniques that have been inspired by the world building practices associated with speculative fiction. We ask those who come to our workshops to imagine the world of 2060 — not as it will be but as we desire it to be, and in this way, we try to find some degree of consensus about what an ideal society might look like, a consensus which cuts across other divides amongst us. As we do so, we are using utopias not as blueprints for an ideal world, but as provocations to have further conversations about the nature and process of social change.

But we do not want simply to focus on the future — on what changes are ahead. We also want to reflect on our traditions, on things we cherish and want to carry with us into the future with us. One way we get our participants to reflect on that sense of tradition is to ask them to bring a meaningful or memorable object with them and share its story as a means of introducing themselves to the group. At first, we understood this practice as simply an ice-breaker, but from the start, it was clearly much more. Sharing these objects and their stories with each other creates a degree of intimacy and vulnerability between the workshop participants; it enables trust as people talk about stuff that is at the core of our common humanity. In the room, the sharing of these stories, the handling of these cherished artifacts, break down bareers, but as we’ve returned to our base at the University of Southern California, we have found that these object stories continue to do important work as tools to think with, ways that we as a research group can gain some sense of what things are valuable and meaningful to the people we encounter in our research.

This semester, we conducted an interpretive experiment trying to understand the memorable objects shared with us by the participants in two of our recent workshops — one centered on the future of work, involving former coal miners and tobacco farmers, assembled in Bowling Green, Kentucky and one centered around the future of faith amongst the congregation of a Lutheran Church in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Our discussions of these memorable objects were shaped by recent work in anthropology and sociology which explores how humans map meaning onto their possessions, how our belongings often express a sense of belonging, how the exchange of things helps to shape our relations with other people in our lives. In this tradition, certain objects are seen as telling — that is, they yield stories that help us to better understand the people around us. When we are asked to show off things that are meaningful to us, we engage in a process of self-fashioning — we construct and perform our identities through the stuff we share (both the objects themselves and the emotional baggage they carry for us).

In these short and very personal essays, our graduate students engage with some of the object lessons which we gathered from our engagement with the people of Kentucky and Arkansas. Our students are writing here to and about people they have not met, people they only know through these stories about cherished objects. Given the contemporary political context, the temptation is to read these essays as pieces written from a very blue state — California — to the inhabitants of two red states. But, in practice, the situation is far more complex, since some of our group members were raised in the south or in the rust belt, and thus these stories offer a glimpse into a world they have left behind, at least for the purposes of their education. And beyond this, the members of our research group come from varied other places — from Latin America to Eastern Europe — and thus find other cultural connections with the original tellers of these tales and possessors of these objects.

For our research group, this is a means of getting our intellectual juices flowing — a discovery process that we hope will yield further insights into the civic imagination. But we also hope that it is simply another stage in a longer communication process. We are reaching out to the original storytellers to get their reactions to what the students have written and we encourage other readers to share their responses with us. Tell us how and why you connected with these particular stories. Share with us objects that you use to remember who you are and where you came from.

Introduction was originally published in Memory Objects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

MEMORY OBJECT (FAYETTEVILLE) — “My object is a gold ring that had belonged to my great grandmother. This ring was special for many reasons. For one thing, it belonged to the great grandmother that I look a lot like. Family tell me that I also act like her in many ways.

When I was a little girl, my grandmother showed me the ring in the box in a china cabinet, and she said that when I was older I could have it. When I’d go to their house (they lived just a block away from where we did), I’d peek in the drawer to make sure the box was still there. When my grandmother moved to a nursing home and we were cleaning out this ancestral home to prepare it for sale, I laid claim to the ring. The timing was important. I had just gotten divorced. I remember so well taking off my wedding ring and putting on my great grandmother’s ring. I transformed my family connection from one kind of family to connecting to my ancestors, to people with a long history of strength and love. It meant everything to me.

The ring itself was modest. It had very little actual gold in it, but it never changed colors. It was a simple band with several markings in it that were decorative but simple. It also had three green stones in it (surely not emeralds) but they never moved or fell out either. The three stones may have represented my great grandmother’s only child (my grandmother) and her two grandchildren. Or it might have just been how the ring was made and sold and didn’t really mean anything.

I lost that ring a couple of years ago. I have no idea where. I’m heartbroken, but I’m also pretty zen about it. It’s just a ring. It did its job and I still feel attached to it even though it’s not on my hand. That tells me that it’s the woman who owned it first as well as my grandmother are what I feel connected to, not the ring itself, but I love that I had this thing that helped me do that at a time when I needed a connection to something powerful.”

And hope without an object cannot live
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

There seems to be something about rings –about girls and rings in particular. It might be the happily ever after ideal we confine around this specific type of jewelry, or the durable materiality of metals, or just because we have been brought up to understand jewelry as a token of love. Either one or the other, I was too brought up with an ideal ring. An heirloom that, as yours, once belonged to my great grandmother. I didn’t share her looks, but according to my father, I inherited her feet –they were close that way, mostly when considering she from my mother’s side of the family.

It was a ring my mother came into on her 15th birthday — I won’t go into the Mexican quinceañera tradition, but it is part of the story of the ring that was shared over the years. It was a gift from her grandmother. I don’t quite remember the details or the speech, but I do have an image in mind, which I recalled when reading about the ring in a box; we share that. In my case, it was my mother who told me that when I was older, I could have it. I also peeked into that jewelry box to make sure it was still there; I tried it on next to my mother, and remember it was too many sizes big for me — apparently my grandmother’s hands were also well padded. Most other days, it laid there, awaiting our next visit. These shared nostalgic memories are relatable in more than a ring.

There is a particular void when losing a valuable object, but furthermore when the most relevant value is sentimental. It embodies a wistful space that we might end up using for self-reflection. I had lost mine, too –and I say mine, because it was the something borrowed that my heart didn’t quite give back. I tried it on that last time I saw it, before putting the velvet black box away. The heartbreak we share is not entirely related to the object, but rises from parting from heritage, from connection to family, and as a broken link to the embodiment of relatedness through a golden–or plated– piece of jewelry. These wearable-memory objects can represent hope in time of need, and unexpectedly parting from them can only translate to losing hope, that which for some reason feels lost without the object we pinned it to.

Hope-objects was originally published in Memory Objects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Written on April 23, 2018

MEMORY OBJECT (BOWLING GREEN): “I picked up my Smith-Corona Coronet Super 12 electric typewriter by pure chance. I had wanted a typewriter for years — I’ve always had a fondness for outdated forms of writing tools. I have a quill and inkwell set too and I often handwrite a lot of my projects before I end up typing them up on the cold laptop screen. I stumbled upon this typewriter in a thrift store, sitting next to an abandoned mismatched living room set. It doesn’t work perfectly — it’s badly in need of service repairs — but I didn’t care as I lovingly cleaned each key the second I got it home. It was ten dollars well spent. I love these outdated forms of writing. There’s something about using these tools that connects me to the past of my craft. I can imagine Mark Twain sitting in a room clacking away on one of the first typewriters, crafting his stories for the world to read, but not knowing if they would. I can imagine the office workers and writers in Kentucky’s past who must have done something similar, filling in a report or crafting a tale for an eager audience. Our means of production in writing, and in many other industries, may have changed over time, but I think it’s important to get back to our roots, to polish up what was working well and borrow from that past, let it inspire us, to bring ourselves toward a brighter future. Today, my typewriter often sits in its box with no real functioning purpose anymore, other than to remind me of where we’ve been and to inspire me to keep moving forward.”

“Cold laptop screen”. The words struck me suddenly, and my stream of thoughts stumbled to a halt. Reading the memory object description on my own glowing screen, with my laptop’s fan whirring away (bemoaning my dozens of running tabs) and warmth physically pouring from its sides, the word “cold”, a resonant, striking adjective to be assigned to a laptop, seemed misplaced.

In contrast, the author describes the “outdated” technologies of the past, a quill and inkwell set and a Smith-Corona Coronet Super 12 electric typewriter, and their ability to speak to a living history and a “brighter future”. These contrastive characterizations of old and new technologies seem initially reminiscent of a pervasive dictum articulated by some critics of media: something akin to “children used to play outside in the mud and run free rather than spend all day staring at their screens”.

But the author’s descriptions of these antiquated tools don’t appear to encourage us to reject present technologies and cling to the past. Instead, they encourage us to think about our relationship with all of the writing tools at our disposal. Through valorizing the intimate involvement with the writing process that his/her typewriter provided, the author encourages us to slow down; to remember that writing technologies (whether pen and paper, typewriter, or laptop) support more than productivity — they support craft and creativity.

As I read the author’s description of his/her fondness and love for “outdated” writing technologies, I envision his/her memory object, a Smith-Corona Coronet Super 12 electric typewriter, as an emblem of earnest hope for self and society. As Daniel Miller illustrates in his work, “The Comfort of Things”, we can utilize goods to build our own individual worlds. This memory object author reveals the dual-purpose of his/her world-building materials: to create and re-create ourselves, and to envision changes for the world at large. The author’s electric typewriter serves this twofold purpose of inspiring and sustaining a hope for an individual “me” and for a collective “we”. The typewriter, and similarly “outdated” technologies, become “instruments of the self” (Grant McCracken), as they connect the author “to the past of my craft” and “inspire me to keep moving forward”. Simultaneously, the author claims, “I think it’s important to get back to our roots, to polish up what was working well and borrow from that past, let it inspire us, to bring ourselves toward a brighter future”.

While the author claims that his/her typewriter is tucked away in its box, no longer serving a “real functioning purpose”, it remains an active, dynamic tool in his/her creative life. Stripped of its original writing function, the typewriter remains a tool for building and feeding his/her hope for his/her self, and for a future in which all individuals might reimagine and rework their relationship with writing tools.

Works Cited

McCraken, D. (2005). Culture and consumption II: Markets, meaning, and brand management. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Miller, D. (2008). The comfort of things. Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Craft and Creativity: Reimagining Our Relationships with Writing Technologies was originally published in Memory Objects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Written on the 10th of May 2018

Memory object(Fayetteville): “A river rock from the Ozarks. My family went on vacation when I was around 6. We were driving through the Ozark mountains when my dad pulled over to look at a river. I have no idea what river or even what state..

We rolled up our pants and waded in the cold water. I remember the early morning sun playing on the ripples and the fish nibbling on my toes. My mother wanted a rock to remember this moment… My father and brother went back to the shore and started looking. I saw the most perfect rock under the water. It was so cold, I felt frozen. I held my breath and dove down to grab it.

So, we have a river rock from the Ozarks. I am from Florida. When we moved to this area my mother had been diagnosed with cancer.. she kept the rock high on her mantel…when she came to see the birth of my 3rd child (6 months after we arrived in Arkansas) she gave me the rock… and told me that life was a beautiful cycle… I had given her the rock on the most beautiful family trip we had ever had…and now I lived in the ozarks and would be taking my kids to see the beauty.

I have it high on a shelf. A memory of the beauty here and in my family…that sometimes we have to suffer the cold to get something worth having…and life is a gift…and is meant to be shared. “

______

An Odyssey of questions unfolds. When and how do we carry memories with us in time? Who carries them after we are long gone? In what form? How can we re-activate, enrich these meanings? How are memories becoming part of a larger collective consciousness? How can we trace and conserve ephemerality throughout generations?

How are objects reshaping us and how are we reshaping them? Are objects traces of something much larger, maybe incomprehensibly larger than us? Is the rock from the Ozarks becoming more human or more objectified in this journey of personalisation? What is the boundary between an object and a being?

This memory object is filtered at first through the eyes of a 6-years old, who then becomes an adult and gradually a dad of his 3rd child. “The rock” from the Ozarks is at first one of many. It begins to become singularized when subjectified, when complemented with feelings, with an anticipation of nostalgia.

The rock advances from a wish of a child’s mother to preserve a moment in time, continues a quest, climaxes as an under-water discovery of a child, gains the status of a souvenir for the entire family, advances to a healing mechanism for the illness of his mother, becomes a cherished inheritance, and finally, an intense trans-generational link. This rock is “a memory of beauty”, but not only in connection to nature, but in connection to the human spirit. As if, its interior would capture, reactivate, expand feelings. A magnet. It is not only the rock itself, kept “high on a shelf” that impacts lives, but also the trip to the Ozarks that reinforce memories.

A family trip as a subjective marker in time. The “cold water” and “fish nibbling” seem way too ephemeral moods to inhabit generations. “My mother wanted a rock to remember this moment”. The rock finding is a ritual in itself. It cannot be any rock — but “the most perfect” one. The definition of perfection is in the eyes, hands, moves and feelings of the beholder. Is it round? Is it grey, dark, light? Is it shiny? Is it small? We don’t really know. We don’t even need to know.

The rock from the Ozarks is not only an object. It is almost a link between human and non-human form of existence. It feels more like a world. A world of peace, exploration, unity, longevity. How different does time pass for humans and rocks? How different does meaning pass from rocks to humans? What grammars do we create between these three forms of existence: humanity, spirituality, nature? And how is humanity conserved when filtered through non-human lenses?

Rocks are perceived as an evolving symbol in our societies. To some, they symbolize strength, constancy, eternity. In the Romanian folklore, Traian Dorz wrote a poem in which we are invited to learn from nature on how to lead our ephemeral existence: “learn from the water to have a steady journey / learn from the fire that everything ends as dust / learn from the shadow to stay silent and to contemplate / learn from the cliff to firmly believe / learn from the sun how to adjust your sunset / learn from the rock how much to say / learn from the wind that embraces paths/ how to go through life. ” Rocks are mentors.

After a recent visit at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, I discovered a section entitled “Rocks Tell Stories”. It explained how rocks and their intricacies reveal the traces of our existence. In our case, the rock does not only to carry the wider stories within it, but also the inner, noetic ones. It becomes a form of geo-poetry, geo-spirituality, geo-continuity, geo-nostalgia.

A River Rock from the Ozarks: a Trans-generational Link (Short Treaty of Geo-Poetry) was originally published in Memory Objects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Memory Object (FAYETTEVILLE): “My childhood undershirt. I have an cotton undershirt from when I was four years old. It is very soft and is white with tiny blue flowers on it. It has been in my underwear drawer for as long as I can remember. When I went away to college, I often used it as a handkerchief when my allergies flared up due to our old and musty dorm ventilation. It is hard to explain what it means to me, but I like to be reminded that I once was a small child — the undershirt seems to connect me to that childhood.”

Cultural approaches to material culture insist on the notion of objects as holders of important cultural meaning, as well as on a mutual constitution in its relationship with subjects. In this sense, the excerpt above allows us to appreciate how a simple cotton undershirt can, in fact, do a lot of “cultural work.”

The most notable is that this object is connecting this person directly to his childhood in a very affective and nostalgic way. Indeed, this very simple piece of fabric is evoking heartfelt feelings associated to a time of nurture, safety and comfort which usually characterize the first home an individual lives in. The very materiality of this memory object seems to reinforce those warm sensations, not only because its sole purpose was to keep its user warm as a kid, but also because the description above highlights its very soft and delicate texture.

This sense of care and protection that the object emanates also becomes clear when he (I have chosen to imagine the owner as a male) writes that he would use this undershirt during times of illness while in college, when he needed to care for himself, on his own, away from that first home and away from those primary caretakers that possibly were his parents. In this context, the undershirt is also extending the connections between them in time, especially during moments that can be trying and alienating, such as being away for college.

Lastly, this object is connecting this person to a past self, to his younger self, and thus acts as a nostalgic reminder of something that was and that can never be again because it is simply not possible to revert to that time, to those emotions and to those relations as they were. The power of this object is such that this person is not able to dispose of it, as that would represent severing that connection to what was. Losing the past that has attached itself to the fibers of the cotton would mean losing a part of this person’s sense of self.

All of this is why the cotton undershirt sits in his underwear drawer, mostly hidden but always there, accessible to its subject in times of physical or emotional need.

written on April 16, 2018.

Holding on through cloth was originally published in Memory Objects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

MEMORY OBJECT (FAYETTEVILLE): “My memory object is my baby teeth, which my mother collected and saved and one day mailed to me sealed in a bright blue envelope.”

When we discussed the memory objects from Fayetteville in a Civic Imagination meeting, I was immediately struck by the milk teeth. Most of the other objects from this location were saturated with a kind of sentimentality linked to Protestant ideology, fitting for a workshop run in a Lutheran church. This object, however, was different. In contrast to the descriptions of the other Fayetteville memory objects, which were frequently longer and suffused with affect, this description was short and matter of fact, yet the language was remarkably evocative, almost poetic. It could even be organized as a short poem:

My memory object is my baby teeth,

which my mother collected and saved

and one day mailed to me

sealed in a bright blue envelope.

Especially vivid is the image of the baby teeth in the bright blue envelope.

Further reflecting on this memory object, it seems to me that another reason it intrigues me so is not because of what is present but what is absent. The brief, vivid description evokes my curiosity and sparks my imagination. What is the relationship between the speaker and his (I was told the speaker was a man) mother? The fact that she collected them at all suggests that they had some significance to her, and they mean something to the writer as well, although it is not clear what. Why did she decide to send them to him all of a sudden? Did she let him know that she was sending them, or did they arrive in the blue envelope unannounced? Did the envelope contain a letter of any kind explaining the reason for sending the teeth, and what did the speaker make of the unusual parcel? The object suggests a narrative, but it is up to the reader to decide what that story might be. In this sense, the teeth are what Roland Barthes refers to as a readerly rather than a writerly text. The reader must actively work to interpret the text, filling in the gaps intentionally left by the writer in order to make sense of the work.

My notion that the milk teeth are a readerly memory object was supported by the widely diverging reactions of the Civic Paths members. Others thought that this object was creepy or even disgusting. There is, in fact, something abject about the object. I think it stems from the fact that the object was once a part of the body of the speaker. What, then, does it mean to feel nostalgia for something that was once part of your body? Perhaps it is like when an amputee continues to feel sensation in their phantom limb.

I recall a carpentry staple that I swallowed as a baby and was removed from my digestive tract. My mother, who I do not have a particularly close relationship with, keeps this staple swathed in cotton gauze in a plastic container in her jewelry box. Perhaps one day, sensing her own mortality, she will send this staple to me in the mail in a colorful envelope.

Milk Teeth, Phantom Limbs, and Carpentry Staples was originally published in Memory Objects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

(Written by Henry Jenkins on May 16, 2018)

The Civic Imagination Project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, has accepted as its mission an effort to stimulate discussions within communities across America and around the world about our shared values, about our hopes for the future, and about the models we use to think about the process of social and political change. We conduct workshops where participants are encouraged to imagine the future together, using techniques that have been inspired by the world building practices associated with speculative fiction. We ask those who come to our workshops to imagine the world of 2060 — not as it will be but as we desire it to be, and in this way, we try to find some degree of consensus about what an ideal society might look like, a consensus which cuts across other divides amongst us. As we do so, we are using utopias not as blueprints for an ideal world, but as provocations to have further conversations about the nature and process of social change.

But we do not want simply to focus on the future — on what changes are ahead. We also want to reflect on our traditions, on things we cherish and want to carry with us into the future with us. One way we get our participants to reflect on that sense of tradition is to ask them to bring a meaningful or memorable object with them and share its story as a means of introducing themselves to the group. At first, we understood this practice as simply an ice-breaker, but from the start, it was clearly much more. Sharing these objects and their stories with each other creates a degree of intimacy and vulnerability between the workshop participants; it enables trust as people talk about stuff that is at the core of our common humanity. In the room, the sharing of these stories, the handling of these cherished artifacts, break down bareers, but as we’ve returned to our base at the University of Southern California, we have found that these object stories continue to do important work as tools to think with, ways that we as a research group can gain some sense of what things are valuable and meaningful to the people we encounter in our research.

This semester, we conducted an interpretive experiment trying to understand the memorable objects shared with us by the participants in two of our recent workshops — one centered on the future of work, involving former coal miners and tobacco farmers, assembled in Bowling Green, Kentucky and one centered around the future of faith amongst the congregation of a Lutheran Church in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Our discussions of these memorable objects were shaped by recent work in anthropology and sociology which explores how humans map meaning onto their possessions, how our belongings often express a sense of belonging, how the exchange of things helps to shape our relations with other people in our lives. In this tradition, certain objects are seen as telling — that is, they yield stories that help us to better understand the people around us. When we are asked to show off things that are meaningful to us, we engage in a process of self-fashioning — we construct and perform our identities through the stuff we share (both the objects themselves and the emotional baggage they carry for us).

In these short and very personal essays, our graduate students engage with some of the object lessons which we gathered from our engagement with the people of Kentucky and Arkansas. Our students are writing here to and about people they have not met, people they only know through these stories about cherished objects. Given the contemporary political context, the temptation is to read these essays as pieces written from a very blue state — California — to the inhabitants of two red states. But, in practice, the situation is far more complex, since some of our group members were raised in the south or in the rust belt, and thus these stories offer a glimpse into a world they have left behind, at least for the purposes of their education. And beyond this, the members of our research group come from varied other places — from Latin America to Eastern Europe — and thus find other cultural connections with the original tellers of these tales and possessors of these objects.

For our research group, this is a means of getting our intellectual juices flowing — a discovery process that we hope will yield further insights into the civic imagination. But we also hope that it is simply another stage in a longer communication process. We are reaching out to the original storytellers to get their reactions to what the students have written and we encourage other readers to share their responses with us. Tell us how and why you connected with these particular stories. Share with us objects that you use to remember who you are and where you came from.

Introduction was originally published in Memory Objects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.