As part of of the work done in research group Civic Paths I helped to develop the Atlas of the Civic Imagination. A collaborative website that contains a collection of stories that inspire the civic imagination originating from different parts of the world started in summer’s workshops at the Salzberg Academy on Media and Global Change “to create an atlas of the stories that inspire us, unite us and define us as our ideas migrate from our home communities to an international stage.”

Participants gathered stories that they feel contain sparks of civic imagination in their home communities, drawing on resonate pop culture narratives, folklore/myth/religion and contemporary or historical biography. They will then share their documentation of these case studies through the creation of media artifacts uploaded to a central collaborative Atlas of the Civic Imagination. They will also work together to map the media ecologies of their media, thinking about how these stories travel across different media and how the affordances of those various media shape popular response.

Then, exploring each other’s’ stories, they migrated stories and story elements, reimagining migration as the movement of narratives across spaces and places, and exploring common and divergent threads, seeing how the combinations of unexpected elements might lead to unique and engaging creative output. As story migrations lead to real life sharing, reflection, debate and collaboration, participants will form working groups to imagine how their combined stories can be enlarged and leveraged as the foundations of international transmedia campaigns aimed at improving the issues facing migratory and refugee communities all over the world. I also piloted the dynamic with a story contribution.