Facts , Objects, and Visions in the Design of Globalizing - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

Facts, Objects, and Visions in the Design of Globalizing Knowledge

Michael D. Kennedy

Brown University

Prepared for the

CAS/

MillerComm

Lecture

Series

University of Illinois,

October 24, 2018

Thx to so many --

Zsuzsa

Gille

, Julian Go,

Ania

Skrzypek

, John Jennings, Stacey Robinson, John

Seely

Brown, Ann Pendleton-

Jullian

,

Prabh

Kehal

, Laura

Garbes

, Julian Chambliss,

Karida

Brown, Georgina

Manok

,

Tomek

Zarycki

, Ola

Goldys

,

Juho

Korhonen

, Rici Hammer, Jose

Itzigsohn

, Amy Dolan et al --

And to all of you

…

.

Slide2

Abstract

Since the publication of Globalizing Knowledge (2015), I have engaged in a number of global conversations with radically different scopes of imagination, principles of design, and visions of consequence in the articulation of transformative knowledge cultures. In this presentation, I juxtapose three: a) a technocratic approach to governing the future, associated with the Oxford Martin Commission and Pascal

Lamy

 

https://www.feps-europe.eu/resources/publications/532-prioritising-people-and-planet-a-new-agenda-for-global-progress.html

; b) the pragmatic imagination of

ecosystemic

design associated with the work of Ann Pendleton-

Jullian

and John

Seely

Brown 

http://www.pragmaticimagination.com/

; and c) an 

AfroFuturism

 made popular by the cinematic debut of the Black Panther and the more transgressive works of John Jennings, Stacey Robinson and others 

https://www.amazon.com/Cosmic-Underground-Grimoire-Speculative-Discontent/dp/1941958788

. This comparison illuminates radically different assumptions about innovation's source. More importantly, it moves possibilities in the design of knowledge networks and their public effervescence by establishing a different sense of connection among facts, objects, and visions in the design of globalizing knowledge. 

Slide3

Globalizing Knowledge

“Kennedy

interrogates “globalizing knowledge” as it relates to the push for institutions of higher education to redefine their missions in global terms. They explore how different forms of knowledge are implicated in the reproduction and transformation of power and social relations. Kennedy uses particular empirical cases from across the world to explore intellectual and institutional responsibilities in struggles for greater equality and justice within the academy, and beyond

it”

(

Kehal, Garbes and Kennedy forthcoming http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/obo/page/sociology).It’s a rather post-communist rather than post-colonial American vision… but no reviewer has made it so explicit (in English!)… an emergent #GATSociology theme?https://www.academia.edu/27756653/Extensions_of_Globalizing_Knowledge

Slide4

Picturing Imaginations, Design & Consequence

Slide5

Prioritising People and Planet -- FACTS, objects,

and Vision

in the Progressive Alternative (PA)

(following GK, pp. 277-85)

Slide6

“A Forward Looking Vision”“It

must be global but leave room for diversity. Challenges and opportunities are common, but a

one-size-fits

all approach would not work. We are all in the same boat but the fear of uniformity and the demand for preserving multiple identities needs to be addressed. It must be designed with a long time horizon in mind, but applicable to the problems of today as well. It must be principled and all encompassing: taking into account the impact of technology on the future of work and social fabric, but be based on ideals of fairness, equality and solidarity. It must encompass the ecological dimension. It must be simple to allow for a wide debate, while matching the growing complexity of societies. It must shape the contours of an alternative vision of the future of humanity, where the economy serves humans and nature, not the other way round. It must remain open to new ideas and new forms of social and institutional

organisation

”

Slide7

The Cultural Logic of a Progressive Vision

Long/Short

Solidarity

& Environmentally Human-

Progressive Global/Diversity Term Equality Sustainable Open Centered------------------- ~ --------------------- ~ ------------------------- ~ -------------------- ~ ------------------------ ~ ------------ ~ --------------Its Other Homogeneity/ Presentist/ Unequal and Destructive Closed Market- Nationalist Backward Unjust Society Centered

Slide8

Elements of a progressive vision

Although these were 15 variable expressions of this vision

–

some prescriptive, some more value-laden

–

they were all universally accepted. Some of them were relatively easy. Some of them were more challenging discussions, and took more work to realize agreement, as around migration and around security (not surprising for progressives)And some of them are quite creative. I especially like this:

“

an innovative, creative, capable and dynamic state that is proactive in empowering all its citizens through good and decent work, and in investing in ways to protect against old and new social insecurities and to prepare society for future challenges.”

Slide9

Behind all this… the weeds of experience

and data

Slide10

And a Realism beyond politics

“

Establish a Common Platform of Understanding: The ability to address today’s global challenges is undermined by the absence of a collective vision for society. To remedy this, the Commission urges renewed dialogue on an updated set of shared global values around which a unified and enduring pathway for society can be built

.”

Ironically, this is not very different from my sense of the World Economic Forum (GK pp 242-490) even though this is a Progressive Movement.

It’s just a matter of who leads, and to which networks, organizations, social groups and accompanying values they are tied, not in what method is used by that leadership to interpret the complexity of a rapidly changing world.Leadership is a matter of understanding global complexity and the meaning of progress.But after exploring the imagination more in figuring globalizing knowledge, I fear that we missed an opportunity to get really creative.

Slide11

FACTS, objects, and Vision

in the Progressive Alternative

Great Emphasis on presentations of facts and evidence

Objects are not transformative apart from the reason used to deploy them or compensate for them.

Vision is derived from understanding and piecing together the complexity and increasingly rapid multiple megatrends facing the world.

The document, and the process, offered a vision of how this common platform of understanding could be realized over a year, but also to recognize priorities. We need to prioritize winning political power to realize this vision.The long term and the short term fuse in that sense, but it means that it comes down, in the end, to vision being sacrificed to both precision in analysis and precision in winning elections. Objects are invisible in this, and vision is secondary. There were no distinctive artists or creators. Nobody was irreplaceable.

Slide12

Facts, OBJECTS, AND VISION in The Pragmatic Imagination with Design Unbound

(Following GK pp. 231-33)

Slide13

The Premise of the Pragmatic Imagination

”

…

. a valuable resource for navigating our broadly connected, rapidly changing, and radically contingent world. It begins from a critical assumption that efficacy in the world today requires a productive entanglement of imagination and action. It then presents a framework for understanding and unpacking the imagination as a wide range of mental activity that can be put to purpose for agency and impact in today’s world” (p. 3).

Moved by very prominent and consequential networks of visionaries and technologists across the world

…. W endorsements by 9 men and 3 women, from the US (especially southern California) and UK. But their global networks of reference are also vast; when I mention their names in Singapore, for example, people take great notice. They travel in an elite, and powerful world.

Individual creativity, and vision, matter.

Slide14

Perception, Reasoning, Speculation, Experimental, and Free Play in the Pragmatic Imagination

Slide15

The Cultural Logic of thePragmatic Imagination (vs. Progressive Alternative)

Whitewater

Making Presentation Morality

Multi- Design,

World Imagination Things Matters Implicit Media Tools & Mechanisms ------------------- ~ --------------- ~ ----------------------- ~ -------------------- ~ ---------------- ~ ---------------- ~ ---------------------- World of Reason Interpreting

Clarity Norms Textual

Mobilization of

Decipherable

Data

Counts

Declared. & Graphic Data and People

Trends & Relations

Joined by a Common Wish to Develop Efficacious Engagements in Realizing the Possible yet Better World (note pp. 74-78 in PI).

For example, making the “innovative

, creative, capable and dynamic

state”, such as that explored by Pragmatic Imagination’s endorser, Beth

Noveck’s

“Smarter State”.

Slide16

Facts, OBJECTS AND VISION in the Pragmatic Imagination

PI is about unleashing all faculties of sense making and breaking, from perception and reason (deductive, inductive and abductive) to speculation, experimentation, and free play.

“World Building”, exemplifies: “a tool that is specifically conceived to set the

imaginatino

in motion and to

scaffl it to design rich and vas, highly textured, worlds that one can imagine occupying as desired, not default, futures” (p. 96 in PI). This vision making is suitable for all transformative agents, whether heads of state or those like Abreu and his Venezeulan Youth Orchestras As his box violins illustrated, transformation is based less on knowing the system and rather having the imagination of the thing that might disrupt convention. This method, however, is even less explicitly anchored in norms or expectations than PA. In some ways, one could argue that Trump’s method of governance is itself based on the Pragmatic Imagination, when he drops outrageous tweets in the public sphere, this creates a new ecosystem for truthfulness and its public resonance.

Slide17

The Work of Design is Different from the Work of Social Science & Politics

“The beauty of design as an approach to life is its creative opportunistic tendencies. The entrepreneurialism associated with these tendencies has always been a driving force

onad

one that has been effective in negotiating change at all scales. From elegant objects to infrastructure, design has the distinct capacity to affect the context in which it sits.

Visionary, optimistic, and opportunistic, design is different than instrumental problem solving. Instrumental problem solving works to solve defined problems. Design works within a rich mental space in which problems are the impetus for work that converts ideas into things that are integrally linked to human behavior, perceptions, values and desires. As such, design may or may not

solve problems. It engages the life around problems.”from an early draft of Design Unbound, reprinted with permission in Kennedy 2015:231.It also engages art in the spirit of Picasso and many others. PI embraces this statement: “Art is a lie that tells the truth”. Sometimes art is the truth that reveals the lie.

Slide18

Afrofuturism: John Jennings, Stacey Robinson et al.

Slide19

Black Panther (the Movie) has made Afrofuturism part of our public vocabulary…

“What the Heck is Afrofuturism?”

“Afrofuturism: the Genre that made Black Panther”

“What is Afrofuturism?

The resurgence of Afrofuturism

goes beyond ‘Black Panther,’ to Janelle Monáe, Jay-Z and more”“Afrofuturism: Why black science fiction 'can't be ignored’”“Beyond 'Black Panther': A brief history of Afrofuturism”And so on… But Afrofuturism is far more profound

than most “world building” exercises

…

Slide20

How Is This Different from Most Marvel Superheroes?

The Golem archetype defends an obvious

community

from recurring and obvious threats,

with the named exemplar defending Jews from pogroms. But America is not an obvious community. A far more appropriate translation of the Golem into contemporary America would have been to make the Hulk Black, and not white, before turning green.

Black

Kirby gets

that

(Kennedy, “Superhero Sociology”

ms

).

See p

. 93 in John Jennings and Stacey Robinson,

Black Kirby Presents:

In

search of… The

Motherboxx

Connection, an Art Exhibition

.

Exhibition

Catalogue, 2013

Slide21

Black Kirby and the White Canvass in the Design of Globalizing Knowledge

The Challenge of Difference and Contexts:

In Sociology between 1890 and 2009, beyond the US, UK, & Canada, most articles addressed French, German, Japanese, Soviet, Indian, Chinese, South African, Russian and Italian places, in that order (p. 165).

I posed the challenge of difference in national terms, but one could conceive them in more Du

Boisian

terms too. What if I conceived the context of GK not as a globalizing university, but as white privilege, composed on a white canvass, much like the Incredible Hulk, or even the Black Panther, was composed with that Whiteness in mind and in imagination?What if the challenge of difference was not posed in terms of multiplicities of citizenship, class, language, gender, sexual orientation, but rather in terms of intersectionality with racial difference as anchor? What if Blackness had been my Guiding Light? What might I have seen beyond diversity?

Slide22

Fanon in a New Light… from Jennings, John. 2011.

“

Matterz

of the

FACT” [https://issuu.com/makeprophetz/docs/matterzdoc-2]*. “Riffing on Fanon’s “The Fact of Blackness”, Jennings illustrates the potentials for a visual

knowledge cultural

sociology. He highlights

how

White

people’s colonizing power can

make

the Black Body.

They construct

a constricting space –

“

an abnormal, animalistic, decadent and wanton dark body

in

which African Americans are forced to reside

” --

Jennings

’ 46 images, which draw heavily on a cyborg theme,

illustrate

how

the counter-self, despite entrapment, is made

.”

(from

Kehal

, Prabhdeep Singh, Laura

Garbes

and Michael D. Kennedy

“

Knowledge Cultural Sociology and Its Critical Inclusions” in Lynette

Spillman

(ed.)

Oxford Encyclopedia of Sociology

Oxford University Press

http

://

www.oxfordbibliographies.com/obo/page/sociology)

The Fact of Blackness is a global question, one that Fanon so clearly demonstrated.

Globalizing Knowledge without that fact is composed on a White Canvass.

Slide23

The Cosmic Underground: The Grimoire of

Black Speculative Discontent

Reynaldo Anderson & John Jennings (eds.)

Cover Art by Stacey Robinson

For my familiars, Du Bois is the

starting point. But even that radical challenge lacks magic. Kinitra Brooks “Afrofuturism disruptsthe linearity of time”, proposing that we look into the mitochondrial DNA of pre-historic wisdom, of “ancient African knowledge systems found in the complexities of its helix form” to find forms that express us “truthfully and totally” (pp. 43-44).

Slide24

Afrofuturism Reflects a Radical Black Intellectual Tradition more generally… (thx Rici Hammer)

“

History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read.  And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past.  On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.  It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.”

James Baldwin

https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/summer-2016/james-baldwin-on-history“The guilt remains, more deeply rooted, more securely lodged than the oldest of old trees.. The record is there for all to read.. One wishes that Americans, white Americans, would read that record and stop defending themselves against it. Only then will they be enabled to change their lives. The fact that Americans, white Americans, have not yet been able to do this – to face their history, to change their lives – hideously menaces this country. Indeed it menaces thie entire world.”

http://engl101-rothman.wikispaces.umb.edu/file/view/Unnameable+Objects+Unspeakable+Crimes.pdf

Slide25

Vision with Decision (thx Julian Chambliss)vs. Vision with Less Precision, and

Precision w/ Less Vision)

Drawing on Kara Keeling’s

The Witch’s Flight

and riffing on Bree Newsome, Clint Fuker proposes that she acts as Keeling’s Black Femme: tearing down that Confederate Flag isseen as irrational, or magical, because such acts don’t fit the norm.But whose, or what, norm? Black women, Black girls, Black Femmes, have a power that could bring down the house. Or toss a police vehicle. Think about this, Black Buck, Black Panther. Free Play with Globalizing Knowledge.

Slide26

Cultural Logics of thePragmatic Imagination, Progressive Alternative, and

Black Speculative Discontent (Afrofuturism)

Whitewater

Making Presentation

Morality Multi- Design, World Imagination Things Matters Implicit Media Tools & Mechanisms ------------------- ~ --------------- ~ ----------------------- ~ ----------------------- ~ ---------------- ~ ---------------- ~ ----------------------

World of

Reason

Interpreting

Clarity

Norms Textual

Mobilization of

Decipherable

Data

Counts

Declared & Graphic Data and People

Trends & Relations

----------------- ~ --------------------- ~ ----------------------- ~ ------------------------ ~ ---------------------- ~ --------- ~ ----------------------------

Non-Linear Double Constituting resonance for Colonialism/ Multi- Emancipation by

Time in Conscious Alternative marginalized/

Slavery/

Media All Means Necessary

Modernity’s Speculation Reality Now enlightened Injustice

Exploitation Starting Point

Slide27

FACTS, OBJECTS, and VISION in an Afrofuturist Globalizing Knowledge

Free Play: What would Globalizing Knowledge look like if it was moved

less with this American disposition informed by Polish engagement

…

not only with a postcolonial but with an

Afrofuturist sensibility, with not only Du Bois, Fanon, Cabral and Cesaire, but with Sun Ra, Octavia Butler, George Clinton, Audre Lord, With Kinitra Brooks, Clint Fuker, Reynoldo Anderson, Natasha Kelly, With John Jennings, Stacey Robinson, Black Kirby. Is Black Panther the beginning of that popular movement around

Afrofuturist

alternatives?

How White does it remain? Or better,

h

ow might it reflect an

AfroFuturist

Subjectivity on which to build?

Slide28

A New Design for Globalizing Knowledge with Facts, Objects and Vision with Decision

The Progressive Alternative evidences potentials for collaborative

learning and vision making with social scientists in the room.

The Pragmatic Imagination illuminates both method and significance

for speculation, experiment, and free play in rethinking our approach

to alternative futures. Image by Stacey RobinsonThe Afrofuturist Imaginary radiates gravity and light, ways of being and of vision that are both grounded in experience and a critical sense of how things can otherwise be. It takes a Megascope. Ask Du Bois about it. Or John Jennings.

Slide29

Facts, Objects, and Visions in the Design of

Globalizing Knowledge

Since the publication of Globalizing Knowledge (2015), I have engaged in a number of global conversations with radically different scopes of imagination, principles of design, and visions of consequence in the articulation of transformative knowledge cultures. In this presentation, I juxtapose three: a) a technocratic approach to governing the future, associated with the Oxford Martin Commission and Pascal

Lamy

 

https://www.feps-europe.eu/resources/publications/532-prioritising-people-and-planet-a-new-agenda-for-global-progress.html ; b) the pragmatic imagination of ecosystemic design associated with the work of Ann Pendleton-Jullian and John Seely Brown http://www.pragmaticimagination.com/; and c) an AfroFuturism made popular by the cinematic debut of the Black Panther and the more transgressive works of John Jennings, Stacey Robinson and others https://www.amazon.com/Cosmic-Underground-Grimoire-Speculative-Discontent/dp/1941958788. This comparison illuminates radically different assumptions about innovation's source. More importantly, it moves possibilities in the design of knowledge networks and their public effervescence by establishing a different sense of connection among facts, objects, and visions in the design of globalizing knowledge.