Page 217 - Retos y desafios de lo escenarios emergentes en la comunicacion educativa 1

Retos y desafíos de los escenaRios emeRgentes en la comunicación educativa

imagination operates. In Hall’s model, stories are encoded with
messages that are then decoded by the audience. Expanding on
this useful model, we take a more cyclical view in which audiences
also become participants, encoding and decoding messages, which
then in turn influence media creation. Civic imagination operates
during this cycle as we shape, challenge, and repurpose the stories
that surround us. To elaborate on how civic imagination operates,
we actively seek out case studies and examples that articulate the
civic imagination. In our edited book Popular Culture and the Civic
Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change (NYU 2020)
includes creative engagements with story worlds like Hunger Games,
Miss Marvel, Hamilton, and Bollywood dance.

Drawing on our case studies, analysis, experimentation, and other
work in this space, we identified six areas where the civic imagination
can have an impact. Civic imagination can help us:
• Imagine a better world.
• Imagine the process of change.
• Imagine ourselves as civic agents.
• Forge solidarity with others with different experiences from
our own.
• Imagine our social connections with a larger community.
• Bring an imaginative dimension to our real-world spaces and
places.

We explore these areas both conceptually and practically, recognizing
that our work is part of a larger discourse on the importance of
imagination and its role in our civic lives, which includes The Dark
Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger
Games (Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, NYU Press 2020), Parable of the
Sower (Octavia Butler, Grand Central Publishing 1993), and Radical
Imagination (Alex Khasnabish and Max Haiven, Zed Books 2014),
and other important works.

We also acknowledge that imagination itself is not inherently ethical
or civic, as it can be used for various purposes, which is why we set
clear ethical and civic boundaries when it comes to our collaborative
initiatives. That said, we do work with diverse groups that differ in

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