Hot air balloons in Boise, Idaho, 2018 (photo by Christina Hendricks)
As part of Mid-Year Festival 2024, I’m participating in a book circle on Ruha Benjamin’s book, Imagination: A Manifesto. I am going to add a few reflections here on the Introduction and chapters 1 and 2, in preparation for our meeting about those chapters.
I wanted to join this book circle because I have a strained relationship with imagination sometimes. In some ways I feel I have a great deal of imagination (I love drawing even though I’m not great at it, for example, and doing very short, 6-10 word stories), but in other ways I feel like I tend to just continue with things as they are because I struggle with understanding how they might change. This is especially the case with systemic issues that would require very complex work in many ways to even start to approach.
Back in MYFest 2022 I wrote a blog post about imagining higher education futures, and how much difficulty I found with that task because of the interlocking structures that all need to change in order to make bigger changes. I felt somewhat stuck, because while trying to change one thing it bumped up against so many others that made it difficult to move. I’m hoping that while reading and discussing this book I feel even more unstuck.