The Civic Imagination: Political Culture in Contemporary American Cities

Abstract

Across the political spectrum, people are continuously, actively engaged in prospective thinking about a better society and political system. The authors examine this dynamic meaning-making process in year-long collaborative, ethnography of civic engagement at the city level. Social scientists from three disciplines, including political science, engaged in participant-observation and conducted interviews with seven radically different civil society organizations, each working for political change in a single American city. Each researcher worked at all field sites, collaboratively coded field notes, and contributed to a collective writing process. This paper uses the story of a heated controversy about closing several public schools to show how citizen imaginations shape understanding and action in contemporary civic life.

The paper introduces the concept of “civic imaginations,” and explains how these cognitive maps of the citizen-state relationship guide political participation. “Civic imaginations” are the ways in which people individually and collectively envision better political, social, and civic environments and work towards achieving those futures. We use "civic" because we are interested in imagination that is concerned with society, and not, for example, with individual aspirations for a better life. We use "imagination" because it implies thinking of things that do not (yet) exist, and thus is an act of bringing forth a possible future, or what philosophers have sometimes referred to as poiesis. As an act of bringing-forth, the civic imagination informs and guides action, directly bearing on how individuals think about diagnosing social problems and creating social change. Civic imaginations are fluid and in motion, constantly being created and recreated as people confront reality and seek out their visions of a normative “good” amidst changing circumstances. As people and civic groups develop visions of a better world, their imaginations lead them to act in particular, and extraordinarily diverse, ways.

We make sense of the variability in civic imaginations by observing that they cluster around three strong sets of discourses: concern with inequality, prioritizing solidarity, and collective thinking to solve social problems. First, some civic imaginations cluster around the need to fight unequal distributions of power in society. Individuals and organizations with this imagination see themselves acting at the local level to contribute to a much broader struggle against systemic social inequalities, and prioritize the opinions, voices, and actions of those most affected by injustice. A second type of civic imagination clusters around the idea of promoting community solidarity, making claims for people to come together, to develop a sense of community and collective culture, and to strengthen neighborhoods and local spaces. A third type clusters around the belief that by simply coming together and communicating, people can generate creative solutions to social problems. We argue that listening for others’ civic imaginations is a way to gain clarity about the inspirations of engaged citizens and civic groups, their actions and their pitfalls. It is a means of understanding political culture, of examining civic life, of studying democracy in action.

Keywords: civic engagement, civil society, political culture, disavowal, imagination, political sociology, NGO, activism