CO-CREATING MEDIA FOR EQUITY AND JUSTICE
How to co-create — and why: the emergence of media co-creation as a concept and as a practice grounded in equity and justice.
By Katerina Cizek and William Uricchio
With coauthors Juanita Anderson, Maria Agui Carter, Detroit Narrative Agency, Thomas Allen Harris, Maori Karmael Holmes, Richard Lachman, Louis Massiah, Cara Mertes, Sara Rafsky, Michèle Stephenson, Amelia Winger-Bearskin and Sarah Wolozin
400 pp., 7 x 9 in, 198 color photos, hardcover, 9780262543774, published November 1, 2022
15% off + free shipping | code: READMIT15 (offer for U.S. only through Penguin Random House)
How to co-create — and why: the emergence of media co-creation as a concept and as a practice grounded in equity and justice.
Co-creation is everywhere: It’s how the internet was built; it generated massive prehistoric rock carvings; it powered the development of vaccines for COVID-19 in record time. Co-creation offers alternatives to the idea of the solitary author privileged by top-down media. But co-creation is easy to miss, as individuals often take credit for—and profit from—collective forms of authorship, erasing whole cultures and narratives as they do so. Collective Wisdom offers the first guide to co-creation as a concept and as a practice, tracing co-creation in a media-making that ranges from collaborative journalism to human–AI partnerships.
Why co-create—and why now? The many coauthors, drawing on a remarkable array of professional and personal experience, focus on the radical, sustained practices of co-creating media within communities and with social movements. They explore the urgent need for co-creation across disciplines and organization, and the latest methods for collaborating with nonhuman systems in biology and technology. The idea of “collective intelligence” is not new, and has been applied to such disparate phenomena as decision making by consensus and hived insects. Collective wisdom goes further. With conceptual explanation and practical examples, this book shows that co-creation only becomes wise when it is grounded in equity and justice.
Events
November 1 • 12 pm ET • online
Virtual Celebration of Book Release at MIT Open Doc Lab/CoCreation Studio
Please register here and join us for a virtual celebration with most authors and coauthors present.
November 14 • 3pm CET • Amsterdam
World Launch at IDFA: Meet the Authors
International Theatre Amsterdam, Leidseplein 26, 1017 PT Amsterdam, Netherlands
Please email us to be placed on guest list if you are not already an Industry Delegate.
December 2 • 1 pm GMT • online
Virtual Lunchtime Talk at Pervasive Studio, Watershed U.K.
Please register here and join us for a virtual talk with a few of the authors.
December 9 • 6:30 pm ET • New York City
U.S. Launch at Ford Foundation: Authors’ Photoshare led by Thomas Allen Harris
Ford Foundation building, NYC
Please email us to be placed on guest list if you would like to attend.
Press
Authors






Her recent credits include Sydney G. James: How We See Us (2022), produced for the Firelight Media/American Masters short film series, In the Making, and the forthcoming documentary short, Reclamation (2022), produced in collaboration with the Detroit Narrative Agency and the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. Anderson served as the 2019-2020 Murray Jackson Creative Scholar in the Arts at Wayne State University, where she heads the Department of Communication’s Media Arts & Studies programs and has served as a faculty member since 2003. She is also the Resident Artist in Media Arts at The Carr Center in Detroit. A long-standing advocate for diversity in public media and the arts, Anderson was a co-founder of the National Black Programming Consortium (now Black Public Media); a past president of the National Conference of Artists, the nation’s longest-standing African American visual arts organization; and is currently a member of the Board of Directors of American Documentary, Inc.







