What kind of society do we want to create?  Where do we stand now & how do we move forward?

 

As we stand at the junction of retrogressing to the homogenous & hierarchical past rather than progressing towards inclusive, egalitarian & plural ideals, there is an urgent need for holistically making sense of what is happening & what ought to be happening. Despite the need, discussions remain splintered, more focused on critique of the problem rather than generating solutions on HOW we can move forward.

 

SOCIAL IMAGINARY fills the gap by creating the SPACE for CRITICAL ANALYSIS & SOCIAL VISIONING that engages the public & youth in critical analysis of WHERE WE STAND NOW & social visioning of HOW WE CAN MOVE FORWARD.  It creates the PUBLIC SPACE for CRITICAL ANALYSIS & SOCIAL VISIONING via its public discussion series.  It also creates the EDUCATIONAL SPACE for CRITICAL ANALYSIS & SOCIAL VISIONING by pioneering social design education that empowers participants with critical thinking & design thinking skills in direct engagement with urgent issues of our time. 

It serves the space for holistically making sense of how the intersection between economic, social, cultural & psychological forces is colliding to fuel the phenomenon that is being expressed now & HOW it can be addressed at the root in order to create the vision of a society that we believe in.  It also serves as the space for clarifying that the values of equality, inclusion, justice & fairness are neither Left nor Right ideal but UNIVERSAL ideal — the source of unity — under which different ways of achieving this ideal can be debated & discussed.  Rather than reliance on top-down policies, it asks HOW the society could shift through the renewal of social consciousness, through the shift in social imaginary, putting the power back into the hands of the people in the way we choose to create our everyday lives.  Current workshop offerings are as follows:

 

• BEYOND MULTICULTURALISM [6 Weeks, Online]: How do we create an inclusive & egalitarian society in which diversity is not merely tolerated or managed but fully harnessed as a thriving lived experience for enrichment of everyone involved & benefit of the society as a whole? BEYOND MULTICULTURALISM empowers participants with SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS to be able to SEE, with a critical distance, WHY where we stand now is still a problem & HOW we can move beyond where we stand now towards creating a truly multicultural society.

• ROOTS OF POPULISM [6 Weeks, Online]: Despite the eruption of populism across the globe that is throwing liberal democratic values into a disarray, there is little public understanding of what populism is, what's fueling it & what can be done about it. ROOTS OF POPULISM takes participants through the process of holistically & systematically making sense of how the intersection between economic, social, cultural & psychological forces is colliding to fuel the phenomenon of populism & how it can be addressed at the root.

• CRISIS OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY [6 Weeks, Online]: When we say 'democracy', we mean liberal democracy.  But increasingly, liberal democratic values — such as freedom, equality & rule of law — have come under attack, not only in societies that adopted liberal democracies from the West but within Western liberal democracies themselves. CRISIS OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY explores WHAT we mean by 'liberal' in liberal democracy, WHY it has come under attack — its dis-functions, shortfalls & contradictions — & HOW we can restore liberal democratic values as the source of unity rather than division.