OUTER WORK
What kind of society do we want to create? Where do we stand now & how do we move forward?
Given an increasing polarization in societies & the world, there is an urgent need for holistically making sense of WHAT is happening, WHY it is happening & HOW we can move forward. Despite the need, discussions remain polarized, more focused on defending one's own position rather than seeing & understanding the whole, with a critical distance, and generating the shared vision forward.
SOCIAL IMAGINARY fills the gap by creating the SPACE for CRITICAL ANALYSIS & SOCIAL VISIONING that clarifies shared ideals & generates shared vision forward. It serves as the space for:
-
HOLISTIC: Holistically making sense of HOW the intersection between economic, social, cultural & psychological forces is colliding to produce the phenomenon that is being expressed now & HOW it can be addressed in order to create the vision of a society that we believe in;
-
CLARIFYING: 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 these ideals can be debated & discussed;
-
UNIFYING: Having 'difficult conversations' that nonetheless need to be discussed & clarified in order to bring different sectors onto the same page & move forward.
Current workshop offerings are as follows, which empower participants with critical thinking, interdisciplinary thinking & design thinking skills in direct engagement with urgent issues of our time:
-
BEYOND MULTICULTURALISM [8-week online workshop]: 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 & HOW we can become active agents of social transformation in the way we choose to create our everyday lives. [MORE>]
-
ROOTS OF POPULISM [8-week online workshop]: 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 fueling the phenomenon of populism that is being expressed now & how it can be addressed at the root. [MORE>]
-
CRISIS OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY [8-week online workshop]: When we say 'democracy' in the West, we mean liberal democracy. But liberal democratic values — such as freedom, equality, the rule of law — have increasingly 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 [including its dysfunctions, contradictions & shortcomings & HOW we can restore liberal democratic values as the source of unity rather than division. [MORE>]
Rather than reliance on top-down policies, SOCIAL IMAGINARY asks how the society could shift through the renewal of social consciousness, through the shift in social imaginary, putting power back in the hands of the people in creating the vision of a society that they believe in.