Invitation to concluding POP-Imagine event, June 15th at The National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen.
Sign up for the event here!
Henry Jenkins presents: "Civic Imagination, Creativity, and Connected Learning: What It Means to Bring Popular Culture Into the Museum Space."
Stone Mountain is the largest Confederate memorial in the world, larger than Mount Rushmore and created by the same artist, the center of heated debate across the American south and in many ways, a monument to lost cause ideology. I grew up less than five miles from it and went there regularly as a boy on field trips. Over the past few years, I have consulted in the redesign of the visitors center at the base of the mountain, which is being used to provide historical context for a troubling artwork which can not be torn down. The museum uses such popular and troubling texts as Birth of a Nation, Gone With the Wind, and Song of the South to question th stereotypes we hold about the region and the ideological work those tropes perform in an America still heavily divided by culture wars. The goal of the exhibition is to encourage visitors to question their assumptions about the American south and in the process, imagine what alternative visions for its future might look like. The museum ends with a space dedicated to fostering the civic imagination, where we hope that docents will encourage visitors to engage with the question of what we might put on “the other side of the mountain” to embody what the region means to the world today. Across the country, in San Diego, home of the San Diego Comic-Con, a new museum has emerged to be the homeland for fandom, comics, science fiction, and all things geeky. Young visitors go there to discover their own passions and expertise, learning to connect their interests to their education, in ways that empower them to do well in school and beyond. Here, again, it is through deploying works of popular and participatory culture within a museum setting that these students find themselves validated by institutions that have so often dismissed the things they care about. By using these two museums as my primary example, I will offer some insights into why it matters when we incorporate the popular arts into museums and other public institutions.
Henry Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts, Education, and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. He is the editor or author of more than twenty five books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television and Participatory Culture, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism, Comics and Stuff, and Where the Wild Things Were: American Boyhood and Permissive Parenting in Postwar America. He is currently co-authoring a series of 15 books, Frames of Fandom, with Robert Kozinets and co-editing The Global Handbook of the Civic Imagination with Sangita Shresthova and Kedi Zhou.
Upcoming activities:
- June 15th: Concluding POP-Imagine event, The National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark. Henry Jenkins presenting "Civic Imagination, Creativity, and Connected Learning: What It Means to Bring Popular Culture Into the Museum Space". The project team presenting insights from the POP-Imagine project.
- June 25th-26th: Textures of Digital Entertainment Conference, Odense, Denmark. Ea Christina Valentin Willumsen presenting "What We 'Know' from Netflix: Popular Culture as a Formative Force in Cultural History Imaginaries".
Publications
- Willumsen, Ea Christina Valentin. 2025. "Crafted by Your Imagination: Exploring Imaginaries in the Museum Through a Creative Collage Method." The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum 18 (2): 175-200. doi:10.18848/1835-2014/CGP/v18io2/175-200.
Activities 2025
- July 4th: EUPOP 2025, Paris, France. Ea Christina Valentin Willumsen presenting "More Than Just a ‘Skin’? Popular Culture’s Influence On Cultural Heritage Imaginaries".
Activities 2024
- November 20th: Sonic Days. Sound in Museums. Sonic College, Kolding, Denmark. Christian Hviid Mortensen is co-presenting with Vitus Vestergaard "Wings of Imagination: The Affordances of Sound in Museum Exhibitions".
- September 13-15th: Seventeenth International Conference on the Inclusive Museum. MuseumsQuartier, Vienna, Austria.
Ea Christina Valentin Willumsen is presenting "Crafted by Your Imagination: Exploring Imaginaries in the Museum through a Creative Collage Method".
- June 28-29th: London Conference on Critical Thought. University of Greenwich, London, UK.
Christian Hviid Mortensen is presenting "The sensemaking tactics for bridging the temporal gaps of "permanent" exhibitions at cultural history museums".
- June 25-26th: Characters; Rights and Roles. Seminar at Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden.
Susana Tosca is presenting ”Fictional Characters and the Cultural Commons in Museum Communication”.
- June 21st: Advisory Board Meeting.