COLLECTIVE WISDOM BOOK

Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media for Equity and Justice, an MIT Press trade book released Nov. 1, 2022.

By Katerina Cizek and William Uricchio, with co-authors 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.

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, from collaborative journalism to human-AI partnerships to radical, sustained practices of co-creating media within communities and with social movements. The authors explore the urgent need for co-creation across disciplines and organizations, and the latest methods for collaborating with nonhuman systems in biology and technology. Their account demonstrates that co-creation becomes wisdom only when it is grounded in equity and justice.

“Collective Wisdom provides us with a utopian possibility. Through rich references and real-life stories, the coauthors show how our futures are connected and how, if we ignore this, we will face disasters even harder to grasp and control.” – Ai Weiwei

A trailer for the Collective Wisdom field study and book. (48 s)