Co-Creating Media for Equity and Justice, MIT Press 2022

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.

"The myth of the single author is beautifully exposed with the bright light of co-creation, which gives us our power as collective storytellers and makers fueled by care, responsibility and humility."

Sarah Polley, Academy Award nominee for Best Adapted Screenplay

“My first thought as an educator, I need all my students to read this!”

Ruha Benjamin, author of Race After Technology and Viral 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, author of 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows

“Collective Wisdom is a seminal work that surfaces critical ideas for how to be better designers of our future.”

Kamal Sinclair, co-author of Making a New Reality and member of the Interactive Board, Peabody Awards

“This book is a much needed tool to build a more conscious and interdependent society.”

Hank Willis Thomas

Collective Wisdom was chosen by IDFA as it’s 2022 Book of the year
FAD magazine said it was a top art book to read in 2023