Radically Reimagining events are like communal TED Talks, where diverse groups of experts co-create new visions for a subject.
These two-hour gatherings bring together diverse, eclectic thinkers on a specific subject, like homelessness or wildfire. Radically Reimagining events use food, art, music, speeches, and virtual reality experiences to break through silos and gridlock on polarized issues.
The Radically Reimagining concept was developed by Karen Bradshaw who used fellowship funds from the Desert Institute of the Humanities at ASU to fund the first Radically Reimagining event. Bradshaw collaborated with Lauren Strohacker, Ron Broglio, and Flora Tromelin and many others to create an event that was itself art — a gathering where participants would collectively re-envision the human relationship with nature.
Seeking to displace anthropentricsm also meant de-centering old hierarchies. Standard scripts of highlighting important dignitaries were thrown out for the sake of time. Everyone from the cater to valet company, venter planner to speakers in some way reflected the ecological ethos of the event.
Participants from the first year shared how the event inspired them and asked to invite new awardees and attendees, organically creating a second gathering a year later. Experts in other fields appreciated the model and asked to extend it to new subject areas.
How Radically Reimagining is creating real-world change [in law].
Radically reimagining facilitates collective envisions of a new and better future. Through radical lawyering, attorney thought-leaders can then to lay a legal pathway between where we are and this new vision using the tools of our profession.
From “Law Through the Eyes of Animals”:
As we see it, there are three steps to co-creating new solutions:
Step 1: Assessing the status quo and problems incumbent in it,
Step 2: Envisioning a new and better future, and
Step 3: Leveraging the tools of our profession to build legal pathways between where we are and where we want to go.
Notably, we discussed these techniques as part of a broader set of conversations about content-neutral activist lawyering. There are countless examples of legal reforms that happened as a result of an intentional, strategic series of actions designed to bridge the status quo and the desired future.
Radical lawyering or relies upon using legal tools to achieve objectives outside the present norms. Activist lawyers act within the existing legal structures to achieve large-scale social change—they represent a cause, not a single client. Radical and activist lawyering is content-neutral: it can occur at any point in the political spectrum. By exploring such activist lawyering, we were able to understand how the tools of our chosen profession can be wielded to obtain legal (and, perhaps, by extension, social) reform.
[1] “Radically reimagining the human relationship with nature” is drawn from an initiative led by Karen Bradshaw, which includes an interdisciplinary community arts event in Spring 2022 sponsored by the Desert Institute for Humanities and a series of academic works. See Karen Bradshaw, Identifying Contemporary Rights of Nature in the United States, supra note 7.