The Citizen Recommends: Imagining Possible Futures
The Citizen Recommends: Imagining Possible Futures
The Pamela & Ajay Raju Foundation and the Art Museum will award $x,000 to one high schooler for an essay about the futurity
Mar. 04, 2019
If you want to know about our future, ask a immature person. They, later all, are the ones who take to live in it; nosotros are only borrowing their globe. Chances are, the answers you get will be as varied as there are possibilities: Technological, scientific, environmental advances—and challenges. Innovations that make our world smaller—for better and worse. Economic and political realities that bring us closer together—or push u.s.a. further autonomously.
"Teenagers are much more open to multiple possibilities than adults are," notes Adam Rizzo, museum educator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. "They're able to imagine the time to come in more divergent ways than whatever adult tin can."
This is the idea behind this yr'south Pamela & Ajay Raju Foundation essay competition, for high schoolers around the region, in partnership with the Art Museum. The contest plays off the themes of the museum'south fall exhibition, Designs for Different Futures, a multi-media event that will combine fine art, technology, costume, and other sources—including cricket farms!—to convey what we might feel in the future.
With the essay, students are being asked to consider: What are the benefits, limits, and fifty-fifty dangers of new technologies that you imagine could impact our hereafter in both positive and negative means?
It is, Ajay Raju says, intended to exist a jumping off signal to encourage young people to recollect about their earth—and their place in it.
"Information technology doesn't matter who wins to me: It'south the thought that around 400 kids took the time to pause and reflect on what they want a future to look like," Raju says. "I bet you lot, if we sift through all the essays, nosotros volition find nuggets of ideas that only the high school students who have future in heed more than we do could come up up with. That is victory."
With the essay, students are being asked to consider: What are the benefits, limits, and fifty-fifty dangers of new technologies that yous imagine could impact our future in both positive and negative ways?
This is the third year of the Raju Foundation essay contest, an almanac effect that gives united states a glimpse into the bright minds of loftier schoolers. The first twelvemonth, right after the presidential ballot, asked students to reverberate on J itish Kallat's Covering Letter , an fine art installation donated past the Foundation to the PMA that features a letter of the alphabet Mahatma Gandhi sent to Adolf Hitler in 1939. That year, 400 students used Gandhi's words as the basis for an exploration of how to seek common ground with our enemies. Erinda Shendo , at the time a student at The Arts Academy at Benjamin Rush, won for her piece titled "Practicing Radical Promise," which we ran in The Citizen.
Concluding year, the Foundation partnered with the Philadelphia Zoo to ask students to identify a water challenge facing our region, with a specific focus on amphibians, then to articulate a "realistic and innovative solution" that could be implemented. Hadley Brawl, a senior at Penn Lease, won for an essay most reducing pesticide use in the quest for a perfect lawn, which also ran in The Citizen.
In both the previous years, the winners received a $ten,000 scholarship from the Raju Foundation; Hadley also received another $5,000 to help implement her idea with the Zoo. This yr, the prize is a $five,000 scholarship and another $5,000 to work with curators at the PMA to purchase a slice of art for its collection—to exist displayed during the new exhibit—that volition e'er have the winning pupil'southward name on it.
Rizzo, who is the PMA's schools liaisons officeholder, is spreading word of the contest throughout the school district, hoping to depict in as diverse and widespread a group of entries as possible both to solicit essay ideas—and to draw them in to the work of the museum. It is also the perfect melding of Raju'due south passions: He sits on the PMA's board, and runs the Germination Projection, a borough leadership program for accomplished high schoolers in the region. (Raju is as well co-founder of The Denizen.)
"I believe that the museum—fifty-fifty though in some ways, the metropolis looks at it similar a crypt—has become the platform where gimmicky and futuristic thoughts are being mulled most," he says.
More than that, Raju says he plans to concord the essay contest every year, because it serves a larger purpose: "It gets people thinking almost our city, and their own versions of its possible hereafter," he says. "It makes them better citizens."
Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/the-citizen-recommends-imagining-possible-futures/
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