In a multidisciplinary course, anthropology, sociology and design students were asked to team up to create a project; everything from topic to medium was left open. Salma Mostafa and I teamed up to create a choose your own adventure novel that explored themes of hope, agency, accessibility and biomedical citizenship.
A narrative experience that poses the question of citizenship against the urgent and symbolic backdrop of biopolitics; explored through a science-fiction adventure novel in the style of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” gamebook. The protagonist-reader is where it geographically positioned in Ghaliba, a city of the future, where an accidental discovery plunges them into a new world of choices they must navigate to “do the right thing”.
Our questions primarily orbit the use of form to inspire specific kinds of engagement; we view the gamebook style as integral to the development of our arguments, and through which we, as creators, continue to make different narrative and intellectual choices. How can we situate the reader in a context that is both separate from and referential to reality? How can the limits of our agency as citizens be visually and textually represented? How can “choice” be both emphasized and devalued through the narrative process?
The choices made by the protagonist-reader throughout the novel point to the different ways by which citizenship is - or is not - a navigable institution that is ultimately fictional as a process of identity formation and personal belonging. The novel maps out the protagonist-reader’s journey, visually and narratively connecting their choices to fate, while reminding us that there are certain “scripted” endings mapped out for citizens.
Novels of this form often lead to a minimum of three endings. However, we have chosen to lead the paths to one common ending. The lack of multiple endings is meant to push the reader into questioning their agency in relation to the state, while also honoring the importance of one’s choices in shaping their life-experiences. We are often reminded that our choices are all we have. When we know how our story ends, the journey becomes all the more worthwhile.
Mapping Citizenship / Spring 2019
