Mathews J. Wakhungu and E. Christian Wells
Applied anthropology is grounded in engagement through collaboration. As the mantra states, “teamwork makes the dream work.” But sometimes this is easier said than done. Challenges to doing collaborative research include the complexity of stakeholder relationships, conflicts that arise through engagement, contrasts between academic schedules and community residents’ time, , the need for culturally sensitive communication, and problems related to experimentation and creativity in research. Where to begin?
Scientific research begins with a research problem. However, in our experience with community-based research, starting with a problem can make it difficult to collaborate with communities and other stakeholders. Sometimes it’s because of stigma. For co-author Wells, identifying land as polluted (e.g., urban brownfields) often creates immediate resistance to collaboration. After all, no one wants to be told their community is contaminated. And sometimes it’s because of distrust. For co-author Wakhungu, addressing failing public infrastructure (water and wastewater) is often shaped by institutional distrust (e.g., government, utilities).
In wrestling with this dilemma for many years, we have recently begun asking what if the mantra “teamwork makes the dream work” is better off in the reverse? That is, what if dreamwork makes the team work?
By dreamwork, we mean how people think about and plan for their future. This sounds a lot like scenario planning or what some call “futuring.” But with dreamwork, participants are observing our past and present through a lens of what is possible for the future (good or bad) and actively preparing for it by, for example, creating strategic action plans or community benefit agreements with outside (government, industry) organizations.
We have found that starting with dreamwork — instead of problems — can lead to strong, authentic, equitable collaborations over the long term. For example, co-author Wells has used a dreamwork process called Transformative Scenario Planning that convened various groups to co-construct future scenarios of health equity for a residentially segregated community in the Florida panhandle suffering from drinking water pollution from a local paper mill. In another example, co-author Wakhungu has used dreamworking processes across projects on urban public space, mobility, and climate to convene residents, youth, planners, artists, researchers, and local organizations around questions of just futures in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.
Workshop participants used transformative scenario planning to co-design alternative futures in light of current contexts to develop a strategic action plan for health equity.
Participant-generated “headlines from the future” articulate possible trajectories of urban social, ecological, and governance change.
From these experiences, the problem-to-dreamwork shift has become an epistemic reconfiguration in how we practice applied anthropology. Below we offer some suggestions for rethinking praxis when a futures lens enters community-based practice:
- Co-articulating — Dreamwork shifts collaboration from problem solving to co-articulation of futures, helping each other create spaces and infrastructures for voicing, listening, and negotiating what the future could hold under different pathways. In doing so, it reframes problems into possibilities and shifts attention away from causality, blame, and deficit toward understanding the present as emergent rather than fixed. By beginning with aspirations, trajectories, and possibilities, dreamwork enables participation where problem-centered approaches produce fatigue, defensiveness, or disengagement.
- Convening — Community partners are often far more interested, willing, and excited to talk about what they want for their community rather than concentrating on what is wrong. When dreamwork is embodied in this way, it brings different ways of seeing into relation with one another without requiring consensus. Residents, technical experts, local officials, activists, and researchers may hold conflicting interpretations of the present while still orienting toward overlapping aspirations for the future relative to their sense of self and identity. Dreamwork therefore enables convergence without agreement. It creates enough alignment for shared movement while leaving differences intact.
- Redistributing — Conventional research often privileges formal expertise and technical evidence. Dreamwork creates space where situated knowledge, lived experiences, technical analysis, and speculative imagination can coexist without collapsing into hierarchy. Questions of futurity become accessible not only to planners, scientists, or consultants, but also to those whose futures are most immediately at stake. In this sense, dreamwork is also a struggle over legitimacy: who is authorized to imagine, define, and speak the future into public discourse. It matters who gets to imagine the future.
- Stretching — Dreamwork stretches what counts as evidence. Empirical data remain important, but they sit alongside patterns of emergence, anecdote, intuition, memory, fear, risk, aspiration, and imagination as legitimate registers of knowing. Under conditions of uncertainty and rapid transformation, futures cannot be assembled solely from retrospective data. Communities often sense shifts long before institutions formally recognize them. Dreamwork expands evidentiary sensibilities toward these emergent forms of perception.
- Temporalizing — Much applied research is organized retrospectively: What happened? What caused the issue? What intervention “fixes” it? Dreamwork introduces prospective orientation into the analytic frame. It asks what is becoming plausible, directional, or foreclosed. Retrospective validation and prospective sensing begin to coexist. Communities are not only interpreting the past; they are collectively reading trajectories of change.
- Enacting — Dreamwork does not end with imagination; it moves from visions toward collective action. Once futures are articulated, participants begin walking backward from those futures to ask what actions, relationships, resources, institutions, and collaborations are required to move toward the articulated future. They ask: what does the future need from us? In this sense, dreamwork becomes enactment, enabling stakeholders to identify critical pathways, barriers, trade-offs, strategic actions, and the conditions necessary for desired futures to emerge.
- Learning — In our recent work, futures processes have increasingly become forms of participatory monitoring, evaluation, and learning, which shifts from external assessment toward anticipatory learning. Visioning sessions become spaces where participants collectively build futures while also learning to read signals, trajectories, and changing conditions as they unfold. Evaluation becomes less extractive and more anticipatory, less about measuring fixed outcomes than about sensing movement and recalibrating together.
The goal of dreamwork is not to replace problem-informed research, but to create the relational and epistemic conditions through which collaboration, co-inquiry, and collective action become possible.
Nurturing collective imagination moves us to actionable pathways. The applied anthropologist becomes less a detached producer of knowledge and more a curator of encounters offering a safe and productive space for voicing and listening to different subject positions.. If applied anthropology has long organized itself around problems, then dreamwork asks what becomes possible when we instead organize around futures.
Contributors:
Mathews J. Wakhungu
Mathews J. Wakhungu, Ph.D., is research principal at Kounkuey Design Initiative and courtesy faculty at the University of South Florida. He is a cultural and design anthropologist working at the intersection of ethnographic research, design thinking, and social innovation. He brings over a decade of experience integrating ethnographic ways of knowing into collaborative, interdisciplinary work on social innovation, urban design, community resilience, urban design, environmental justice, and sustainability. He is the 2023 recipient of the Wesley W. Horner Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Christian Wells
Christian Wells, Ph.D., is professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Brownfields Research and Redevelopment at the University of South Florida, where he served previously as founding director of the Office of Sustainability. His research aims to improve environmental and public health outcomes of re/development efforts in underserved communities. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the 2025 recipient of the Comitas Award for Public Knowledge and Engagement from the Society for Applied Anthropology.
