Certainty Kills Civic Imagination | Michael Rohd

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Bio:

Michael Rohd has spent thirty-five years asking the same question from increasingly systemic angles: what does it take for people who don't usually talk to each other to actually talk, and what happens when they do?

He started in 1991, running theater workshops on the secret fifth floor of a Washington DC homeless shelter — a hidden HIV clinic where people sought care anonymously because being seen there put them at risk. He didn't know yet that what he was building had a name. A decade later, he co-founded Sojourn Theatre in Portland, spent nine years at Northwestern University, then moved to ASU before joining the University of Montana in 2022 to found the Co-Lab for Civic Imagination. His book, *Theatre for Community, Conflict, and Dialogue*, has been widely translated and remains the field manual for applied civic theater practice in the US.

His current project — State of Mind, done in partnership with Montana Repertory Theater — is a touring theater and public dialogue residency on behavioral health that has now reached 37 Montana communities and more than 2,700 participants. Montana has ranked in the top five states for suicide for thirty consecutive years. The work is not incidental.

In this conversation: what kills civic imagination (certainty is first on the list), what a well-designed facilitation process makes possible that a badly designed one doesn't, why theater can't change people's deeply held beliefs but can be a gymnasium for practicing courage, what students in rural Montana keep telling adults about adult behavior, the moment a Great Falls school board meeting stopped because board members were moved to tears, and what you do with thirty years of witnessing.

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In this episode:

- The origin story: HIV workshops on a secret fifth floor in 1991
- Dwight Conquergood and the ethics of working as an outsider in communities not your own
- Augusto Boal and the discovery that someone else was already doing adjacent work
- What kills civic imagination: certainty, lack of trust, no analysis of power, racism and exclusion
- Process design: what a well-designed facilitation makes possible
- What theater can't do — and why Rohd is careful not to overclaim
- State of Mind: 37 communities, care commitments, and what young people keep saying about adults
- The Great Falls moment: a school board meeting halted by student testimony
- The most surprising finding: students surfacing adult drinking, drug use, and modeling as the obstacle to their own wellbeing
- What you do with thirty years of bearing witness

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Links:

- Michael Rohd's article on the Malta 2.0 residency (with photographs): https://michaelrohd.substack.com/p/state-of-mind-20-malta-montana
- Co-Lab for Civic Imagination at University of Montana: https://www.umcivicimagination.com/
- State of Mind project: https://www.headwatersmt.org/stateofmind-mentalhealth/
- *Theatre for Community, Conflict, and Dialogue* by Michael Rohd: https://www.heinemann.com/products/e00002.aspx
- Augusto Boal, *Games for Actors and Non-Actors*:

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The Principal Uncertainty is a podcast by George Laufenberg. It's not about finding solid ground — it's about staying oriented in open water.