Category Archives: Harry Potter

The Harry Potter Alliance

This, according to the famous Henry Jenkins, media scholar at MIT, could be the way the next wave of activists gets nurtured.  Jenkins calls this “Avatar Activism.”

About 100,000 Harry Potter fans have been mobilized by HPA for causes including marriage equality, genocide prevention and literacy. They raised enough money to send five cargo planes to Haiti bearing medical supplies after the earthquake there, and they’ve bought thousands of books for libraries in Rwanda and the Mississippi Delta.

Harry Potter: Boy Wizard … And Real Life Activist? addresses what may be an evolving phenomenon around activism.   Reading this, I am reminded of Plato’s Republic and how he warned that the poet is a threat to the State. I’m wondering whether this new form of narrating could be a place for storytelling for a new generation?