Visionary Ecologies: Oracles for Past, Present, and Future More-than-Human Entanglements in the Urban Environment
Summer-Break Workshop
06.09.2023 – 08.09.2023
Date: 6–8 September, 10:00–17:00
Visionary Ecologies proposes practices of speculating possible visions and strategies that intentionally work toward liberation and alternative futures of environmental justice. The workshop is inspired by “visionary fictions,” a term coined by Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha to distinguish science fiction that has relevance toward building new, freer worlds from the mainstream strain of science fiction, which most often reinforces dominant narratives of power.
This workshop revolves around the oracle, an artifact that allows us to travel through temporalities and parallel dimensions to imagine a place and its ecology in different times and scales. The oracle user can access the “pluriverse,” which is a world where many worlds fit, as Zapatistas of Chiapas put it. In the book Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary (Tulika Books, 2019), Kothari et al. envision a “pluriversal” world that overcomes patriarchal attitudes, racism, casteism, and other forms of discrimination. The oracle invites its user to join a deep process of intellectual, emotional, ethical, and spiritual decolonization.
“Visionary fiction encompasses all of the fantastic, with the arc always bending toward justice. We believe this space is vital for any process of decolonization, because the decolonization of the imagination is the most dangerous and subversive form there is: for it is where all other forms of decolonization are born. Once the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements
To register for the workshop, please fill out the registration form.
See the full workshop program below.
Downloads
- Visionary Ecologies Workshop Program (284 KByte)