Imagining Alternative Worlds through Activism

Imagining Alternative Worlds through Activism

• Who: Nour Abou-Jaoude, Julia W Szagdaj, Anna Lathrop
• Date: Wednesday, 10 November 2021
• Time: 9:00 - 10:30 am EDT / 14:00 - 15:30 UTC
• Duration: 90 minutes
• Type: Workshop with interactive, creative elements
• Language: English
• Location: TBD

Please note, this workshop is capped at 15 people. You will be put on a waitlist if the session has reached capacity. Depending on the demand, we may consider hosting this session again in the future.

The future is brimming with beautiful and positive paths that may seem unattainable due to the strain of everyday activism or harms of human rights abuses. This workshop is designed to disrupt and expand our assumptions about where we are going and help us envision and make concrete real futures filled with joy and hope, and inspiration.

Using music, poetry and speculative language, transdisciplinary designers—Nour Abou-Jaoude, Julia W. Szagdaj, and Anna Lathrop—will guide participants to create what James Auger calls “a perpetual bridge”: the space between the world as we want it to be and the world as it is now. This newly created alternative “world” acts as a space for hope and inspiration, sprouting new questions, strategies, tactics and relationships.

In order to travel into our futures, we must understand our pasts. As such, the designers will lead participants through their pasts into these alternative futures.

The methods used for the workshop have been co-designed in collaboration with the UNESCO Futures Literacy Community, Negligence Refugees from the Lebanese diaspora, and the Transdisciplinary MFA program at the Parsons School of Design.

Bio: Nour Abou-Jaoude is an experienced creative strategist, with a deep commitment to systems change and the futures of our societies. She led an integrated, 360-degree campaign to abolish Article 522 of the Lebanese Penal Code, which stated that a rapist was exonerated if they marry their victim. Nour holds an MFA in Transdisciplinary Design from the Parsons School of Design, The New School.

Julia W. Szagdaj is an experimentalist, transmedia artist, and researcher who believes imagination should start from the heart. She works as a learning scientist and systems transformation consultant at the United Nations Development Programme and is involved in fighting for women's rights in Poland. She holds an MFA in Transdisciplinary Design from Parsons School of Design, The New School.

Anna Lathrop is a futurist and transdisciplinary artist whose work lies at the intersection of alternative worlds-building and justice. She is a theatre director and producer, and co-founded Groundwater Arts, a citizen-artist collective working to re-envision arts and entertainment through a climate-justice lens. She is also a mentor in the Emerging Scholars program at Design and Culture Journal, and a teacher in the Strategic Design and Management (BBA) program at The New School.

Notes

Mural Board with self-guided activity: https://app.mural.co/t/newschool14/m/newschool14/1636558433806/55dbd9d43419ee985b43d3179989801d53256acc?sender=u3c10edaaa9bc9532bc6f8236

Self-guided activity for imagining / futuring

Poetry submitted by the group

Colorism hurts

Both you and me.

Beauty is personal respect.

Prisons are absurd.

Bodies separated.

Hearts locked up.

Souls isolated.

Justice locked away.

Far from witnesses

Where there are no witnesses

I heard them saying "you don't exist".

Tears are my fuel.

Tomorrow is another day

For hope.

dark hallways fill and flicker

the rivers burst their banks

freedom is a step away

Who was my ally who was my enemy

Trump's treatment towards immigrants

The way he talked about Sebastian

The US was bullying my best friend

What is hope? What are dreams if we cannot sleep.

they have no idea what it's like

to lose home at the risk of

never finding home again

Beauty is existing in our dreams

Poetry formed by the group’s submission

Beauty is

personal respect.

I heard them saying "you don't exist".

Tomorrow is another day

For hope.

What are dreams if we cannot sleep.

dark hallways fill and flicker

Theme: Being Seen

You exist in dreams, in tomorrow, in beauty, and in hope

the rivers burst their banks

freedom is a step away

Theme: Locked

Justice locked away.

I heard them saying "you don't exist".

freedom is a step away

The US was bullying my best friend