Immigration & Mobility developed by Taiwo Afolabi with the support of Olusola John.
Immigration & Mobility focuses on roots and routes, and the realities of immigration, including the processes we have to go through to arrive at a place.
The course considers what it means to leave, what pieces go with us, and what it means to leave a piece of us behind.
The course explores Indigenous land-based wisdom especially in reference to the body and Indigenous rights.
You will consider, how have the stories I have been told about the land influenced me? What kind of stories do I need less/more of?
Upon deepening our connection with the land, we will develop a passion for caring for and protecting the land. This connection becomes our reason why we do this work, it comes from a place of love and care.
Introducing Geon Nativa: Cookery and Intergenerational Codes of Memory by Aisha Lesley Bentham
According to Geon Nativa, Conjuring is about the process of alignment between you, the earth and the spirit. We explore Conjuring through practice, method and review.
Conjure also demonstrates, in small & large ways, how life and the world around you is always conspiring for your highest purpose.
Introducing: Critical Cat Studies by Nazli Akhtari
Critical Cat Studies offers guidance on how to learn with cats in ways that blur Euro-American centric ways of knowing and help us attune to more joyful, sustainable, and equitable ways of living and making worlds.
Who better than unruly cats can complicate for us the artificial borders we constantly construct?
Throughout history witches, women, lesbians, queers, Marxists, and modernity’s outcasts have made kin with cats. What if we consider the lineage of feline kinship as a praxis of disorderly living against the violence of capitalism that thrives on racism, sexism, queer and transphobia and environmental destruction?
Access the free course by joining the Department community.
For more information, contact Kimberly Skye Richards, librarian for the Department of Utopian Arts and Letters, at kim@sustainablepractice.org
Spread out the word! Share with your team & network.
Introducing: At Least This Will Make a Funny Show by Kristina Wong
At Least This Will Make a Funny Show guides you through attempting to make dramatic social change in the world without giving into existing systems of charity, failing, and then making an original (maybe award winning) solo performance piece about how you tried.
This course is not to diminish the seriousness of the problems that overwhelm our world, but recognizes that the ability to persevere in this fight will require creativity and a lot of coping strategies, which include humor.
Includes a bonus module on how to deal with being cancelled, trolled, or blacklisted because your best attempt at making social change will always piss off someone.
How are you attempting to make social change?
Ready to start?
Join the Department community & enroll for free!
For more information, contact Kimberly Skye Richards, librarian for the Department of Utopian Arts and Letters, at kim@sustainablepractice.org
Spread out the word! Share with your team & network.
Introducing: Unsustainable Utopias by Meghan Moe Beitiks
Unsustainable Utopias is an exploration of the false promise of utopias and the human tendency to seek them out, build them up, and destroy them.
We will review failed utopias across time and cultures and examine the events that led to their various transitions into cults, militias, closed communities, tragedies or just discontinued projects.
This course is an exercise in learning from humanity’s most ambitious (and terrifying) mistakes– while remembering that we ourselves are human.
The course is a discussion of alternatives to utopias, based on research in community development and organizing, as well as the structures of inequity that inevitably inform even the most ambitious projects.
Together we will make a broken utopia based on the world’s worst mistakes and consider antidotes for the worst social poisons.
What utopias have you imagined?
Ready to start?
Join the Department community & enroll for free!
For more information, contact Kimberly Skye Richards, librarian for the Department of Utopian Arts and Letters, at kim@sustainablepractice.org
Spread out the word! Share with your team & network.
Introducing Crip Glam: Spells for Everyday Disability Activism by Julia Havard
Crip Glam highlights the aesthetic interventions that queer and trans disabled people use to undo ableism, cissexism and heterosexism, and casts spells for crip femme futures, a distinctly femme and disabled approach to aesthetics and activism.
Beyond survival, what are the practices and tools that are used by those who are multiply-marginalized to craft pleasure, to elicit joy, to invoke humor, and to gross people out?
This course supports learning about radical practices of disability arts and culture and practices of disability activism to underscore how the liberation of multiply-marginalized disabled people is integral to collective liberation.
Is this not a future worth creating?
Ready to start?
Join the Department community & enroll for free!
For more information, contact Kimberly Skye Richards, librarian for the Department of Utopian Arts and Letters, at kim@sustainablepractice.org
Spread out the word! Share with your team & network.
Introducing: Peasant futurisms by Sanita Fejzić
Peasant futurisms is a call to transform capitalist cities into edible and wilder ecocities, with protected greenbelts and foodbelts, rooted in circular economies with the goal of growing more liveable and delicious futures for all.
This course invites learning from peasant knowledges and practices of cooperative labour, mutual aid, subsistence farming, and self-sustainability to posit peasant futurisms as a joyful way of living locally and relationally that rejects forced ruptures from land and resist the compulsory digitization of life.
Is this not a future worth cultivating?
Ready to start?
Join the Department community & enroll for free!
For more information, contact Kimberly Skye Richards, librarian for the Department of Utopian Arts and Letters, at kim@sustainablepractice.org
Spread out the word! Share with your team & network.
The CSPA Department of Utopian Arts and Letters (DUAL) is a project of the Centre for Sustainable Arts. It is a project of public dreaming born out of desires for decolonization, climate justice, and collective liberation. It envisions Plural Utopias Of the Future (PUOF), each imagined through the radical thinking of diverse artists. DUAL operates within, across, and beyond official governmental and academic departments to empower us with visions of the future to work towards and the necessary “curricula” to dismantle the systems that stand in our way. It offers a free, public education for thriving futures designed by community expert artist “faculty” and organized by counterpart “librarians.”
This Project Assistant will provide administrative and organizational services and support to the Department of Utopian Arts and Letters (DUAL) Project and editorial support for CSPA Publications including DUAL, the CSPA Quarterly and CSPA Reports. In this role, you will work independently utilizing business knowledge, experience, copy, and administrative expertise to deliver value and support the contributions of the DUAL Project and CSPA leadership Team(s). This role is privy to senior leadership matters, communications, correspondence, documents, and decision items and is required to exercise a high level of confidentiality, discretion, diplomacy, and sound judgment.
Project Assistant Job Responsibilities:
Qualifications for Project Assistant