Choreodaemonics by Laurel Lawson & Sydney Skybetter

Choreodaemonics seeks to explore the creative opportunities and political risks of creative production through emerging technologies of AI, robotics and virtual presence.

Most urgently, “Choreodaemonics” examines the ideological, technological and aesthetic collisions wherever humans meet with emerging computational systems.

The phrase “choreodaemonics” is a contraction of “choreography” (the art of bodily movement through space and time creating meaning) and “daemon” (a background computational process).

Students will consider the histories and processes of creative production and technological development, and ultimately investigate the performative consequences of embodiment by computational agents through robots, avatars, games, software, customer service platforms and social media.

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We warmly invite you to this special event, where Kimberly Skye Richards will be sharing about The Department of Utopian Arts and Letters.

Speculative Futures: new ways of thinking about energy, culture and climate change

Date & Time: Feb 12, 2025 02:00 PM

Join for a fascinating conversation with Dr. Kimberly Skye Richards and Dr. Sourayan Mookerjea on how speculative futures can help build just, sustainable, and healthy futures for the whole planet, and how we can start practicing it today.

Speculative futures is an envisioning process and design approach that brings together arts, social sciences, and humanities’ perspectives to address complex societal issues by inviting people to visualize new and potential futures. Increasingly, speculative futures is used to create solutions for the climate and biodiversity crises as well as the entangled injustices and inequities faced by communities.

Register here!

Speakers

Dr. Kimberly Skye Richards PhD.

Dr. Sourayan Mookerjea PhD

Moderator

Dr. Jackie Seidel

We look forward to seeing you there!

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: 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.