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

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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

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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

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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.