Many political organisers have found speculative fiction useful to help them imagine, and work towards, alternatives. Visionary fiction is defined by Walidah Imarisha as:
‘Encompass[ing] the fantastical cross-genre creations that help us bring about those new worlds. This term reminds us to be utterly unrealistic in our organizing, because it is only through imagining the so-called impossible that we can begin to concretely build it. When we free our imaginations, we question everything’ (Imarisha, 2015).
The resources here are from a session at the CHASE Encounters Conference where we came together to reimagine cultural houses, university and society as a start to reimagining the world. Now, the conversation continues as we look forward to meeting, planning and putting out world-building plans into action in the everyday.
Our key output was to collectively author a utopian manifesto, work that is ongoing here. This will eventually include practical steps for more participatory communal spaces for culture, decolonising the university, reimagining and reclaiming academic freedom and possible direct action intervening into structures of oppression. We are constituting a model for subsequent working groups, that could discuss these topics further and take practical steps towards these imagined futures.
Add to the Collective Visual Manifesto for Action and notes that we made during our session
Add to the Jamboard on Reimaging the Cultural House and Reimagining Academia – add your own cultural house or room
Add to the Padlet on Reimagining Society and help us build our fictive future
Look at the slides that inspired our discussions:
If you would like to be involved please email: reimagine.the.world@magneticideals.org
Watch this space for future meetings and collaborations.
About the facilitators:
Irina Bucan’s research is on the state-funded model of ‘cultural houses’ in Eastern Europe, focusing on public homes that provide intimate, ‘homely’ feelings and an environment for negotiating what culture can be.
Kate Meakin is working on speculative world-building in both fiction and social movement organising, and the ways in which political change can be impacted and inflected by particular speculative fiction in order to speculate on possible futures.
Heather McKnight’s research focuses on reimagining the university through resistance, and the shared ideas of freedom, alternative pedagogies and inclusiveness emergent through spaces of protest and debate.