Confronting Emergent Dystopia
Working group description
Dystopia is the continuation of violent relationships of the past into the present, while doubling down on them in the future. Settler colonialism, racial capitalism, gender-based violence, ableism, and queerphobia have physically transformed our planet and the unique ecological relations that moderate the climate and geo-biophysical systems. In Canada, these violent social relations translate into material impacts, including through multidimensional poverty, food and housing insecurity, lack of access to clean drinking water, physical and emotional illness, and a sense of anxiety and hopelessness (Raphael, 2009). Dystopia refers to development strategies or tales of progress and futurity that carry on legacies of dehumanization, instantly defuturing the lives of millions of people. Scholars have named these dystopian “death worlds” as moves to white settler innocence that cast typically BIPOC futures to one of apocalypse (Mitchell & Chaudhury, 2021). Dystopias also cast unprecedented climate events, dumping of wastes, incarceration and police violence, the control of femme bodies, starvation and genocidal regimes, declining mental and physical health, settler colonial occupation of Indigenous territory, and anti-Black racial capital as inherently normalized for the advancement of techno-utopian futures and which (forcibly) submit humanity to white, cis-heterosexual, and male-dominated imaginaries. We seek to not only demonstrate these dystopias, but also build interdisciplinary collaboration, intergenerational solidarities, and strategize alternative futurities amidst these very conditions.
Our working group, Confronting Emergent Dystopia brings together unique interdisciplinary discussions that seek to unsettle structures of dislocation, alienation, and separation to help better identify where (un)sustainable futures exist and for whom. Dialogue between STEM, the arts, and the social sciences has been meager despite the potential for interdisciplinarity in confronting these challenges. In studying and thinking through dystopic conditions, our working group also desires another future, and asks racialized, Indigenous, queer, trans, non-binary students, academics, and community members what else might be possible? How can we think, create, and sustain futures through intergenerational solidarity building?
Organizers
Casey Burkholder
Faculty of Arts, Department of Education
Vijay Kolinjivadi
Faculty of Arts, School of Community and Public Affairs
Bea Parsons
Faculty of Fine Arts, Painting and Drawing, Studio Arts
Angela Ponio, Coordinator
Email: a_ponio@live.concordia.ca
Key questions
Our working group asks three sets of related questions:
- Envisioning futures: When faced with emergent and delusional dystopic “solutions” that further reinforce the root cause of problems, what strategies do students, academics, and community members enact to envision alternative futures? What does it look like for intergenerational participants to imagine their place among so-called utopic “solutions” that do not respond to people’s freedom dreams amidst localized and national forms of environmental racism and injustice?
- Media production: How might engaging in media production with working group participants and screening these productions in communities work to counter dominant forms of apathy and denial, and support youth, adults, and elders to claim a stake in creating solidarities and community-making? and
- Network building: What is required for intergenerational working group participant-produced media about dystopia to create, support, or extend networks of solidarity and resistance in the face of unsustainable futures?
Group members
- Melissa Keehn (University of New Brunswick)
- Jayne Malenfant (McGill University)
- Celeste Orr (University of New Brunswick)
- Joshua Schwab-Cartas (NSCAD University)
- Jennifer Thompson (Université de Montréal)
- Other Concordia colleagues (To be announced)
Activities
We will host a series of 8 events (1 per month) throughout the academic year at the Sir George Williams campus. These events will be co-facilitated by Concordia faculty, graduate students, other academics, community members, and artists. The event descriptions below are subject to change.
Format:
Panel discussion and tiny collage workshop at the 4th Space Gallery.
Description:
Participants are invited to a panel discussion about the new frontiers of greenwashing dystopic futures - including by using environmentalism (e.g., large-scale tree-planting, solar farms, and carbon storage) as an excuse to justify obvious social and ecological degradation. With insights from India, Quebec, Mi’kmaki and beyond, participants will come to understand the tactics being employed in greenwashing and how to creatively combat it through counterbranding strategies.
Format:
A meet and greet and art-making event complemented by a facilitated conversation among community engaged academics and justice-oriented organizations.
Description:
Creating an opportunity for diverse stakeholders to get to know each other and their work, as well as to understand each other’s experiences, visions, and challenges. We seek to create solidarities between these diverse groups whose work touches on the dystopic realities unfolding across education, health, media, housing, the creative arts, and beyond.
Format:
Embroidery/patch-making workshop and dialogue.
Description:
A community-centered workshop series where participants create hand-stitched patches and embroidery that imagine futures beyond extraction, domination, and erasure. Drawing from traditions of craft as resistance — such as quilting, visible mending, and protest textiles — this space could invite story-sharing and resistance through needle and thread. Influenced by Indigenous resurgence, Black feminist futurism, and diasporic textile traditions, participants could stitch symbols, phrases, and images that reflect survival strategies, ancestral knowledge, and speculative futures. Follow-up dialogues could explore the question: "What futures are we stitching toward?"
Format:
Viewing and creating short 60-second cellphilms and dialogue. Showcasing of a student-led zine project highlighting examples of resistance against dystopic futures, creation of “nowtopias.”
Description:
Watching short cellphilms and then creating cellphilms in response that imagine reparative, relational futures. Includes moderated discussion panels on settler innocence, eco-apocalypse, and racialized/Indigenous futurities. Will feature a cellphilm production workshop for participants to produce “counter-future” or “futures otherwise” films. In the second half of the workshop, students from the School for Community and Public Affairs will showcase a zine project of “nowtopias” of resistance and alternatives around the world for liveable and abundant futures already in the making.
Format:
Participatory art mapping workshop and dialogue.
Description:
Participants will be invited to create personal or collective “counter-maps” that unsettle colonial geographies and assert Indigenous, queer, and diasporic spatial knowledge. Through mixed media — collage, ink, textile, digital drawing — working group participants will collectively chart territories of loss, care, resistance, and dreamwork across campus and beyond, disrupting the logics of borders, extraction, and surveillance. Invited speakers will include those working to build alternative and sustainable food systems on campus.
Format:
Sound art/experimental sound/music event and dialogue.
Description:
Highlighting and creating sound art, exploring the theme of sonic dystopias and their ruptures. The event will include an exploration of field recordings from zones of environmental destruction and highlight sound art that imagines other futures, and imagines planetary healing. Participants will create soundwalks responding to the audio workshop on sound as resistance.
Format:
Collage workshop and dialogue.
Description:
A critical collage making-space for reimagining “futures” from a place of refusal and care. Participants build collages using recycled materials and speculative prompts (e.g., “modes of surviving/thriving amidst settler collapse”). The goal could be to unsettle assumptions of progress and innovate from the ruins with slow, accessible and relational images. Participants will also learn about alternative low-tech practice, including fermentation for food sovereignty and feminist hacking of dystopic “artificially intelligent” pipe dreams.
Format:
Participatory gallery of art that we have created through our work together.
Description:
A curated collection of soundscapes, cellphilms, embroidery patches, zines, collages, poetry, and tactile media that document and evoke the sensory experience of living through dystopia that we have created throughout the Working Group (September – March). Artworks will be exhibited and thematized according to “death worlds” that come up throughout the other months’ events (e.g., incarceration, resource extraction, food and water crises), featuring works by students and faculty and any of those who attend our workshops. Visitors will move through themes (and annotate artworks with post-its and make art in response) to witness the entangled violences of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and ecological collapse.