The J.S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities, SFU Institute for the Humanities, and EcoCultureLab Vancouver present
Radical Hope in Feverish Times
A series of public webinars exploring strategies for cultivating possibility in defiance of brutalism
In his book Brutalism, African philosopher Achille Mbembe defines his titular term as “the process through which power as a geomorphic force is constituted, expressed, reconfigured, and reproduced through acts of fracturing and fissuring.” Borrowing the term from architecture, Mbembe aims to capture “an age gripped by the planetary-scale pathos of demolition and production of stocks of darkness,” a “becoming-black of the world” that parallels the enslavement of African bodies in the Atlantic slave trade by an imposition of the logic of war onto populations with nowhere else to go. Military designs are, in this sense, added to today’s pressures of changing climates, deteriorating environments, competition for dwindling resources, and the dismantling of public service systems, as powerful interests engineer fear, confusion, and disengagement while touting the false solutions of “reborderizing,” ethnonational wall-building, and the technological evasions of geo-engineering and artificial intelligence.
In this context, where can we find causes as well as realistic strategies for creative hope toward a more life-enhancing, difference-harboring, and ecologically viable world? “Creative hope” is not the idle hope of facile optimism; it is the active effort to find and seize opportunities for creating a better world than the one being handed to us. It is a radical hope (radic-, radix is Latin for “root”) because it identifies and removes the obstructions toward the flourishing of human and nonhuman life in its beauty and diversity. It reverses the brutal reduction of humans to mobile laborers and consumers, and of the world to resource and datafied commodity.
This series of “first Tuesday” noon-time webinars will explore the work of artists, critical thinkers, digital activists, and communities responding to the challenges of war, authoritarianism, disaster, and climate change in ways that build the possibilities for hopeful, collaborative, and richly more-than-human futures.
Time and place
Zoom (RSVP required), first Tuesdays of the month (in the fall and spring) at noon Pacific Canadian time (GMT-7 until November 2, then GMT-8).
Schedule of topics & speakers this fall
October 7: Indigenous Survivance and Resurgence, Traditional Knowledge, and the Arts: Jeff Ganohalidoh Corntassel (professor of Indigenous Studies, Cherokee/University of Victoria, BC, Canada), T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss (interdisciplinary artist and ethnobotanist, Skwxwu7mesh Nation/British Columbia, Canada), Eglée Zent (ethno-ecologist, Venezuela/University of Vermont, USA)
November 4: How Another World Might Be Possible: Debbie Bookchin (journalist, author, co-founder of Emergency Committee for Rojava); Brian Tokar (author/educator, Institute for Social Ecology, Vermont, USA)
Information on forthcoming webinars will appear on this page, blog-style, with the latest at the top. (Bookmark it for easy access.) To receive notifications about future J. S. Woodsworth Chair events, please sign-up HERE.
EcoCultureLab Vancouver gratefully acknowledges the support of the Olga M. Ciupka Memorial Fund.