. . . is 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 irregular webinars explores 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 select months through the year, at noon Pacific Canadian time (GMT-7 until November 2, then GMT-8).
Updates appear on the blog below this post. You can also sign up to receive notifications about future J. S. Woodsworth Chair events HERE.
EcoCultureLab Vancouver gratefully acknowledges the support of the Olga M. Ciupka Memorial Fund, the J.S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities, and the Simon Fraser University Institute for the Humanities.