Senses of the Future

The conference “Senses of the Future” asks about futurity in times when the future looks bleak or absent. This group of artists, activists, and scholars will ask about the future in ways that register at the level of the senses. Futures are always “haunted” by unrealized possibilities from the past and barely grievable losses, so how does the past re-emerge in the future we imagine with its lived or unlived possibilities? When hopes for the future have been dashed or destroyed, how do unexpected futural horizons open up? Many emancipatory struggles have been incited by images of the future that have proven to be unrealizable, eventually mourned as vain hopes that belong to the past. But do radical imaginaries themselves have a future we have yet to understand? How do we think experimentally with new coordinates of space and time in the wake of revolutionary promises? Drawing inspiration from sources as various as Marx’s 18^th Brumaire and the projects of abolitionism, participants will examine the promises and perils of a radical imagination for our time. How do we imagine politically a world unconstrained by carceral logics and violent borders? What radical sense can now be made of Black Futures, yoking imagination and critique? Can utopia and dystopia generate senses of habitable future worlds?

Full program coming soon