Dreaming Ourselves Into The Future

Interactive Black Futurism Lecture + Speculative Writing Lab

If we do not dream ourselves into the future, someone else will. This participatory program moves students from reading Black futurism to practicing it.

Sims begins with a compact lecture on Black women writers who have used speculative storytelling to challenge the boundaries placed around Black existence. Students then enter a guided writing and imagination lab built around questions of memory, place, embodiment, community, ritual, technology, and survival. Rather than asking students simply to predict the future, Sims invites them to create futures: Who are we there? What have we refused to carry with us? What have we preserved? What has become sacred? What systems have disappeared, and what did we build in their place?

Students leave with an original piece of speculative writing and a framework for understanding imagination as a creative, intellectual, and liberatory practice.