HSOC-520: Critical Planetary Futurisms

What role might artists and designers play in scripting possible futures, at a moment when it has become difficult to sustain imaginaries of any future whatever? Amid conditions of ecological crisis and systemic injustice, who inscribes the future, and for whom is the future structurally foreclosed? In this scenario, artists have increasingly turned to future-oriented practices as a tactic of refusal and survival. Attending to their work, this course will examine a range of global practices spanning Afrofuturisms, Arab Futurisms, Indigenous Futurisms, Latinx Futurisms, Sinofuturisms, and SWANA Futurisms, among others. Artists' projects will be paired with critical texts by Black Quantum Futurism, Grace Dillon, T. J. Demos, Kodwo Eshun, Yuk Hui, Kara Keeling, Jussi Parikka, Sofia Samatar, and others. Students will coproduce the course's assessment rubrics, and will participate in the design of the class as active co-creators of curriculum through student-generated modules.