Emergent Futures
CoLab

A Laboratory for Transdisciplinary Experimentation
and Collaborative Future-Making

About

The CoLab

We are a collective of scholars and artists from various fields working on activist, speculative and collaborative projects that reimagine and shape emerging futures. EFC provides an inclusive space for people to map out future-oriented methodologies, ethics, strategies, tactics, and modes of being while working together towards better futures.

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Collaborative

Speculative

Imaginative

Interventionist

Activist

Improvisational

Relational

Self-Reflexive

Responsible


Featured Insights

Talking Uncertainty Insights incorporate bite-sized podcasts and textual syntheses collaboratively created by EFC members.

Engaging with (im)possibility and (un)certainty through fiction

Dr. Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, how can methods that involve fiction or social fiction help communities to channel uncertainty and reimagine their futures?

Community benefit and slow activism

Dr. Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston

How can we go beyond self-reflexivity in our research and deal with our inability to directly impact the living conditions of our interlocutors?

Anticipating seven generations ahead

Dr. Dolleen Tisawii'ashii Manning

How is the concept of mnidoo related to the Seven Generation Principle, which states that we must consider the impact of every action we take on the next seven generations?

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Group of people of various ability levelsDiverse group of people

Online Talk Series

Talking Uncertainty

We feature scholars, artists and practitioners who are working on collaborative projects that speculate emergent futures in times of radical uncertainty. This series highlights how individuals and communities are staging, designing, performing and transforming futures.

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May 28, 2022

Misfits in the World: Crip Futurities and World-making in Disability Arts

Dr. Eliza Chandler, Dr. Carla Rice, Lisa East

In this talk, the speakers speculate upon the anti-assimilationist politics of crip cultural practices within the disability arts sector in northern Turtle Island (Canada). We discuss the ethical and practical complexities of “cripping” our research methodologies and gesturing towards decolonization while collaborating with disability community members.

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March 16, 2022

Multimodal Articulations of Futures in an Afghan-Danish Film Collective

ARTlife Film Collective: Dr. Karen Waltorp, Nilab Totakhil, Asma Mohammadzai Safi, Sama Sadat Ben Haddou, Mursal Khosrawi and Lea Glob

In this talk, Dr. Karen Waltorp and other Afghan-Danish members of the ARTlife film collective will discuss and unpack their multimodal filmmaking collaborations within the context of politically charged media ecologies.

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April 30, 2021

Seeding Happiness: SumArth’s Farmer-led Agri-Models for Rural Development in India

Prabhat Kumar

This talk features Prabhat Kumar who has been building holistic models to establish farmer-led institutions, foster sustainable livelihoods, reduce the carbon footprint and provide nutritional security to farmers in Bihar, India. We reflect on the politics and imaginaries of these community-led programs and partnerships, in light of the ongoing farmers' protests in the country.

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December 17, 2020

Call Me Back: Ethno Science Fiction as an Ethnographic Film Method

Dr. Johannes Sjöberg

In this special event, Dr. Johannes Sjöberg will be premiering his new ethno science fiction film ‘Call Me Back’ (2020), followed by a talk on exploring uncertain environmental futures through creative and collaborative practice. We will explore how projective improvisation in ethnographic film could contribute to the way we relate to scientific predictions of the future.

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September 30, 2020

The Murmuration of Birds: An Anishinaabe Ontology of Mnidoo-Worlding

Dr. Dolleen Tisawii'ashii Manning

What does a bird actually see when it is part of a large flock? During these times of radical uncertainty, continuing threats of colonialism, capitalism and climate genocide, Dr. Dolleen Manning discussed what we can learn from wading into subtle mnidoo regions to collaboratively imagine new futures and formations.

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July 15, 2020

An Elephant in the Room: Tracking an Awkward Anthropology

Dr. Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston

In her talk, Dr. Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston tracked the feeling of awk­wardness she experienced in an imaginative ethnography project conducted in collaboration with Randia, a Polish Romani woman. She discussed her attempt to re-envision anthropology as an engaged, collaborative and interventionist practice.

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News

We periodically share news about EFC members’ performances, podcasts, workshops, publications, presentations, events and other activities. Read the latest news here.

Nov 2022

Hannes Bürkel

Festival Director, Freiburger Filmforum; Kommunales Kino Freiburg; University College Freiburg

EFC is collaborating with Freiburger FIlmforum - Festival of Transcultural Cinema to co-curate "Filming Futures" section in their 20th festival edition (May 11 - 21, 2023). Submit your films and audio, visual and digital outputs that deal with futures, utopian/dystopian imaginations, our understanding of time and related topics.

Oct 2022

Rajat Nayyar

PhD Candidate & Vanier Scholar, Theatre & Performance Studies, York University

Rajat Nayyar, Jared Epp, Rana El Kadi and Karen Waltorp invite you to submit an abstract for EFC's panel 'Imagining Differently: Challenging Neoliberal Media Ecologies in Futures Visual Anthropology' at the upcoming Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) Film Festival's online conference to be held between March 6 and 10, 2023.

Feb 2022

Magdalena Kazubowski Houston

Associate Professor, Theatre & Performance Studies, York University

Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston and Mark Auslander invite you all to the book launch event for In Search of Lost Futures: Anthropological Explorations in Multimodality, Deep Interdisciplinarity, and Autoethnography (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021) on 2 February 2022 – 11:30am to 1:30pm EST.

Jun 2021

Elsa Robinson

Artist and Teacher

Elsa Robinson's exhibition, Sankofa, engages with feminist art, Afrofuturism and Afrosurrealism. It will be held at Latitude 53 between June 18 and September 25, 2021.