Join us for a workshop on
Speculative Writing : Stories for a World in Transition
Tuesday, May 18, 2021
6:00pm CET / 12pm EDT / 9am PDT
Facilitated by Lauren Parater and Anand Pandian
Baltimore mural, 2016, artist unknown
“The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary,” Ursula K. Le Guin observed. “We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.”
We invite you to join us on Tuesday, May 18 for an hour-long workshop on speculative storytelling. We will explore storytelling as a practice of charting alternative trajectories and envisioning new worlds, in the face of ecological loss. We will work on developing speculative stories as catalysts for other modes of action and imagination, with the promise of transition and repair in mind. Each of us will work on a short “flash” fiction or nonfiction piece, with the hope of sharing them together on our EDC Forum.
Participants are asked to register HERE as “Going” so we know you’ll be coming. You’ll need to log into your EDC account to register, and to create an account HERE if you haven’t already.
The workshop will take place on the Speculative Worlds channel of our Commons. We will spend the hour with a brief framing, then actually writing, then talking about what we’ve written. We invite you to come to the workshop with a story idea in mind, and to read the following short pieces in advance:
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Alexis Wright, “The Inward Migration in Apocalyptic Times”
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Lauren Parater, “Why Innovation Needs Storytelling”
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Anand Pandian and Ollie Zhang, “Contrapuntal Storytelling”
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“Writing Flash Fiction: Interview with Brevity editor Dinty Moore”
Lauren Parater leads communication activities at the UN Refugee Agency’s Innovation Service. Her current work and personal explorations focus on narrative change, climate displacement and ecological loss, and social innovation. She has spent her career exploring how creativity and radical imagination can be used to communicate complex issues within the humanitarian system.
Anand Pandian is a professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. He thinks and writes on ecological ethics, on cultivating ecological sensibility and widening the horizons of social justice, everyday aspiration, and speculative design. He is the author, most recently, of A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times.