Writing by Putri Creative from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)
Writing Queer Utopias: Queer Thriving and Decolonial Futurity
Workshop (In person at UBC Okanagan)
Organized by :
Dr. Roísín Seifert (Postdoc, UBC Okanagan Education) +
A.E. Osworth (Assistant Professor, UBC Vancouver, Creative Writing)
Guest Presenter:
Dr. Rebecca SalazaR (Queer BIPOC poet, activist, literary editor)
ALL QUESTIONS CAN BE DIRECTED TO: queer.thriving@ubc.ca
Date: April 9 and 10, 2025
9am -6pm PST (with breaks throughout both days)
OVERVIEW
A Message on the Workshop from Dr. Roísín Seifert (Postdoc, UBC Okanagan Education) + A.E. Osworth (Assistant Professor, UBC Vancouver, Creative Writing)
Queer UBC students at all levels + post-docs are invited to join a two-day intensive designed to use both art (poetry, prose, and world-building games) and speculative ethnography to empower us as queers to practice radical hope and resilience through imagining and writing our own decolonial futures.
Who is the Workhop for: This workshop is a space by and for queers. The workshop is open to all queer UBC students, post-doctoral scholars or recent graduates.
What the Workshop entails: Two days of generative co-creating and deep relating facilitated by Dr. Róisín Seifert, and A.E. Osworth, along with special guests, including Dr. Rebecca Salazar, a Queer BIPOC poet, activist and literary editor. The workshop will begin by using creative writing to reflect on the self in our current context, then branch out to engaging anthropological tools and perspectives to think and write critically and explicitly about future cultures. Participants are then asked how to decenter colonial worldviews in speculative futurism. Finally, the workshop offers participants the chance to put it all together using a tabletop role-playing game to co-create ethnographically informed speculative future worlds. We will then write stories and artifacts from within those imagined futures. Students will have an optional showcase opportunity after the intensive ends. Students will also have the opportunity to contribute to research that will measure the impact of this activity on well-being and help shape future iterations of the Writing Decolonial Queer Utopias Project.
Why this Workshop is happening: With the importing of queer-phobic policies and attitudes in many countries, it is easy to imagine that the future for queers is bleak; it is, therefore, just as easy to descend into depression, apathy, and anxiety in the present. This space is being created in response to a sustained queer mental health crisis that is and always has been caused by a heteronormative, capitalist, and deeply colonized world. All those concepts are, however, created by human beings. Which means we can replace them with better ones. It is not a foregone conclusion that our world will get worse; let’s imagine together how our world might (queerly) improve. While this is a creative intensive, we hope that it will have very tangible impacts on mental health, community well-being, and (perhaps) even future worlds.
For up-to-the-minute information, please follow us at [https://www.instagram.com/queerthrivingubc] on Instagram.
