CoFUTURES Conference 2023: Community Speculations and Technopolitics

CoFUTURES 2023: “Community Speculations and Technopolitics” is dedicated to ideas of community: How and why do communities come together, enact, and utilize speculative methods to rethink the world? What kinds of technologies and what kinds of politics come together to allow or necessitate the formation of communities?

In the last two decades, Future-oriented movements and communities have produced their own manifestos, organized societies, lobbying groups, artistic societies etc. These movements mix aesthetics and politics, drawing from science fiction speculations, decolonial anthropology, antifascist resistance, queer activism, disability rights and anti-ableism, neurodivergent thinking, and ethical propositions to engage in future making from the margins. These communities seek to affect the real world and build in the present the future they want to see. What are the potential opportunities and pitfalls of this approach? How do these communities interact with economies of capital, emotions, and taste?

This conference is interested in visions beyond “genres”: in activisms, community efforts, futurings that blur or even erase boundaries between artistic imaginations and politics, between individual and community efforts, between what’s imagined and what’s enacted. How can new forms of belonging recognize our entanglement with other species and agents?

Speculative strategies are part of new community-building, across cultural divides, and/or with more-than-human lifeforms and machines. How can we envision more-than-human forms of making kin? As closed futures and looming presents continue to threaten both the existence and creative potential of the earthbound, maintaining openness and spaces for imagining possibilities become acts of resistance. Technology, re-imagined, re-used, and re-purposed becomes both part of these resistances, as well as tools for continued oppression. How can the work performed by the combination of technology and poetics become more politically aware?

Learn more at the conference website