Afrotectopia Imagineer Fellowship 2020
by Ari Melenciano
What happens when you bring together 10 innovators from around the world to collaboratively imagine, speculate, and design vibrant and healthy Black futures? We, Afrotectopia, really wanted to find out and so we created the inaugural Afrotectopia Imagineer Fellowship.
The Cohort
Fellows: Yaa Addae, Léa Alapini, Beau Bonnet, Madebo Fatunde, Niki Franco, Isaiah Murray, Jonathan Obote Odur, Nneka Sobers, Morgan Vickers, Josie Williams
Facilitated and Designed by: Ari Melenciano (Founder and Executive Director of Afrotectopia)
About the Fellowship
[Fellowship held August 2nd — September 13th, 2020]
The fellowship was designed to bring together an international, interdisciplinary, and intersectional cohort of Black innovators. We initially presented (5) fellowships for 1.5 months of work, with a $1,000 stipend each. Due to the immense amount of talent and brilliance exhibited through the interviews, we expanded the amount of fellowships to (10)!
Fellows were selected from every region of the U.S. (Northeast — Connecticut and New York; Midwest — Ohio; South — Florida and Texas; West — California) and around the world (Ghana, France, and the U.K.).
Since fruition, Afrotectopia’s main areas of focus have been art, design, technology, Black culture, and activism. And we’ve been keen on creating Afrotectopian environments that are welcoming of diverse and widely-ranged professions and practices. We are invested in omni-specialized demographics because when you are designing futures, we recognize that it must be done through a comprehensive and cohesive practice with understandings in every facet of life. We sought a similarly vast array of professions, skills, mediums, and practices amongst the fellows. Below are some of their areas of interests and studies.
We were also intentional to not consider Blackness as a monolith, but as a highly nuanced identity. The Fellows selected all held a variety of cultural identities within the Black/Pan-African diaspora.
And beyond their culturally identities rooted in racial politics, we wanted to curate a group of people that held other different lived experiences and identities from socio-economic statuses to sexualities, and beyond.
And at the core of much of the fellowship, we emphasized the way Afrotectopia defines and identifies technology. Technology is not synonymous with digitality but merely an extension of human capability.
But beyond a human-centric ideology, we believe technology in its fullest form is merely an extension of sentient capability.
About the Fellows
Here are the info cards on each of the 10 *incredible* fellows.
Design of the Fellowship
The fellowship was designed to cultivate a collaborative research-driven practice implemented through designing and developing theory, and communal engagement. In this fellowship, the fellows collectively engaged in each of the proposed projects (which they voted on in their inclusion of the fellowship timeline and their order of priority):
- Designing Culturally Relevant Pedagogy for Remote Learning Amidst Poverty
- Inventing Black Radical Technoculture
- Afrotectopia/Black Futures Manifesto
- Designing Future Cities
- Future of Protests (which we did not get to in the fellowship as we pivoted from developing a 5th project to honing in on the projects we already explored)
A core foundational value of the fellowship was the emphasis of “community over individualism.” Every project was engaged by every fellow, creating space for their expertise or lack thereof, to be contributed.
Our objectives for this fellowship was to cultivate a deep sense of community amongst the fellows, be collaborative, and make sure all research and practice done within the fellowship was accessible to all.
Everything we do we want to be accessible for others to be able to build on top of. With this in mind, all of the research conducted was presented online for all to access.
We understand that much of the work we do at Afrotectopia is not about qualitative data analysis and number oriented “hyper-impact.” It’s not about the numbers for us. It’s about the value, experience, sustainability, and the sentiment shared amongst all participants. Often, the full-breadth of work and impact coming out of Afrotectopia is unseen. They are seeds we plant and water, and bloom more likely for someone else to be able to benefit from. Afrotectopia is always about the investment in the community before, anything else.
The Fellowship began by building community with one another, learning about one another’s work, interests, and passions. By the end of the first day, the fellows collaborated to build an online and publicly accessible syllabus to guide their research practice for the next 6 weeks.
We further cultivated a space for community engagement by opening up the fellowship’s research practice to the wider Black public to collaborate with us. We did this by creating weekly Imaginariums that were open and free to the Black and Pan-African public. Each Tuesday in the Imaginariums, we were joined by a prolific practitioner relevant to the field we were studying. Olivia McKayla Ross for Inventing Black Radical Technoculture, Ayodamola Okunseinde for Afrotectopia/Black Future Cities, Olalekan Jeyifous for Designing Future Cities, and Glenn Cantave for Future of Protests.
After the presenters shared their work, participants of the Imaginariums would then be broken up into small groups of 3–5 people to have intimate conversations around the suggested prompts. They would contribute their notes to the collective Miro board, allowing them to see the thoughts of people in other groups as well. These smaller groups would also allow participants to get to know one another, allowing for greater community building.
After about 30–45 minutes of intimate brainstorming, we’d return to the main video room for a 30 minute collective conversation. Here, participants would share ideas mentioned in their smaller groups, and build the conversation off of one another’s thoughts.
The fellowships with the Imagineers were held each Sunday from 10am-3pm EST — a time allotment also designed to work for the fellows in different locations.
Our Sundays would begin by checking in to the space with a rose and a thorn from that week. We’d then move into a discussion on that week’s required readings — things we learned, already knew, had general thoughts about. The Imagineer Fellows were also able to build off of work of the Imaginariums and use the documented brainstormings to ground their practice. The Fellows that were able to attend the Imaginariums would share their notes and discuss their findings.
After a break, we’d then be joined by a guest speaker who’s work was boundary pushing in each week’s specific area of study. Quardean Lewis, founder of Youth Design Center (including Made in Brownsville) for Designing Culturally Relevant Pedagogy for Remote Learning Amidst Poverty, Rafael Sergio Smith (Design director at IDEO) for Inventing Black Radical Technoculture, Tsige Tafesse (of BUFU) for Afrotectopia/Black Futures Manifesto, and Emma Osore (co-founder of BlackSpace) for Designing Futures Cities.
After a lunch break — with some time to reflect on the conversations and lectures from the first half, the fellows would move into an hour of vision mapping for the prototypes to be developed by the end of the day.
Fellows would then find 2–3 main projects to divide up and work on for the next hour. We often used either a business model canvas or other layout to dive as deep into each of the pillared facets of the projects, as time allowed.
With the last 15–30 minutes, we shared the work developed with a brief description and conversation. Then we selected the required readings for the next week. Always wishing we had more time but also exhausted by the 5 hour zoom session!
Ari, the facilitator, would then convert the findings and notes from the fellows into easily shareable visual media. Here are some examples from the work done with Designing Culturally Relevant Pedagogy for Remote Learning Amidst Poverty.
Conclusion
The Fellowship concluded with a live video presentation (on September 13th, 2020) from each of the fellows, joined and supported by the extended Afrotectopia community. Sentiments shared in the chat expressed how renewing, inspiring, and reinvigorating the work of the fellows were.
Overall, what 👏🏽 an 👏🏽 experience👏🏽. No words are worthy. Much of the work of Afrotectopia is about creating healthy spaces and seeing what Black people do with it. This space was abundantly over-filled with the brilliance of each fellow. The space itself, a space for Black radical imagination through collaboration, was affirmed in its necessity. We need more opportunities like this. We need more time to gather and dive even deeper in. But in the time and in the space that we did have, so much was created. In this publication series, you will find essays from each fellow as they reflect on their experience within the fellowship; their learnings, ideas, and beyond.
To those that joined us as participants or presenters in the Imaginariums, the presenters in the fellowships, and the disseminators of the work we’ve developed — thank you, thank you.
We can’t wait to keep building. Until next time!
