Seeds for Radical Imagination
by Niki Franco
In Adrienne Marie Brown’s Emergent Strategy she offers that “all organizing is science fiction — that we are shaping the future we long for and not yet experienced. I believe that we are in an imagination battle, and almost everything how we orient toward our bodies is shaped by fearful imaginations.” As a community organizer who is rooted in Black Marxism, Third World Socialism, and abolition — having the space and opportunity to be in an intentional cohort of other Black folks planting seeds of revolutionary thought across industries was paramount for me this summer. Most specifically, being an Imagineer Fellow supported me in flexing my muscle of radical imagination and execution of ideas/project creation with folks at an international scale. Dabbling in distinct yet interconnected themes every week through readings, dialogue, guest speakers, and project ideation helped me anchor myself in a more holistic approach to problem-solving and recognizing multiple vantage points in social issues. It also heightened the nuance of the contradictions we are facing in this moment (ie: tech offering points of connection and advancement while also serving as a crucial tool for surveillance and the expansion of the military and prison industrial complex — which are directly responsible for the extraction and destruction of the climate).
The kickoff to our fellowship had the political backdrop of COVID-19 and a global uprising which exposed the current American imagination, while juxtaposing it with radical demands led by Black folks across the globe, which directly informed how we framed our conversations and designs. Both living in Miami and being Caribbean pose the threat of ongoing climate crisis on my psyche everyday — it impacts how I orient myself towards housing, political economy, policing, privatization, and the role of tech in facilitating all of the aforementioned. In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, she states that “The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together,” and this is an anchoring value in spaces like the Imagineer Fellowship — to move at the speed of trust in interdependence.
The first session of the Imagineer Fellowship was dedicated to sowing the seeds of hopes and dreams we had for the fellowship, discussing our individual work and disciplines and the anti-Black tendencies we experience in each of these sectors, and collaboratively crafting a syllabus where each of us contributed videos, articles, texts, books, lectures, poems, social media posts that touched upon the following themes:
- Designing Culturally Relevant Pedagogy for Remote Learning Amidst Poverty
- Inventing Black Radical Technoculture
- Afrotectopia/Black Futures Manifesto
- Designing Future Cities
- Future of Protests
As someone who works facilitating spaces of collective study and curating curriculum that is accessible to working-class and poor folks, one the themes which resonate with my present work the most was week 2’s “Designing Culturally Relevant Pedagogy for Remote Learning Amidst Poverty”. During this time of uncertainty and major shifts in education, schooling, and approaches to learning altogether, intentional pedagogy is key. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire outlines that “In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing… The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence.” Plainly said, our current educational model perpetuates hierarchies, oppressive modes of power, and treats students as empty vessels who lack indispensable value and insight unique to their lived experiences. As poverty deepens in this country due to the pandemic and mass unemployment, cutting through this pedagogy is necessary. During this week of ideation, as fellows, we began crafting the outline of a toolkit targeted for educators. The toolkit was centered in the goal “social and emotional transformation as a means to liberatory pedagogy” — the rationale behind this project was the following:
- recognizing that educators hold a place of authority in the learning process and typically uphold and perpetuate oppressive pedagogy, we believe they are instrumental to decolonizing the process.
- combating the separation of body, mind, and spirit in the learning process.
- fostering an environment of mutual reciprocal learning and care.
- acknowledging the COVID moment of rupture has put education through major shifts, this presents an opportunity to change.
The toolkit we collaboratively ideated was rooted in values of inclusion, self-actualization, agency, cultural competence, sociopolitical consciousness, and consideration of body, mind and spirit. In the words of Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, “To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people.”
As an organizer currently working on budgetary processes urging folks to be imaginative about the way Miami as a city can exist — prioritizing care, social services, public spaces, and abolitioning punitive and predatory systems, week 5’s Designing Future Cities session was particularly instructive for me. Abolition necessities imagination. Abolition is not simply about absence, but also about the presence of what people deserve, long for, and dream of. Ari Melenciano, the founder of Afrotectopia, had one of her presentations, Omni-Specialized Design for Beautiful Futures included in our syllabus and in the lecture she puts forth “nature-centered” design and suggests that we should design futures that not only cater to the needs of humans, but rather center the needs of nature and sentient beings. Ongoing wildfires, deforestation, flash flooding, water shortages, rising sea levels, increasing heat, species extinction all contribute to the most decisive moment of history.
All of the weekly themes offered me a well of new insight, considerations, and critical texts I had not come across before, most specifically around interventions in tech, as that’s an industry I’m not well versed in and mostly have critiques of. The co-created curriculum also placed an emphasis on understanding Blackness as a layered lineage and identity that could never be monolithic. Understanding that I live in the empire and cultural hegemony of the west, being able to share space and be in study with an international cohort deepened my sense of global solidarity with all Black folks fighting capitalism, white supremacy, and imperialism. In a moment of compounding crises and rupture, the veil of American Exceptionalism has been lifted for everyday people and the urgency for internationalism is as crucial as ever. Conversations in this space deepened my knowledge on the specificity in which Africa has been continuously divested and extracted from and how that manifests in access to basic utilities, including internet and access to the digital world. My sense of African anti-colonial and Pan-African philosophers and thinkers also expanded because of the Afrotectopia fellowship.
For the new world to root and materialize, we cannot rely on the systems and imaginations that got us here in the first place — designing radical Black futures is not a utopia, but rather our necessary hope.
