Decolonizing the Future: Introducing the Diaspora Futures Collective
“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.”― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower
“Looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future.”― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
This article co-authored by Nour Batyne (@thedisruptivist), alisha bhagat, Aarathi Krishnan, Tulsi Parida, Mansi Parikh , Wayne Pan (@waynejpan) — and the Diaspora Futures Collective
For many, the crises of the past year shed light on several fault lines within our society. But for those of us from underrepresented and marginalized communities, the fragility of existing systems has always been glaringly obvious.
We always knew that current systems were no longer adequate to address the problems of the future, but now, the urgency is clear. We need to be able to rethink dominant paradigms around the way in which we view and act upon the future.
Hence the need for the Diaspora Futures Collective, a group centering futurists of color who work collaboratively on thinking through some of the problems of the present and the years to come.
Who we are and what we seek to do:
We are a collaborative community of people from diverse backgrounds working on the future: We believe that mainstream futures practice does not support collaboration. Too often we are pitted against each other as individuals when the complex problems of the future will require collaboration to solve. We see strength in our diversity. In our professional lives, we may be the only black, brown, or indigenous person in predominantly white spaces. Or we might be pigeonholed into only working on futures thinking as it pertains to our own ethnic group. This collective creates a space which is explicitly not white-dominated so that we can explore collaboration on our own terms.
We wish to understand the world through stories, lived experiences, and a deep examination of inclusion and equity. Good futures and foresight draws upon knowledge from a range of sources — both qualitative and quantitative. As technology continues to improve our access to numerical data, we would like to focus on sources that are often absent from mainstream futures conversations; stories, experiences, and culture. By including the lived experiences of ourselves and others, we hope to build a multi-faceted and complex understanding of the future that can provide a powerful complement to existing methods.
We seek to amplify alternative voices in the mainstream futures discourse as well as experiment with and promote alternative methodologies. Mainstream futures thinking emerged from the military and corporate contexts in the West. It is time for us to expand and diversify our models and methods. We want to move away from futurists as “experts” and towards a model of futurists as experimenters, facilitators, and community members. We also wish to leave behind futures that are not extractive and consumption focused, towards futures that are regenerative, equitable, plural, safe, focused on our role as future ancestors, community driven, and built from the wisdom of our own ancestors.
How we work
From the beginning we did not want to be associated with any particular organization. Our members come from diverse organizations engaged in teaching, systems change, consulting, art, design, community organizing, and more. There are very few opportunities for PoC and those with a plurality of identities, to gather without that space becoming co-opted. As we grow and expand we hope to work with allies who wish to truly partner with us by amplifying our voices, sharing opportunities for our group, and joining us in examining how racism, the legacy of colonialism, and caste-based discrimination impacts the work we do.
The discourse around decolonizing futures is still relatively new and we are still grappling with what it means to question established ways of thinking and build new mental models. Our hope is that this collective provides a brave space in which to do so. Building any community takes time and we anticipate some stumbling blocks. We don’t have all the answers. We hope to continue to build, learn, and iterate in the hopes of strengthening ourselves as well as creating a more inclusive and equitable future.
As we continue to build our community, we hope you will join us in this exploration. We hope to share more on Medium, as well as host conversations on other platforms.
