Introducing the members of the Unravelling Time Learning Marathon ⏳
Time is both one of the most personal experiences we have and a cornerstone of human existence. Last week, the Unravelling Time Learning Marathon kicked off, bringing together 8 peers across 3 timezones to support each other’s explorations of time.
We’ll be spending the next 4.5 months delving into questions covering topics including work, world-building, rituals, and campaigning — and congregating online to challenge, support and grow one another from afar.
You can follow our adventure on Instagram.
And now, an introduction to the group…
Emer Mary Morris
Emer is an artist, cultural worker, organiser, seasonal labourer and avid adventurer. Her work is participatory and celebratory and aims to be embedded within community struggle for social change. As a theatre maker her practice is multidisciplinary - including verbatim theatre and theatre of the oppressed
Emer’s Learning Question is: ‘How can story telling about labour struggles be used to reconstruct how we value time?’
Find Emer on Instagram + Twitter.
Tamika Abaka-Wood
Tamika is East London/ Essex through and through, but currently based in Brooklyn.
She’s spent 10 years designing and facilitating people-centred research, insight + foresight experiences + processes around the globe for brands, charities and cultural institutions.
Her approach is ethnographic, always. Her role is to catalyse cultural, social or creative innovation. She’s also co-founder of Plantain Papers, an annual print journal which provides the African diaspora across the world a platform to connect with each other and tell their own stories, in their own words. For her, seeing things not as they are but as they could be is dreamy-liminal-transformative-challenging-fun work.
Tamika’s Learning Question is: ‘How do we [as future ancestors] leave soft, unfinished, irresistible blueprints for equitable world-building? #FUTURESONFUTURES?’
Find Tamika on Instagram + Twitter.
Claude Lajous
Claude is a queer French artist based in Bristol. Besides their creative work, which includes experimental writing, photography and collages, they’ve been playing with digital technology for more than 10 years. They’re devoted to building resilient sustainable communities through a permaculture lens. Their future self delight in celestial magic and long walks in the woods.
Claude’s Learning Question is: ‘How can we reimagine our experience of time through ritual(s)?’
Find Claude on Instagram.
Allison Jordan
Allison (she/they) is an autistic student and multimedia creator exploring the generative power of technoprosthesis, play, autopoietic interiority, and trauma. Her practice is a manifestation of her functional reliance on socioemotional technoprostheses to process, interrogate, and translate her innermost experiences. Through musical and visual self-documentation, she engages in a surreal, radically vulnerable, emotionally hypervalent form of worldmaking.
Allison’s Learning Question is: ‘How can I create autobiographical multimedia projects that explore the way my experience of time is refracted through my autistic, Black, and non-binary bodymind; interrogate and dismantle ableist aesthetics and conceptions of autistic cognition; and more accurately represent the lush kaleidoscopic reality of autistic inner life?’
Find Allison on Instagram + Twitter.
Zahra Davidson
Zahra’s day job is Enrol Yourself Chief Exec. But the need that led to the idea for the Learning Marathon still exists (a desire to creating and stretching from within a dynamic learning community), and so she’s back for another one — this time as a participant. Zahra likes to make ideas become reality, even when it involves lots of boring leg work, and she is most fascinated by the processes through which people learn, adapt and change.
Zahra’s Learning Question is: ‘How can I play with the ticking time bomb I hear within?’
Find Zahra on Twitter.
Shahreen Vayani
Shahreen is a literature graduate and aspiring writer and filmmaker based in London. She has worked in theatre, arts programming and is most passionate about storytelling in all its forms. Born in Kenya and having grown up in London she is most interested in themes of migration and diaspora.
Shahreen’s Learning Question is: ‘How can I visualise time in alternative ways and what would this process do to how I relate to time and how it relates to me?’
Find Shahreen on Instagram + Twitter.
Dr Yewande Okuleye
Yewande is an interdisciplinary scholar in biochemistry, research design, visual communication and history of medicine. Having worked as a chemist for The Body Shop, she has focused on framing scientific, cultural and social meanings of ‘natural’ with the lay public as well as scientific and well-being sectors.
Her PhD thesis- Reclaiming Cannabis Medicine: Medical and Well Being Narratives in the UK, investigated how different stakeholders negotiated the barriers and opportunities to develop cannabis medicine. Yewande is a recipient of the Economic and Social Research Council (ERSC) Impact Accelerator, Fellowship to develop a citizen science participatory project, which examines the broader applications of cannabis hemp in agriculture and health.
Yewande’s Learning Question is: ‘How can I develop a campaign which highlights the absence of Black people from cannabis reform, medicalisation and commercialisation?’
Find Yewande on Instagram + Twitter.
Edi Whitehead (host)
Edi is a campaigner, facilitator, organiser and artist. They develop the people and projects that make a radical and progressive world possible.
They are currently the Digital Organiser at Act Build Change, the UK’s roaming school for social justice and community organising. They are obsessed with libraries, learning, movements and stories, and use creative projects to figure out how we better tell and remember (hi)stories — exploring gender, place, representation and power along the way.
Edi’s Learning Question is: ‘How can we better connect the efforts of the present to the lessons of the past and the possibilities of the future?’
