Envisioning Lab

Decolonizing Futures: watch the panel and check the shared references

2 years ago   •   3 min read

By Lidia Zuin

To celebrate World Futures Day on March 1st, we at Envisioning hosted a series of talks, workshops, and round tables around the themes of innovation and futures thinking.

One of the round tables that we hosted was “Decolonizing Futures”, a space to talk about science fiction subgenres that are decolonizing mainstream futures. After all, the future is much more than the Jetsons could make of it, so we invited the panelists Alexander Meireles da Silva, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Lauren Klein, Monika Bielskyte, and Sarena Ulibarri to join us for a chat documented in the video featured below.

During this 1h30 round table, you will learn about:

  • Utopias vs dystopia: are they really so opposite or just different sides of the same coin?
  • Solarpunk: what books and authors are addressing this prominent science fiction subgenre.
  • Brazilian science fiction: learn about the new subgenres sertãopunk, amazonfuturism, tupinipunk, politics of recognition and global south sci-fi.
  • Sexism and stereotypes in science fiction: why we should reconsider space opera from a decolonial perspective, the beauty representations and expressions in science fiction.
  • Science fiction and politics of recognition: why we should be writing about our own cultures so that we don’t leave this task for foreigners that might distort and dishonor our traditions.

The Zoom chat cannot be streamed on YouTube, but the fruitful conversation that happened there was something that the participants asked to be shared later on. So here is a list of works mentioned in the chat:

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