Radically hopeful visions of anti-racist futures
I met Hillary Carey, a fellow PhD in Design researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, through on online conference in the summer of 2020. Despite the 2,000 miles that separated us, we quickly developed a collaborative relationship through which we explore our shared interests in anti-racism, design practice, and futuring as a design method.
Together, we explore how designers might contribute to envisioning anti-racist futures. To do this, Hillary and I have been developing a series of workshops with faculty, staff, and students higher education institutions in which we collectively imagine anti-racist futures of these organizations. During a final phase of an anti-racism team training at an arts and media college, Hillary and I facilitated a collectively futuring process for the team in which we imagined an anti-racist future of the college. Our article about this project, “Radically hopeful visions: Futuring for institutional anti-racism work” was published in Futures journal in February 2024.
The “radically hopeful visions” generated by the anti-racism team were interpreted by student illustrators at the college, as pictured in the slideshow above.