Futures from the Margins

What do futures look like from the margins? The 2022 SFRA Conference is dedicated to visions of human futures that center and foreground the issues of those from the margins, including Indigenous groups, ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities, and any people whose stakes in the global order of envisioning futures are generally constrained due to the mechanics of our contemporary world. For many people around the world imagining radically different futures has a life or death quality, as their presents are beset by societal discrimination, poverty, inequality and precarity, as well as the acute effects of climate change and the global environmental crisis.. How can futures from the margins speak to power in presents?

We examine issues in contemporary futurisms that foreground the margins, expose market processes in manufacturing majoritarian futures. Some of the topics discussed in the conference include:

a.         Speculation and Demanding the impossible

b.         Theories of contemporary futurisms

c.         Indigenous Sciences and speculative worldbuilding

d.         Neo-colonialism and speculative futures

e.         Worldbuilding the Otherwise

f.          Climate change and futures from the margins

g.         Critical dystopias in climate change thinking

h.         Pleasure Activism and Speculative Thinking

i.          New philosophies of time in futurisms

j.          Resistance and politics of hope

k.         CoFuturisms