worldmaking media collaborative

I am part of The Worldmaking Media Collaborative, a project initiated by faculty engaged in teaching and research across disciplines at The New School and funded by an Innovations in Education Grant from the Provost’s Office.  Our aim is to explore  worldmaking as an openly conceived theme that prompts an understanding of the world with the potential to become different/ly and calling into being possible future trajectories, non-linear temporalities, and transformative agencies.  The notion of worldmaking brings concepts and questions addressed in feminist, queer, decolonial, critical race, and disability studies, among others, to bear on creative media practices as it interweaves critical engagements with media histories, technologies, politics, cultural narratives, and social practices. 

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Over the spring ‘22 semester, students enrolled in classes across the university are invited to collaborate and share work across courses, responding to diverse assignments that challenge them to engage critically with the concept of worldmaking in projects across modalities of research, writing, creative practice, and design.  Participating students have also been invited to come together in a final exhibition and symposium that celebrates their efforts and draws on faculty scholars, artists, and activists to reflect on the outcomes.   Assignments have been tagged by broad categories of worldmaking activity – each with its own set of pedagogical objectives and learning outcomes.  They include:

 

Walking/touring: A practical activity of looking around; getting from here to there; creating a trail; disturbing a path; leaving a wake.  To walk – whether by foot or other means, alters the world – making and unmaking where humans and non-humans tread.

 

Collaging/collecting: Assembling vibrant materials generates affect.  A future-oriented practice of assemblage and juxtaposition.

 

Exhibiting/archiving/memorialing: What is kept and what is presented to show and represent an idea, a history, a memory, a life?

 

Interruptions/heists:Abolitionist tactics of critical disruption.

 

Ecologies of care: Intersubjective and entangled ontologies and epistemologies.

 

Networks/mapping: Interfaces that activate connections. 

 

Narratology/story-telling: A cosmological technology.