Studio Arts Associate Professor Patrick Hammie (with Carolyn Fornoff (Spanish and Portuguese) and Josue David Cisneros (Communication) have proposal chosen for Interseminars

Imagining Otherwise: Speculation in the Americas was recently chosen by the selection committee for funding through the HRI Mellon-funded Interseminars Initiative, which supports innovative interdisciplinary graduate education in the arts and humanities.

This award provides the opportunity to help design and participate in an Interseminars methods seminar in Fall 2022, to design and co-teach an Interseminars theme-based course in Spring 2023, to organize and run summer intensive workshops in 2022 and 2023, and to host a culminating event (such as an exhibition, performance, conference, or other community- or public-facing activity) in Fall 2023.

“The course introduces speculation as a method and as a practice for social transformation. How have artists, writers, activists, and scholars throughout the Americas used speculation as a means of troubling the world as it is and imagining it otherwise? How does speculation provide us a method for critiquing the world that is and helping to bring into being another, more just world? This course considers how speculation has been used in tandem with social movements, focusing on three main areas: racial justice, immigration, and environmentalism. Through these main lenses, we will explore how speculation operates across different experiential scales (body, territory, nation) as well as temporal registers (projecting to the far future but also capable of imagining alternate pasts) in order to problematize the delimited and totalizing imaginary of colonial-capitalism and white supremacy, and to bring into being new ways of being and relating. Course materials and activities will prioritize Black, brown, Indigenous thinkers from throughout the Americas, in order to foreground how speculation has been engaged by anti-racist projects of decolonization. Student work will adopt different speculative modalities, including community based, experiential, scholarly, and creative components. In the spirit of imagining other forms of pedagogy and radical study, students will play an integral role in developing the course syllabus, objectives, and documentation.”