Explore Our Courses
Live, cohort-based courses taught by scholars, artists, and practitioners. Small groups of 10-25 learners. Real dialogue. Deep transformation.
Weaving Webs of Care
In this 2-day intensive experience, we will explore how we can begin to weave relational webs of support as we tend to ourselves, care for one another, and cultivate the conditions needed to cultivate and sustain a more liberated world. We'll unpack how saviorism, martyrdom, and purity politics shape our lives and leadership; tend to our deeply human need for connection, interdependence, and belonging; and explore how we can weave wider webs of solidarity and support through our relationships, communities, and movements for change. So often we devote ourselves to helping others because there was no one there to help us. It’s a beautiful attempt to right the wrongs of our past, but it too often comes at the expense of ourselves. The work we do in the world really matters, but we are not here to single-handedly save it, nor do we have to martyr ourselves for causes we care about. Even in the times when we come together to fight for a more liberated future, we’re too often fighting each other. Moral perfectionism and threats of cancellation lead to self-censorship and the fear of exile. When activism becomes authoritarian, our need to be “right” eclipses our capacity to be relational. We have to become aware of how we’re unconsciously reinforcing and reproducing colonial, capitalistic, and patriarchal patterns of harm toward ourselves and with one another. Because without the inner work, the outer work won’t work. We are being called to co-create a world where responsibility is shared, reciprocity is valued, and diverse gifts come together to build something none of us could ever accomplish on our own. The only way out is through, and the only way through is together.
Modern Food: How we are what we eat
This course thinks about modern food and our connection with it – who makes it, what goes in it, and how this affects each and every one of us. It examines how our personal choices are shaped by our contexts and environments. This is not a course on “clean” eating or dieting. Instead, we are interested in the intersection of convenience and food – both its importance and its cost when it comes to how we decide to feed ourselves. Over the 2 days of this weekend intensive, we will focus on bread as an example of a food. We will examine how ultra-processed food disrupts the connection between the food we consume and our bodily responses to it, and consider the labour involved in preparing real food using whole ingredients. We will consider how we might re-establish our connection with food as well as the real opportunity costs of doing so. Put simply, who can do the cooking? Finally, by reflecting on our individual contexts, environments, and food choices, we will establish ways that we might want to change the way we eat. Each day, we will end the session with a bread-making workshop led by Josefina Venegas Meza, a professional baker & pastry chef who has worked in some of London's best kitchens. In addition to acquiring a practical and valuable skill, we intend this practice-based session to be an opportunity to reflect on the work of making food and what re-establishing a connection with food entails. You will also receive a comprehensive and exclusive bread-making handbook with all the essential information you might need to refer back to should you wish to continue baking in future.
You're Not Behind. You're Discerning. AI Literacy for Thoughtful Professionals.
Everyone around you seems to have a take on AI: adopt it fast, fear it deeply, or act like it isn't happening. This course is for the people who haven't bought any of those options. You're thoughtful, you're experienced in your field, and you're not interested in tools that strip the human out of work you spent years learning to do well. What you want is clarity: on what AI actually is, what it can and genuinely can’t do, and where you stand on it. Over four sessions, we move together from noise to solid understanding. You'll build real AI literacy rooted in your own values and your own work, without giving up the judgment, care, and human essence that makes what you do matter. By the end, you won't just "know more" about AI. You'll know exactly where you stand on it, when to use it, when to question it, what you choose to keep fully human and why that matters too. *No technical background required
A Life That Can Hold The Work: A Practical Introduction To Wellbeing For Changemakers
Social justice work is deeply meaningful, but it can also be emotionally, mentally and physically demanding. Many of us are trying to build lives that reflect our values while navigating burnout, financial pressure and systems that were never designed to support our wellbeing. This course offers a practical introduction to the foundations of wellbeing for changemakers. Across four live sessions, we will explore four core areas that shape our capacity to do meaningful work over time: - Foundations: Clarifying what a sustainable life and career look like for you - Nutrition: Understanding how food influences energy, mood and focus - Movement: Building strength, mobility and recovery into everyday life - Mental and emotional wellbeing: Developing practices that support reflection, resilience and self-compassion Throughout the course, we will combine evidence-based wellbeing principles with reflective exercises and small weekly experiments. Rather than pursuing perfection, participants will be encouraged to notice what works for their own bodies, circumstances and values. This course does not suggest that individual habits can solve structural problems. Instead, it focuses on practical ways to strengthen the personal foundations that help us stay engaged in the work we care about.
Tending to the Roots of Conflict in a Divided World
Most approaches to conflict and systemic harm focus on the external, without addressing the deeper fears and desires that keep these larger patterns in place. Through a trauma-informed process of guided self-inquiry and embodied exploration, participants in this course will gain a personally transformative, in-depth understanding of how self-suppression sustains the oppressive systems that shape our personal and collective realities. By illuminating how these hidden patterns shape your sense of self, your relationships with others, and the wider web we all belong to, you will gain invaluable insights into what *really* drives conflict while building your capacity to address the roots of division in your life and in our world. Civil rights activist James Baldwin said, “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hatred so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” Unless we learn how to confront that pain, we'll only create more of the same.
Writing Elsewhere Geographies
There is a sense of pervasive hesitation among us all to imagine, really imagine, that a different way of being and living is possible, and possible within our shared spacetimes. Elsewhere Geographies intends to be a space where we gather to learn, curate, and imagine other methods and modes of being and belonging in the here and now. How do we construct survival from within geographies of violence and oppression? What inquires, reckonings, and refusals are part of the process of building our own cartographies of belonging? Edward Said wrote: “In the history of colonial invasion maps are always first drawn by the victors, since maps are instruments of conquest. Geography is therefore the art of war but can also be the art of resistance if there is a counter-map and a counter-strategy.” Elsewhere geographies, then, are these counter-maps. The cartographies and architectures and maps we imagine, experiment with, and cultivate towards worlding the worlds we inhabit. These are the blueprints we make towards abolitionist and relational futures. The course material will be drawn from across resistance poetry, liberatory writing (theory and op-eds), and narrative essays, rooted in anti-imperial, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist principles, but also rooted in interrogation, world-building, and expansive ways of storytelling. Each session will include short readings interspersed with generative prompts to experiment with utilizing these concepts as tools and instruments of extending ourselves and our worlds. We will read excerpts and works from poets, writers, and activist-scholars such as June Jordan, Christina Sharpe, Danez Smith, Amal Dunqal, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Linda Quiquivix, Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant, Sara Ahmed, Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitteh, Ursula K. Le Guin, Basel al Araj, Amiri Baraka, George Jackson, Ghassan Kanafani, and B. R. Ambedkar. The goal is also to bring together writing and works that often aren't read in conversation with each other, but in these conjunctions, entire worlds could be re-imagined. Each session will have time for discussion, sharing and feedback on individual writing and creations. Participants will be encouraged to work on a speculative reimagining of any mode of being from within their lives towards making a personal journal or zine, writing an essay or op-ed, or material they could use to share and educate with amongst their communities: • whether that's a personal radical transformation of a habit or thought (“If you want to be an intellectual, you have to be engaged” ~ Martyr Basel al-Araj, Palestinian activist and writer) • whether that's a rally call against a procedure or institution (“I think of complaint as a queer method, because in a way it is about redirecting a “no!” to the institutions, saying no to them. There’s power in that.” ~ Sara Ahmed, writer and scholar) • whether that's learning to recontextualize and reimagine entire structures (“that’s a critical component for the rest of the world to learn from—is the centrality of demolishing the health system as a precondition to ethnic cleansing” & “the clinic is central to Palestinian society’s resistance” ~ Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, Palestinian surgeon)
Digital Uprising: Reclaiming our Tech Sovereignty
Digital Uprising: Reclaiming our Tech Sovereignty is a six-week lecture series exploring how technology functions as colonial infrastructure that perpetuates systems of oppression, while providing concrete strategies for resistance and building liberatory alternatives. This course includes: * How Big Tech platforms mirror occupation systems through surveillance, control, and displacement of marginalized communities. * We'll analyze algorithmic bias, predictive policing, and how surveillance technologies function as tools of control. * Participants will learn practical resistance tactics including privacy tools, encryption, and community defense networks, while exploring Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) as cooperative infrastructure that distributes power equitably. The series centers liberation movements such as Palestinian liberation as a framework for understanding digital resistance while incorporating Afro-futurist visions, Indigenous digital sovereignty, and other liberatory movements. Through interactive workshops and collaborative hands-on activities, participants will develop critical frameworks, technical skills, and collective imagination needed to reclaim technology for liberation. This course is urgently needed as Big Tech continues to expand its control over our digital lives, exacerbating existing inequalities while enabling new forms of oppression. In an era where surveillance capitalism threatens our autonomy and collective action, understanding how to resist and build alternatives has become essential for anyone committed to social justice and liberation movements.
"International" Development and Grassroots Activism. Why don't the two ever meet?
This micro weekend course, (three hours each Sat/Sun) is a call to all activists who want better for the world but do not find it in the space we call "international" development. With the horrific events in Gaza, Sudan, and now Iran, this space has failed entirely in advocating for an end to war, greed and conflict. It steers clear away from the street style grassroots activism that was originally geared towards socialism, peace and equality. Why is a sector that supposedly stands for these principles, so bad at being an advocate and an activist? In fact, looks down on it? This course will rapidly explore how the "international" development sector has failed because it has gone against activist principles and has instead embraced capitalism. And how we can change that by truly becoming activists for peace and equality. We will do this by looking at the history - and lack thereof - of activist influenced structures and spaces in the sector and how that has disconnected itself from reality. And we will look at the impact activism has had in the last 2-3 years through the examples above, of how this is the real "international" development.
Pluriversal Storytelling: Design a Pluriversal Story for the Future
Every story carries a worldview. Our current dominant ones, from the stories told in news, boardrooms, policy papers, and brand campaigns, are shaped by colonial power and continue to determine whose realities count, whose knowledge is trusted, and whose futures are imagined. This exploration invites you on two things: to interrogate those patterns, and to provide guidance on creating a story and worldview that's rooted in care, hope, reciprocity and relationality. In the first half, we unpack the colonial history of storytelling and learn to identify them in everyday communication. We ask: who defines reality here? Who is missing? Who benefits? In the second half, we turn toward pluriversality: the idea that many worlds can coexist, that no single story has the right to represent everyone, and that futures worth living in must be imagined from many directions at once. Drawing on decolonial thought and narrative design, you will develop your own pluriversal story: a piece of communication, fiction, or narrative that opens rather than closes possibility, rooted in your own epistemology. - Reflect on how dominant narratives inherited colonial structures of power - Identify and challenge the dominant storytelling patterns - Learn tools and frameworks to rewrite narratives - Explore pluriversal frameworks as an alternative - Design a story that centres multiple epistemologies and worldviews - Build accountability, reciprocity and care into the act of storytelling itself Change starts with the stories we choose to tell, the people we centre, and the way we tell them. Every story that goes untold is a future that goes unimagined, and pluriversal storytelling guides you in reclaiming that imaginative territory.
The Values Lab: Living What You Stand For
The Values Lab is a 4-week relational learning experience for people who want to better understand what they stand for and how to live in closer alignment with those values. This course is rooted in the understanding that values are not abstract concepts floating somewhere above our lives. Values live in our relationships, our decisions, our boundaries, our habits, our reactions, and the ways we move through the world every day. While many learning spaces focus on analyzing systems from a distance, The Values Lab invites participants to ground themselves in what is within their direct proximity: their inner world, their immediate relationships, their routines, and the environments they help shape. Inspired by the emergent strategy principle “small is all,” this course centers the understanding that meaningful change often begins locally and relationally. Many people move through life carrying values they inherited but never examined. Others know what matters to them but struggle to live in ways that reflect it because of expectations, burnout, survival, or systems that pull them away from themselves. This course offers space to slow down and explore those tensions. Together, participants will explore: • What values are and how they shape our lives • The stories and experiences that formed our values • The gap between what we say we value and how we actually live • How values influence relationships, work, identity, and decision-making • What it might look like to move through life more intentionally This is not therapy, leadership training, or productivity coaching. The Values Lab is a relational, reflection-based learning space rooted in conversation, witnessing, storytelling, and experimentation.
Building Our Capacity for Resistance
While it is imperative that we resist the oppressive systems we currently live in, intergenerational and racial trauma often tricks us into believing that assimilation will keep us safe. In the workshop, we will unlearn these harmful narratives, dig deep into our roots to learn from ancestral knowledge and sustainably increase our capacity to advocate for our communities. The class will cover our past, present and future – the history of how we got here, the present fears that hold us back, and how we can overcome those to build a better future. Why take this class? Without doing the important work of learning from history and healing from the past, we are doomed to continue our cycles of violence. Moreover, the work of resisting oppressive systems and reimagining them is a long and arduous journey. We need to build our resistance muscles if we want to sustain the long fight, and healing from our racial and intergenerational trauma will help us get there.
Relational Leadership as Design
Course Description This course invites learners to shift from the Status Quo Paradigm (positional authority, extractive practices, and metric driven decision making) into a Relational Paradigm where leadership is understood as a collective capacity, not an individual role. Participants reimagine leadership as something we build with communities rather than perform over them. At the heart of the course are four guiding themes: Power, Ethics, Truth, and Reciprocity, which serve as a diagnostic tool for understanding how leadership shows up in real time. Participants will explore how these themes operate across the seasonal cycles of sustainable leadership, moving from rest to experimentation, action, and harvest. This seasonal lens challenges the myth of “eternal summer” and supports leaders in cultivating practices that prevent burnout and strengthen long term resilience. What the course is about • Shifting from hierarchical, extractive leadership models to relational, community centered ones • Understanding leadership as a social, collective process rooted in trust, reciprocity, and shared responsibility • Exploring how power, ethics, truth, and reciprocity shape leadership decisions • Practicing sustainable leadership through seasonal cycles rather than constant output • Building relational culture as organizational infrastructure Topics covered • The Relational Leadership Design Framework o Principles and pillars that define relational, liberatory leadership o How collective sensemaking, cultural grounding, and shared power function in practice • The BAL Framework (Boundaries, Alerts, Limits) o A practical tool for sustainable leadership and preventing burnout o How to use BAL to maintain integrity, clarity, and relational alignment • Relational Culture Building o Designing conditions for belonging, psychological safety, and mutual accountability o Understanding culture as structural architecture, not interpersonal preference • Seasonal Leadership Cycles o Embracing rhythms of rest, experimentation, action, and reflection o Rejecting extractive norms that demand constant productivity Why this course matters right now Across sectors, leaders are navigating fragmentation, burnout, polarization, and rapid change. Traditional leadership models, which are rooted in hierarchy, individualism, and control, are no longer sufficient for the complexity of today’s world. Communities and organizations need leaders who can design systems needed for communities and institutions to thrive amid complexity, disruption, and change This course offers a timely, necessary alternative: a relational, lineage rooted, and sustainable approach to leadership that strengthens collective capacity and supports systems level transformation.
Engaging in Feedback Dialogues for Liberation
Feedback is often positioned as a tool for effectiveness, productivity, improvement, which denote a certain performative culture and which can be experienced as monological and judgement. Yet feedback should be first and foremost an opportunity for authentic dialogue, for people of all contexts to encounter suggestions, questions, words of advice and wisdom and sometimes dissonances. These conversations, when embedded in brave spaces, can be liberating and emancipatory. Drawing from Paulo Freire's dialogic attributes, this course explores the potential of relational feedback encounters grounded in pedagogy of liberation. It will support people in encountering the tension between suggestion and accountability. Drawing on doctoral research into student (dis)engagement with feedback, the course offers a nuanced exploration of why people sometimes ignore, resist, or emotionally disengage from the very feedback intended to support them. Rather than treating feedback as a technical instrument (a set of comments to improve performance), we examine it as a relational encounter. Feedback is not simply transmitted; it is received, interpreted, felt, negotiated, and often transformed. When framed as a dialogical experience, feedback becomes a site of meaning-making shaped by emotion, identity, power, and context. This shift opens possibilities for deeper engagement and more sustainable practices. Participants will explore the conditions that must exist before feedback can be taken up. Because feedback must first be received (cognitively and emotionally) attention will be given to climate-building practices that foster a sense of mattering. Practical moves will be shared for supporting individuals who may be particularly sensitive to perceived criticism, including neurodivergent people with rejection sensitivity. We will investigate multiple forms of feedback dialogue: inner feedback, peer feedback, and 'expert' feedback. Additionally, we will surface often-invisible dynamics that shape engagement. Power asymmetries between people can influence whether feedback is welcomed, negotiated, or rejected. By making these dynamics visible, we can better design feedback interactions that invite participation rather than compliance. Throughout the course, participants will engage with tools, embodied teaching practices, and reflective activities designed to strengthen relationality in feedback interactions. This workshop ultimately invites all of us to rethink feedback not as a technique to perfect, but as a relational and reflexive posture.
Development by Design (DxD): Power, Perception, and Human Systems
Most systems are designed to produce outcomes, but in the process, they also produce people. This course introduces Development by Design (DxD), an approach to understanding and intentionally shaping how humans think, relate, and behave within systems. Rather than focusing on products, users, or surface-level interventions, we turn inward and outward simultaneously—examining the internal, relational, and environmental conditions that shape development. We begin with the brain. Under stress and uncertainty, human cognition narrows—favoring binary thinking, short-term decision-making, and simplified narratives. These are not failures of intelligence, but adaptive responses. From there, we explore how culture, history, and power extend (or constrain) what we are able to perceive and imagine. Drawing from neuroscience, developmental theory, and critical social thought, we will examine: How survival-based cognition limits perception and reinforces binary thinking How dominant narratives obscure alternative ways of knowing and being How power operates through visibility, absence, and proximity to harm How time is often flattened into linear progress—and what is lost in the process How environments shape not just behavior, but identity and relational patterns Participants will learn to map systems they are part of—organizations, communities, platforms—and identify the developmental conditions those systems produce. This is not a traditional design or systems-thinking course. It is an invitation to shift how you see—so that what you build, lead, or participate in begins to reflect a more expansive understanding of what it means to be human.
Being Human: The Path for Change
Political, economic, and communications systems strip humanity away, by turning us into data points, consumers, and users. Social media and digital technology have polluted everyday life making us more disconnected. The number of sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) tools rapidly grows for doing simple and complex things like writing, communicating, thinking, calculating, analyzing, diminishing our ability to live fully and flourish. While we can do anything we set our mind to — learn, change, solve, adapt, survive, flourish — we choose to overvalue AI technologies rather than see them as complementary. Most people are racing to build coding capabilities and mastering AI. However, they struggle to engage in a face-to-face conversation with another person, be authentic to their values, imagine a better life, or empathize with a person who thinks differently. We are forgetting how to be human — how to feel, to think, to listen, to imagine, to understand, to converse — which is limiting our capacity to care for others and envision more sustainable, fair, and diverse futures. We are angry and more impatient; we feel disconnected, hopeless, lonely, sad, and anxious. To cultivate conditions for change — personal, community, organization, planetary change — we must embrace our humanity. Human skills are our interpersonal and intrapersonal capabilities that enable the development of our identity and interactions with others, which are unable to be replicated by technology. This course is an invitation to be human and reconnect with the skills that make us unique as well as to live with compassion, responsibility, love, and empathy. Positive psychology frameworks and cognitive behavioral therapy strategies will equip you to engage in honest conversations with yourself and others. Futures literacy will enable deeper understanding and more diverse uses of the future to better navigate the present. Through dialogue-based learning, we will engage in mindfulness-based practices, digital detox strategies, and movement practices to make daily living more meaningful. You will gain mental clarity, feel more alive, and strengthen emotional intelligence. By becoming more present, you will engage in deeper listening and build more authentic relationships. This is a transformative experience back to our roots.
SpiraLogics: Using Spiral Intelligence to Navigate Change, Constraint, and Transformation
SpiraLogics is an emerging inquiry into the structural and generative principles that give rise to spiral forms across nature, culture, and cosmology, and how those principles might inform the way human systems and processes are designed and sustained. Spirals appear throughout the natural world—from galaxies and hurricanes to shells, plants, and biological growth patterns. But they also appear in cultural practices, artistic processes, and ways of organizing time and transformation. SpiraLogics asks a simple but far-reaching question: what can we learn from the operational logics that generate spiral structures, and how might those logics inform human systems? This course introduces participants to the Spiral Transfer Method, a framework for translating spiral principles from natural or cultural contexts into human domains such as education, community organization, creative practice, and governance. The method examines how spiral forms arise, what functions they serve in their native environments, and how analogous structural conditions might exist within human systems. In addition to exploration, the course is oriented toward application. Participants will learn how to design and refine systems, practices, and processes that can evolve without fragmentation—maintaining continuity, coherence, and identity even as they adapt and transform. Through guided discussion and collaborative inquiry, participants will: -explore spiral structures across ecological, biological, and cultural contexts -examine the mechanisms and functions that generate spiral forms -map spiral principles onto human systems and processes using the Spiral Transfer Method -apply these principles to a real system, project, or practice of their own (creative, organizational, or pedagogical) -identify areas where spiral logics may strengthen resilience, adaptability, and continuity -recognize human systems that already operate according to spiral dynamics and consider how they might be supported rather than replaced -develop a working prototype, model, or reframe of a system/process that can better withstand pressure, iteration, and change Rather than presenting a fixed theory, this course invites participants into a collaborative investigation of spiral logics as a lens for understanding growth, iteration, continuity, and transformation in human systems—while equipping them with tools to actively shape those systems in their own contexts.
Decolonial Feminist Approaches to Foreign Policy
since 2014, several countries and multilateral blocks have either adopted or committed to adopting Feminist Foreign Policies. however, a lot more needs to be done in prioritizing feminism in feminist foreign policies. while some have chosen to continue dispensing aid, some chose to add women and stir. instead of choosing to engage with feminist values and focusing on intersectionality and peace, most policies continued to normalize “feminism-lite” agendas. in reality, women and non-binary people in the global south have been "doing" feminist foreign policy for generations now. movements ranging from resisting colonialism to practicing food sovereignty, from inclusive lawmaking to deploying international law in pushing for their rights - the wealth of knowledge embodied in praxis in the majority world must be centered. all of this continues alongside major shifts in geopolitics with the proliferation of technology. what might it mean to truly embed feminist principles into foreign policy? this course takes a deep dive into the field to build strong understandings of feminist foreign policy as a concept. it offers a comprehensive overview of feminist foreign policies as they exist, presents the building blocks of such policies, and presents lessons from rich examples from the majority world. in this course, participants will: - understand the violent roots of the current template for international relations and foreign policy - understand how states are not the only actors in foreign policy spaces and reflect on how we can open up spaces for the entire continuum of actors to be represented in how foreign policy is practiced. - understand the relationship between power and the state, which underpins contemporary international relations, and start to build a practice of interrogating it - understand the nexus between gender and the state, and in international relations, to unpack how feminist foreign policies are currently built and implemented. - explore building blocks for feminist foreign policy from the majority world that can bring the transformative potential of truly feminist foreign policies alive. - learn from real-life examples of transformative feminist foreign policies in practice, drawn across time and space, from the breadth of the majority world. - move toward implementing learnings from the program into action through the use of tools and approaches to build and implement feminist foreign policies.
Childhood, Power, and Decolonial Praxis
-Childhood is not a neutral category. The beliefs we carry about children-how they learn, how they should behave, whose knowledge counts-are shaped by centuries of colonial thought, reproduced daily in homes and classrooms that rarely examine their own assumptions. This course offers an interdisciplinary examination of childhood through a decolonial lens, drawing on critical pedagogy, ecofeminism, disability justice, Black radical thought, and indigenous epistemologies. It asks not only how colonialism has shaped our understanding of childhood, but how that understanding lives in our bodies, our parenting, and our teaching. -The course moves through three phases: identifying colonial frameworks in educational systems, developmental psychology, and cultural narratives about childhood; locating those frameworks in learners' own histories and daily practices; and translating theory into praxis through concrete tools and commitments for raising and educating children differently. -What makes this course distinctive is its insistence that decolonial work is not only intellectual but embodied. Most courses addressing colonialism and education focus on curriculum reform: on what is taught. This course goes further, examining how we understand childhood itself, and building in structured writing and reflection practices designed to bridge the gap between knowing and changing. -The course draws on a deliberately wide range of traditions, reflecting the reality that colonialism took different forms in different places, and that decolonial praxis must be as diverse as the communities doing it. It is taught by a practitioner who is an immigrant, Muslim, parent, and educator who has been doing this unlearning for almost two decades, in the classroom, the home, and on the page.
Climate Fables for Activists
Climate activists have long been inspired by fiction and media as gathering points for community, and as sources of inspiration. Take just one example: in the early 2020s, the intrepid Stop Cop City campaign was launched to protect the Atlanta forest from being felled and replaced by an enormous police training facility. Under the woodland canopy, activists gathered to screen Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 animated film of forest defense, Princess Mononoke. As police surveilled the camp, campers joined together to watch a film that spoke to the struggles they faced as defenders of an ailing planet. What a powerful assertion of storytelling and community over carcerality and extraction. As a writer, scholar, and climate activist myself, I wondered how narrative representations of environmental action helped or inhibited me in effectively organizing. What assumptions and biases in popular media were being fed to me without my critical assessment of them? What limitations of the imagination was I accepting? Or what radical possibilities did these stories prompt me to consider? In this course, we explore narratives of environmental resistance and learn to critically think through the subliminal and overt messaging of our fiction and media. In short, we consider the “climate fables” that impart lessons about what it means to care for and fight for the environment. The class is guided by anti-colonial values that unpack how the aftermaths of colonization, slavery, and the plantation impact the scope of the climate crisis and our approach to tackling states of emergency. We’ll consider how gender, race, ability, and class are inevitably entangled with environmental issues, and what frameworks must be reconsidered to develop climate justice approaches that don’t reiterate old harms. Finally, we will draw from today’s most radiant resources of the imagination to envision the worlds we can organize towards. Each week will offer a journal prompt and a short reading/viewing to stimulate your imagination and critical thinking capacities, followed by an instructor presentation and ample time for discussion. Class material will reference and pull from authors such as N. K. Jemisin, Octavia Butler, Rivers Solomon, Louise Erdrich, Waubgeshig Rice, Margaret Atwood, and Kim Stanley Robinson; media such as the works of Hayao Miyazaki, Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022), and Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up (2021); and non-fiction on environment and organizing, such as by adrienne maree brown, Andreas Malm, Kathryn Yusoff, Amitav Ghosh, and others. By the end of the course, you will have a robust understanding of the canon of climate resistance storytelling and its core themes, walk away with an additional syllabus for solo or communal study, be able to engage meaningfully and critically with the complexities of climate action narratives, and leave with new possibilities for imagining climate futures.
Radical Imagination: Visions for Liberatory Futures
Embark on a transformative two-day journey into radical imagination, discovering tools and methods that cultivate bold visions for liberatory futures and new worlds. This intensive, interactive workshop guides participants through personal mapping exercises, collective visioning sessions, and collaborative worldbuilding practices that center care, liberation, and lived experience. Together, we will co-create radical visions for justice-centered futures, exploring alternative ways of being and doing that challenge current systems and pave the way for the world we're birthing together.
The World on our Plates: Culture, Politics, and Food Systems
This course takes as its starting point something we all need in order to survive - food - and examines how the personal is entwined with the social and the political. It must be clear this is not a course on “clean” eating or dieting - rather, it aims to examine how our individual choices are shaped by the larger food systems around us. Together, we will examine the various systems and processes leading to the food that ends up on our plates - where it comes from, what it is made up of, who is involved in putting it together - to reflect on larger questions around culture, cuisine, and community. Figuratively speaking, we are less interested in the breaking of bread than in the actual baking of bread. That is to say, whilst the symbolic and cultural elements of food are generally known, this course aims to focus squarely on the material dimensions of how food is made. We will consider how questions around labour, migration, race & gender, coloniality, capitalism and the climate crisis are wrapped up in the production of food. Together, we'll consider how our choices around the food we consume are shaped by the larger social and political contexts we are a part of. We'll see how these contexts affect our lives - not just nutritionally, but socially and environmentally as well. Our weekly sessions will culminate in a bread-making workshop led by Josefina Venegas Meza, a professional baker & pastry chef who has worked in some of London's best kitchens. In addition to acquiring a practical and valuable skill, we intend this practise-based session to function as an opportunity to personally reflect on the various topics we've covered together, and how they might apply in our individual lives. You will also receive a comprehensive and exclusive bread-making handbook with all the essential information you might need to refer back to should you wish to continue baking in future.
Creative Activism for Kincentric Justice
This interdisciplinary course applies artistic and poetic inquiry to international law and earth jurisprudence with (at least) two intentions: 1) to decolonize carceral legal systems—to deconstruct systems of injustice constructed by colonialism, capitalism and the bureaucratic, legislative strategies and policies that uphold and perpetuate coloniality 2) to envision, imagine, speculate and weave webs of co-existence, co-becoming, and pluriverses of mutual thriving of people, land and sea; and to reformulate an ecocentric legal system that nourishes these worlds. The course will inaugurate our collective inquiry with the question, how can the dominant, criminal justice system be utilized to undo the carceral state that made it? And what can move the human-centric legal system towards an ecocentric law? The following seven weeks will be shaped by your questions, which might be: how can I make beauty with our plant kin to heal the wounds of colonialism? What if we sang with whales and flowers and microbes? What new worlds could we bring into being? worlds of mutual respect and relationality? How can I dance with microbes and mycellium to nourish a culture of reciprocity and an ethics of consent? Questions are the medicine that lead us into deep reflection and creation. Crafting questions hones our skills of deep listening. Following fish philosopher Zoe Todd’s call to center Indigenous laws and sovereignty, the course takes an unapologetically anticolonial approach to design and pedagogy/andragogy. The majority of resources will draw on Indigenous knowledge and culture-keepers, BIPOC elders and activists, and Rights of Nature advocates working in solidarity with Indigenous environmental activists. This course emerges from a generative fission between artistic process and jurisprudence to co-create protocols that disinvest from coloniality/modernity and bridge partitions between humans from “the rest of nature.” Students will learn with and participate in ecosocial justice movements through poetics, interdisciplinary arts, social sculpture, legislative action and/or narrative arts.
Imagine. A world without "international" development.
This course is a deeply personal journey into the ethical and moral dilemmas of my life and career working in international development, in my home country Pakistan as seen through nearly three decades of experience. Using my widely shared blog series Why I Left Development as a foundation, in addition to my subsequent writings on the critique of foreign aid, we will explore the contradictions, questions, and discomforts that arise when the concept of “doing good” collides with Western systems of power. But this isn’t just my story—it’s an invitation for you to reflect on your own. Whether you’re a practitioner, a social entrepreneur, an artist, or a funder, the course will ask you directly, "Am I part of the problem". Your answer will guide the trajectory of this course to help you move forward. Through personal reflections, we will interrogate where we began, the compromises we’ve made, and how we might begin again, with greater honesty and alignment, or maybe opt out completely. This course is not for the weak hearted. I will challenge you to look into your personal experiences and reflections about your work in ways that will create discomfort and doubt. But without this, there cannot be a “transformation”. Personally and professionally.
The Cyberpsychology of AI Creativity
This course explores the evolving relationship between human imagination and machine-generated creativity in the age of artificial intelligence. Starting with a psychological and philosophical grounding in human creativity and imagination, students will journey through the aesthetic, ethical, and labor dimensions of AI's impact on the creative process. Weekly sessions and guided practices blend theory, reflections, and discussions. Some hands-on experimentation with AI tools is explored later in the course. Throughout this course, we ask questions such as: - What defines creativity in a world of synthetic outputs? - Can machines truly co-create, or are they mimicking us? - Who owns creative labor in the age of algorithms? By interrogating these questions, students will leave equipped not just with technical knowledge, but with a critical, ethical, and imaginative lens on the future of creativity. Format: - 4 weeks, 90-minute live sessions - Weekly pre-readings or media viewings - Small group creative exercises - Final project or reflection
Find Your Voice
In this class, we unpack racial and generational trauma as a community, explore the roots of our identities, and learn to find our voices in a world that often wants to silence us. We retrace history to understand how modern society upholds white supremacy and causes extensive harm to BIPOC communities. Using that knowledge, we consciously move away from white models of success, learn how to become more comfortable with our identities, and re-design our life based on the values that matter most to us. We will also learn how to leverage our voice and power to organize in community and create the systemic shifts we need to usher in a better world. Topics covered: - Understanding systems of oppression and its effects on the present world order - How western imperialism rewrote the history of the world - The psychological damage of the white gaze on our identities and self-esteem - Reconnecting with our identity and reclaiming our voice, confidence, and power - Uncovering racial and intergenerational trauma to start the healing process - Dismantling the lie of meritocracy and white models of success and professionalism - Redefining success based on our own values and terms - Strategies to counter racism and uplift the most marginalized voices - Understanding how our liberation is connected and learning to create a network of allies - Making space for joy and internalizing that rest is an important part of liberation work
Beyond Sustainability: Connection, Wisdom, and Regenerative Leadership
We are living in a time when environmental conversations are often dominated by crisis, urgency, and fear. The narratives we hear most frequently focus on collapse, destruction, and emergency. While these realities cannot be ignored, constantly operating from this place can leave us feeling overwhelmed, drained, and powerless. What if there was another way to engage with this work? This course invites you to explore the environmental and sustainability space from a different perspective, one rooted in empowerment, connection, and renewal rather than stress and overwhelm. Over time, the sustainability field has increasingly been shaped by institutions, corporations, and NGOs. While many important efforts happen within these spaces, the deeper essence of environmental stewardship, the relationship between people, land, culture, and ancestral knowledge, can sometimes get lost. This course creates space to reconnect with that essence. Rather than approaching sustainability purely as an intellectual or technical subject, we will explore how to embody other ways of being that allow us to engage with the environmental field from a place of authenticity, care, and inspiration. Drawing from environmental psychology, behavioral change, storytelling, and ancestral wisdom, participants will explore how inner transformation can lead to more meaningful external impact. When we lead from this place, we are able to contribute to healthier systems while showing up with less guilt, less pressure, and more clarity, purpose, and power. By the end of the course, you will feel more empowered to engage with environmental work from a place of inspiration, grounded in a deeper connection to the land, to community, and to the wisdom that has guided humans for generations. Throughout the course, we will reflect on questions such as: - How can we engage with environmental work from a deeper, more life-affirming place that invites both ourselves and others into the conversation? - How can we move from intellectual understanding to embodied practice in sustainability? - How can personal transformation shape broader transformation in global systems? - How can we design and share initiatives, ideas, or projects that emerge from inspiration and authenticity rather than pressure or urgency? - How can we lead and communicate in ways that reconnect people to the land and to each other?
Living with Imagination and Optimism
Imagine having the courage to think and act more authentically, letting go of expectations. Imagine living each day your dream life and with a clear purpose. Imagine becoming the most influential leader because of your compassion and ethics. Imagine that your seemingly wild ideas are instrumental to addressing climate disasters. This is possible if you dare to imagine it. Imagination is human’s superpower – it allows to see beyond current limitations to create unseen and hopeful realities. Optimistic imaginings can increase positive emotions, boost well-being, and lead to empowerment, fostering constructive individual and collective change and impactful action. However, imagination is still mostly associated with children and artists, but unrelated to everyday adult life. As a result, our imagination has become constrained and underdeveloped. While we spend most of our time thinking about the future, our tendency is to imagine apocalyptic scenarios – e.g., worse pandemics – or negative situations rooted in current trends – e.g., AI takes over humanity. We struggle to imagine positive paths forward and often look at others for validation – that is, we follow the familiar and conventional, even if this path does not make us happy. This creates a vicious cycle of pervasive pessimism and hopelessness about the future that increases our insecurities and feelings of anxiety and loneliness, which hinder our imaginative powers. The good news is that imagination can be reclaimed, strengthened, and harnessed. Sitting at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, and well-being, this course is an invitation to explore the symbiotic connection between imagination and well-being, as well as to discover what is getting in between us and reaching our potential. In addition to inner development gains, reinforcing human skills — listening, imagining, conversing, empathizing, paying attention, collaborating — will better equip learners to succeed as employees are increasingly looking for these skills in candidates. Through a blend of mindfulness-based practices and reflection, experiential exercises (visualization, role-play, futuring, pretend play, sensory engagement), and hands-on creativity activities (drawing, sketching, collaging) learners will journey inwards, slow down, identify their barriers, and experience the transformative benefits of imagination for mental and physical health. In each session, learners will practice tools and skills to unlock their barriers and deliberately tap into their imagination as well as to integrate and foster imagination skills in their life, their community, and their work. By the end of the course, learners will feel a sense of freedom, courage, compassion, and optimism. They will walk away with the inspiration and confidence to live with imagination – and to nurture it in others.
Idea to Impact: How to Birth a Soul-Aligned Venture in the World
This course invites you to birth the idea that’s been calling you — through alignment, embodiment, and creative flow. Together, we'll explore frameworks that blend strategy, spirituality, and creative practice to bring soul-aligned ventures into being with ease and joy. Course Themes: Emergence: Letting the process unfold rather than forcing outcomes Intuition: Trusting the energy and learning to move with flow Liberation: Creating from purpose, love, and justice Simplicity: Designing what’s sustainable and true
Designing for Liberation: Tools, Methods, and Pathways for Just Futures
This course is an invitation to imagine and build equitable, liberatory futures – starting with ourselves. Rooted in decolonial, feminist, and community-based knowledge systems, learners will examine their positionality, power, and purpose in today’s world, exploring how personal transformation can lead to systemic change. Unlike traditional leadership or social change programs, this course blends deep self-inquiry with real-world application, integrating inner-led transformation, trauma-informed practices, and the power of storytelling, imagination, and joy as tools for liberation. Together, we move beyond critique and into visionary practice – grounded in care, hope, and solidarity.
Embodying Liberation
This course offers a transformative journey into embodied resistance and collective healing. Developed under siege and exile, Ashira Active Meditation draws from Sufi whirling, somatic release, and indigenous Palestinian practices to support healing from trauma on both personal and collective levels. Participants will: - Explore how continuous trauma shapes the nervous system - Learn how the body can be a site of both memory and liberation - Engage in movement practices, grief rituals, and storytelling - Reclaim joy as a form of resistance Guiding Questions: - How do we grieve while building resilience? - How can our bodies become vessels for transgenerational healing? - What does it mean to be radically alive in times of collapse? This course centers voices from SWANA and global majority communities, offering tools that are culturally rooted, somatically empowering, and spiritually sustaining.
Capitalism vs. Love
An exploration of the fundamental tension between capitalist logic and our human need for love, connection, and community. This course examines how economic systems shape our personal lives including our identities, bodies and relationships, and how we can reclaim love as a revolutionary force.
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