Explore Our Courses
Live, cohort-based courses taught by scholars, artists, and practitioners. Small groups of 10-25 learners. Real dialogue. Deep transformation.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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