Coming Soon— Sign up below to get notified when registration opens.

liberationnarrativeworldbuildingComing Soon

Pluriversal Storytelling: Design a Pluriversal Story for the Future

Explore how colonial patterns are embedded in dominant narratives; rewrite narratives that centre justice, care, and reciprocity; and design imaginative stories that hold many worlds and many futures at once.

Taught by Cinthya Sopaheluwakan

Live Online5 sessions x 90 min

Course Overview

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.

Who Is This Course For?

This course is designed for:

Communications professionals seeking a critical lens on narrative and power
Journalists and content creators who want to decolonise their practice
Writers, storytellers, and designers working on narrative change or systemic transformation
Anyone drawn to worldbuilding, speculative fiction, or pluriversal futures as an imagination praxis

What You'll Learn

Identify critical colonial patterns in dominant narratives across communications, media, and public discourse
Apply a critical questioning methodology to audit their own storytelling
Rewrite colonial language using equity-centred, reciprocal alternatives
Explain the concept of pluriversality and the possibility it opens
Design and present an original pluriversal story rooted multiple worldviews

What's Included

Live Sessions

Interactive classes with your instructor

Session Recordings

Lifetime access to all recordings

Community Access

Connect with fellow learners

Certificate

Proof of course completion

Real-World Project

Participants will design an original pluriversal story (a piece of writing, a speculative scenario, a visual essay, or any format of their choosing) that intentionally holds multiple worldviews, rooted in their own epistemology, and challenges a dominant narrative.

About the Instructor

Cinthya Sopaheluwakan

Systems thinker and storyteller. Founder of The Big Picture.

Cinthya Sopaheluwakan is a systems & strategy thinker, storyteller, provocateur, writer and speaker, focused on challenging dominant systems and narratives. Through The Big Picture, she supports organisations transitioning toward regenerative systems at the intersection of systems thinking, strategic intervention, and storytelling. With a background in physics, business, and sustainability, she brings an intersectional, intentional, imaginative and decolonial lens to her work.

Frequently Asked Questions

No, you do not need to have a professional portfolio to join.

Get Notified

Format

Live Online

Class Size

20 students max

Sessions

5 sessions

Duration

90 min each

Coming Soon

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.

WorldbuildingNarrativeLiberation

JuPong Lin, PhD · From the river to the sea, from mountain rainbow to darkest bed of soil, we shall all be free

Live Online20 students max8 sessions

Coming Soon

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.

NarrativeLiberationWorldbuilding

Karina Anastasia Mathew · Writer & Independent Educator Exploring Liberation Pedagogy

Live Online25 students max8 sessions

Coming Soon

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.

LiberationWorldbuildingWellbeing