Writing Elsewhere Geographies

We are living in a moment of profound dissonance. The dissonance and ruptures are further amplified due to our social webs, digital algorithms, and spatiotemporal disconnects (and discontents) of how we move through the geographies of this world: from the individual to the relational to the communities we are embedded within. Through forces of capital and technocracies, we are also seeing an alarmingly fast erosion of our learning and unlearning spaces, of spaces where we can carefully and intentionally labor to build understanding and other sovereign ways of being. The course offers a portal and a third space, beyond the narrowness of learning within institutions, beyond the dogma of academy.

Writing 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. The heart and spirit of the course are invitations to sit with the grief of the losses of our institutions of care, the ruptures of our relational ecologies—with each other and our more-than-human worlds—and distortions of our shared cultures; and to practice recognition and refusals of the systems of domination and extraction that live within us, between us, and of which we have become (un)willing participants. A reminder that holding space for collective griefs and practicing generative refusals in honesty and vulnerability is our first responsibility to the possibilities of our futures.

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.” Writing Elsewhere geographies invites us to create-curate these counter-maps. The cartographies and architectures and maps we imagine, experiment with, and cultivate towards worlding the worlds we inhabit. Colonial conquest manifests beyond the geographies of place and borders, permeating into the geographies of our cultural symbols, shared languages, our collective institutions and ways of being. Our stories about ourselves and our past-present-future world are over-determined and over-represented by the systems of empire, colonization, and domination. Other ways of living and being have always existed. Through conversation and writing we will remember this, to liberate our imagination and our possibilities from the colonizers' fantasies, to write in community towards the ways our lifeworlds can be.

Course Ethos

TEXTURE AS PEDAGOGY.

The pedagogical anchors for the course are meant to be embodied and generative—sitting with grief, practicing refusals, becoming comfortable with discomfort, embracing the messy process of un|learning and collaborative sense-making as knowledge. As the course host and facilitator, my intention here is to create a space to encourage, guide, and nurture these vulnerabilities as necessary pieces of radical transformations of our selves and relations towards liberatory possibilities.

SYLLABUS AS INVITATIONS.

The course material draws from across neuroscience and psychology, (decolonial, anti-colonial, anti-imperial, anti-patriarchal) liberatory writing, and literary art. The goal isn't to offer these as abstract theoretical ideas on elsewhere geography worldbuilding, but rather a witnessing of the ways our past-present ancestors and more-than-human kin have made living through the ruptures and cracks. Our collaborative elsewhere-making will foreground our lived experiences, ancestral belonging, bodily autonomy and cultural positionalities and privileges. We will collectively build our understanding of the empires within and between us, the organizing principles of the systems that dominate us and extract from our planet, how we are also part of the systems we fight, and what else might be possible.

WRITING AS METHOD, PROCESS, AND RESISTANCE.

The course isn't meant to be or modeled as a writing workshop. My intention is offer writing as one method of liberatory praxis—one that moves beyond its individuated, commodified, algorithmic forms. Different forms and genres of writing will be introduced as experimental sandboxes for elsewhere-making, such as erasure or blackout poetry, persona poems, revolutionary poetics, lyric essays, and speculative fiction. Writing will be practiced through letter-writing in pairs, collaborative and communal writing, weekly generative and long-form writing prompts, deep listening and counterlistening exercises, mapping and countermapping experiments.

Guiding Questions

• What are the mirrors and mirages of this here-geography?

• How can we grieve the here-geographies in ways that are generative and rebellious?

• Why does engaging in imagination feel elusive and risky?

• What inquires, reckonings, and fugitive practices are necessary to build the cartographies of our becoming and belonging?

• What are the conditions of liberation?

• How do bring about the birth, regeneration, and renewals of the conditions of liberation?

• How do we construct survival from within geographies of violence and oppression?

• How do we reclaim our agency and attention as prefiguring for liberation?

• How do we commit to the necessary task of refusals? How do we refuse in community?

• How can we engage in liberatory modes of being through connection and collaboration?

Why Me and Why Now

As a scientist, I was trained in the language of neutrality, that science is apolitical and always pro-humanity, with no regard to the realities of medical apartheid or that much of sci-tech forms the material sustenance of warfare i.e. imperial genocides and colonial conquests. As a writer, I am contending with similar questions on how cultural production isn't neutral either: which stories are told, amplified, lauded with applause and awards, which voices are silenced, left out of the archives, which stories are manipulated through imperial stenographers (i.e. media, academia, law). What does it mean to do science, tech, or engage in any form of knowledge production amidst long arcs of colonialism and empire? At a time when we find ourselves witnessing multiple genocides (livestreamed, silenced) in our here and now. I bring these questions, refusals, lived experiences and trans|un-disciplinary knowledge to this course—not as expertise—but as context and tools for un|learning and diagnosing bullshit, being skeptical, following citations to investigate the archives, detect logical fallacies and to notice silences—who isn't named, who isn't implicated, which equivalences are normalized. I do not come to the pen from legacy but from the vantage point of an outsider — across gender, race, class, neurodivergence — a postcolonial child questioning empires, old and ones becoming.