Today we’re at the intersection of Technology and community work as we look at how futurity/technological concepts can be developed to specifically benefit our communities. In the age of intrusive surveillance and Big Data, how can we use technology to create the future we want to see?
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We’ll be in conversation with a couple of black futurists:
Rasul Palmer stepping out from his role as co-facilitator for KI’s Afrofuture Fridays, has been working with the Kheprw Institute for 12 years. He’s the lead for their Democratizing Data initiative: an initiative to train and develop inter-generational grassroots capacity in the public data field.
Madebo Fatunde is a foresight strategist and a writer, building a practice at the intersection of arts, technology, and culture. His passion is using storytelling about the future to empower better decisions today. Some current projects of his include “The Blackchain”, a speculative future which imagines a world around a Pan-African blockchain network, and “Unmanned Ode”, a poetry collection exploring the codes of masculinity composed alongside and against a neural network. He is a member of the Foresight Practice Group at Autodesk and a founding member of The Guild of Future Architects (https://futurearchitects.com/).
Futurism work creates blueprints to find new ways to understand ourselves and the world around us. And, with its Afrofuture promise, it uses technology to help paint a vivid portrait of what the world could look like.
Leave you with this quote from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower: “All that you touch you Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God Is Change.”
Go forth and be the change.
Books mentioned:
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James
Emergent Strategies by adrienne maree brown
The Chaos Point: The world at the crossroads by Ervin Laszlo
Teaching about the Future by Peter C. Bishop and Andy Hines
Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin
Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows
Afrofuture Fridays brought to you by a partnership with folks we’d like to thank:
