Emergent Futures CoLab (EFC) is a laboratory for transdisciplinary experimentation and collaborative future-making. Our goal is to mobilize knowledge and build activist solidarities that transcend scholarly and artistic boundaries. This includes mapping out future-oriented practices, methodologies, tactics and modes-of-being adapted by individuals and communities around the world.
This transnational collective emerged in March 2020, after the COVID-19 pandemic instigated the cancellation of Urgent-Emergent 2020, York University’s Theatre & Performance Studies graduate student conference.
EFC members seek to address the sense that
urgent action must be taken in response to events
that are currently emerging and shaping our worlds. As our political, economic and environmental futures become increasingly uncertain, we are concerned with what it means to research, create art and take action in this climate of felt urgency.
In times of radical uncertainty, it has become especially urgent to imagine differently by studying and speculating emergent futures and socialities.
We envision a community of practice that maps out such collaborative methodologies and builds solidarity in order to shift our collective focus towards urgent action.
We aim to learn from and engage with indigenous, ecological, human/non-human, feminist, queer, critical race, ageing and disability theories, ontologies and futuremaking practices.
Our goal is to mobilize divergent ways of knowing, imagining and researching to act now.
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We work with people and communities who imagine and speculate emergent futures and socialities. We are interested in collaborative projects that take different forms, such as a digital app, a community website, an accessible and inclusive technology, a stage performance, a video game, a film, a community-led or entrepreneurial initiative, advocacy efforts, and new pedagogies.
We welcome members from various fields to join our collective. Full list of members can be found here.
All content on Emergent Futures CoLab’s website and social media is copyrighted. You can use our content for non-commercial, artistic or academic purposes with full credits to EFC and its member(s), and by citing our project wherever appropriate. When referring to our recorded online talks, please use the citation(s) available below each talk.
Emergent Futures CoLab is a transnational collective that was co-founded in Toronto, Canada and inspired immensely by Indigenous scholars and artists. We acknowledge that the area known as Tkaronto is the unceded traditional territory of the Anishinabek Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Huron-Wendat, the Métis, and most currently, the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. This territory was the subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes. Tkaronto is now home to many Indigenous Peoples from across Turtle Island, and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this territory.
In the spirit of equity and inclusion, if we can improve on this statement, please contact us.
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