Situated Critical Race and Media

In this closed Network Gathering, Situated Critical Race and Media (SCRAM) will hold space and time with our play cousins to reflect on our intersecting practices of trusting and contextualize how we conjure and manifest trust. As a collective, we consider trust as fundamental for our own senses of intimacy, joy, and belonging. In this session, we will try to put words to this process by exploring what it means to collectively theorize our shared and distinctly personal needs. We do this out of necessity because building trust is indispensable to survival in racist industries, within anti-Black, anti-Asian, misogynist, inhospitable cultures and societies. We will work through exercises that prompt us to describe our needs and capacities as collaborators, and to name our unspoken expectations about trust, authenticity, and love. Together, we will contribute to a toolkit and expanded vocabulary for surviving and thriving under challenging conditions by building trust.

Planned Activities:

We have all been living in a shitstorm, and we each have been weathering it in different ways, alone and together. One thing that the SCRAM collective has come to realize is the importance of trust within our collective to help us survive hostile environments as women, queer, and non-binary folx. Our two-day closed “Situated Critical Race and Media” Network Gathering will be an experimental opportunity for our network of feminist technologists and killjoys, nerdy rainbow unicorns, misfits, the undisciplined and ungovernable artists, activists, and scholars to come together to voice our conditions for building and sustaining trust, to understand how we’ve cultivated resilience and joy while being vulnerable and genuine in connection with one another. This important work is necessary to sustain the difficult, yet joyful, work to build, repair, and care for the world we need. Network Gathering participants will engage in a number of activities hosted by SCRAM and our collaborators–from bodily movement sessions to open ourselves up, to zine-making sessions to articulate our conditions for trusting–to develop strategies and technologies of trust that will allow us to articulate and advocate for our needs in our networks, organizations, communities, families, and workplaces. In the process, we will build community and co-working alliances, share joy, and leave with embodied support generated by sharing time. Our goal: to rethink with you our strategies and tactics of demanding and fostering trust for these precarious times. We will center the knowledge of those who make-do with whatever technologies they have on hand, and work from there to build the conditions within which we can manifest trust.

Please contact the coordinators for more information:

Alexandrina Agloro – alex.agloro[@]gmail.com

Anne Cong-Huyen – annech[@]umich.edu

George Hoagland – ghoagland[@]mcad.edu

Hong-An Wu – wuhongann[@]gmail.com

Veronica Paredes – vaparedes[@]gmail.com