TU#01 Insight - Engaging with (im)possibility and (un)certainty through fiction

Talking Uncertainty

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, how can methods that involve fiction or social fiction help communities to channel uncertainty and reimagine their futures? COVID-19 has starkly highlighted structural inequities and realities that have always existed. The reality we knew has disappeared overnight, and other realities have appeared. Therefore, in many ways, COVID-19 is about absence, and neoliberal academia has tried to fill this gap, through technology and other means - to try to resemble “the normal” - when in fact this is not possible. We need to construct knowledge in a kind of “twilight zone,” which lies somewhere in between the existing and the emergent, the possible and the impossible, the past and the future, and fiction and reality. Fiction helps us to tap into these spaces of absence, uncertainty, emergence by improvising these interiorities to the fore.

Read insights from the talk here: https://www.urgentemergent.org/talking-uncertainty/kazubowski-houston.

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