Join the BSA and ROYA for an all-day COUNTER FUTURES CONFERENCE comprised of three workshops exploring, orienting, and engaging in solidarity building toward an emancipatory futurist imaginary. The sessions are designed to work through the relational, political, and practical aspects of solidarity building by exploring different questions underpinning the work towards a counter future of liberation, justice, and equity.

COUNTER FUTURES CONFERENCE AGENDA

LUNCH RECEPTION

12:00-12:45pm
SUPA SYSTEM by Joseph Zeal-Henry

ACT I: In Relation

1:00-2:00pm
SOUND & SOLIDARITY: FUTURISM

Explore solidarity through a collective playlist-making experience, engaging sonic culture and oral traditions as practices that sustain the urgent praxis of solidarity and open pathways to futurity.

This session is structured through antiphony—a call-and-response form of exchange—with music provided by the SUPA System. Each participant will be invited to contribute a song as a sonic artefact, using it as a building point for conversation and collective reflection. Together, we will consider how music helps us create relational foundations and resist extractive and repressive systems and structures, enabling us to rehearse and imagine alternative emancipatory futures.

ACT II: In Politic

2:30-3:30pm
REVOLUTIONARY SPEECHES LISTENING SESSION

Orient our solidarity toward a radical emancipatory politics as a continuum of global revolutionary moments into the collective future imaginary.

“We do this till we free us,” was Mariam Kaba’s call to action, reminding us that the work of emancipation and liberation is ongoing, continuous, and ever-evolving. “We do this till we free us” collapses time into a continuum of actions because emancipatory movements and liberatory struggles are neither linear nor chronological: they reclaim our colonized time, freeze it, expand it, and adjust it to our needs. Through shared listening of selected speeches by leaders of political, cultural, and social revolutions, we will engage this continuum of liberation as imagined, articulated, and advanced all across the globe. Together, we will then expand on the (con)temporary spaces where time collapses, past, present, and future meet, and emancipatory visions and liberatory imaginaries can be shared, experienced, and collectively built upon.

ACT III: In Praxis

4:00-5:00pm
PSA / FUTURISMS

Engage in solidarity as praxis by collectively working to interrupt the many schemas, structures, and systems of power by reclaiming the public imaginary of an emancipatory future.

Public Service Announcement (PSA) writing wields a unique power: it distills complex ideas into concise, often startling statements that demand attention and redirect action. Jenny Holzer’s texts—ephemeral, direct, and projected into public space—interrupt everyday routines, forcing reflection on societal norms, power structures, and collective responsibility. When we think of PSA writing through the lens of futurism, this power is amplified. Futurist truisms don’t just diagnose the present; they project forward. They imagine worlds that could be, calling audiences to anticipate, rehearse, and participate in futures shaped by care, solidarity, and justice. Each line becomes a seed: a proposition, a warning, a call to action, a possibility that unfolds in the minds of readers and in the spaces they inhabit. In this way, PSA writing transforms public spaces into temporal laboratories, where words operate as catalysts for speculative thought and action.