“Black imagination is a tool of survival. It creates new worlds out of fragments, futures out of ruins.” — Saidiya Hartman

What does it mean to dream when the world insists on collapse? How do we hold onto fragments, and how do we make futures out of ruins? This seminar explores imagination as an act of resistance and survival, a tool for care, community, and creation.

We will center joy, play, and radical imagination—not as escape, but as practice. We will lean into imagination as a space that refuses extraction and insists on healing, accountability, and collective invention.

Adrienne maree brown reminds us that “all organizing is science fiction.” Octavia E. Butler teaches us that dreaming is not luxury but necessity. Christina Sharpe asks us to think of living “in the wake” as both rupture and possibility. Sun Ra sang of other worlds already here, while José Esteban Muñoz insisted on the utopias that glimmer in the “not-yet.”

This seminar is structured as a practice-based workshop where participants experiment, present, and exchange throughout the semester. Each student will be expected to develop a new work—whether performance, video, installation, text, or hybrid form—that emerges from the questions and methods explored in class. Together we will invent ways of working, learning, and unlearning, and imagine how art can serve as both resistance and rehearsal for other futures.

How can we imagine beyond ruin without denying the realities of violence and erasure? How do we practice joy and survival in the same breath? What kinds of tools—material, sonic, embodied—help us to resist and to dream? The seminar invites each participant to engage these questions through practice, experimentation, and collaboration, culminating in the production of a new work to be shared at the end of the semester.