Imperative Conditionals; Black Speculative thought and the co-designed futurity

The Centre for Digital Cultures at the University of Birmingham is delighted to welcome Florence Okoye, who will be discussing black speculative thought and futurity.

The talk begins at 5pm on Wednesday 7 November and will be followed by a drinks reception.

Who gets to live in the future? What kind of future are we looking for? When charting unknown territories, how can speculative fictions combine to help us imagine new intersections of humanity, technology and our environment? How can the critical, Afrofuturist gaze reclaim past and present to democratise the way we imagine and design our intersectional futures? This seminar extrapolates the logic of service design to investigate the possibilities of a radical human centred design methodology that incorporates the glitch feminism of Legacy Russell and the work of AfroFuturist thinkers and practitioners such as Ytasha Womack and Rasheedah Phillips.

Speaker biography

Florence Okoye is a User Experience Designer at the Natural History Museum in London. Since 2015 she has been events curator for AfroFutures_UK, an AfroFuturist collective exploring the intersection of race and technology. Her interests include critical theory, user centred design practice for complex systems and the power of zines! She is a fellow at Birmingham Open Media where her research focuses on community led approaches to pervasive computing and smart cities.

To register, please see our Eventbrite page: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/florence-okoye-discusses-black-speculative-thought-and-futurity-tickets-52255874728

This talk is part of a series of events organised by the Centre for Digital Cultures at the University of Birmingham this academic year. 

Image credit: Detail from cover artwork from Ytasha Womack, Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (2013)