Queer x Futures is a new platform for exploring and experimenting at the intersections of Queerness and Futuring. We aim to offer each other the space and the time to incubate new connections, ideas, and collaborations that advance alternative visions of the future that queer folks are facing today, and might inhabit tomorrow. afkcu
To kick off the platform, we are hosting an inaugural conversation series. Each conversation sits at a different intersection of Queerness and Futuring. You’re invited to join as many or few of these as you like. Where we go after those initial events is up to you, the people who come, but we’ll be here to offer the necessary support along the way.
Conversation 1 will be focused on ‘The Futures of Queer Space’. Our aim in this conversation is to develop deeper understandings of the drivers and trends that could plausibly influence the futures of ‘Queer Spaces’ the coming decades. We will co-create outputs that synthesise these insights, which could be used in future public engagements like visioning workshops and speculative installations. FTTH
While the productivity, visibility, and popularity of queer culture is arguably at an all-time high, many queer folks across Europe are facing new challenges everyday, like the recrudescence of hatred, violence, and regressive policy. This underscores the need to understand the evolving function and value of the spaces we find and use together: for refuge, for revelry, for reinvention. And yet with venue closures and event restrictions on the rise in Europe, fuelled by the impact of gentrification on the fabric of our cities, and by the impact of rapid technological change on our community dynamics, the future of queer spaces themselves is also uncertain.
Conversation 2 will be focused on ‘Queerness and Systems Change’. Our aim in this conversation is to develop deeper understandings of the ways that queerness — as a collection of ways of being in the world — can be(come) a means to empower, improve, or reframe the work of systems change. We hope to work towards a range of outputs that help to connect currently disconnected spheres of action and start new, unexpected conversations. CUV
From climate change to democratic backsliding, our world is undergoing complex transitions and faces uncertain futures. We sense that queer ways of seeing, knowing, and living are a fertile soil in which new approaches to these challenges are taking root. Regardless of anyone’s individual relationships to sexuality and gender, we believe that tending to this soil is a political act. From the personal work of inner reconciliation and transformation, to the collective work of imagining and organising alternatives, queering our lens on the worlds within and around us can illuminate those worlds, and the possibilities they contain, in new and surprising ways.
Conversation 3 will be focused on ‘Queering Futures Methods’.Our aim in this conversation is to develop deeper understandings of how both queer experience and queer theory might be applied to the work of ‘futuring’.We aim to prototype new practices and tools that enable us to forecast, envision, and pursue plausible alternative futures that better reflect queer perspectives. SwYZ
Strategic foresight emerged from an unlikely marriage of disciplines, has grown to contain a fractious diversity of rival factions, and is still routinely challenged with claims of bias and bids for reinvention today. So far, though, precious few attempts have been made to understand what queer ways of being and knowing might offer the field. We sense the potential for new approaches and techniques to take root that avail of queerness as a way to reframe the future in useful ways, whether that’s by surfacing and affirming the importance of queer justice and queer culture, or simply calling on the difference that queerness represents to inspire novelty or mount critiques of prevailing narratives.
We’re aiming for QxF to be an open and collaborative space that brings a diversity of experiences and perspectives into generative dialogue. Ultimately, if you’re interested in these topics, you’re welcome to join us: no one is “not allowed”. But there are voices we would especially love to welcome into to this first round of conversations:
While we welcome voices from around the world, the focus of our platform at this stage is on queer folks based in Europe. This is deliberately to avoid projecting a euro-centric vision onto a purportedly global conversation, and to focus our efforts at an actionable scale. (We can speak to our own geographies, and support other voices to speak to their own, but we can’t to speak for them. Are you involved in similar conversations elsewhere in the world? Let’s link up and find our how we can support each other!) We are also excited by the existing queer community infrastructure that can be tapped into at the European scale, with many Europe-wide initiatives already weaving folks and organisations into networks and communities, representing powerful political blocs and cohesive cultural movements.
This first iteration of QxF is brought you by Ollie and Eva, building on many
conversations with peers over the course of the past year.
Ollie Bream McIntosh (he/him) (London /
Brussels) is a queer PhD and freelance researcher and designer working at the intersections of
systems change, collective intelligence, and civic technology. He is deeply curious about how
ecosystems come together to imagine, sense, and create better futures in novel ways, and he
loves bridging between different methods, disciplines, and worlds.
Eva Oosterlaken (she/her) (Rotterdam) is a
queer researcher, designer and co-founder of Futurall, a creative studio that combines creative storytelling with
values-based collective reimagining for systems change. She is deeply curious about the variety
of ways people experience and make the world, and she loves bringing multiple threads together
as beautiful and compelling wholes.
We are very open to the platform shape-shifting
over time, depending on where the energy is in the system. If you would like to be involved with
the future of the platform in some way let us know. *
To stay in touch with QxF and receive our updates, you can use this form.
For any
questions, ideas, proposals, feedback etc. please don’t hesitate to reach out to Ollie or Eva!
We’ve been steadily collecting links, essays, artworks, books, and films that live between Queerness and Futures. Many of these were suggested to us by you, so thank you! This list can never be complete. If you have any to add please do send these as well.
Web design by Eva Oosterlaken
Fonts
by
Maksym Kobuzan ‘Nyght Serif’, Tunera Type
Foundry
Ariel Martín Pérez ‘Teranoptia’, Tunera Type
Foundry