Agenda

Author and activist adrienne maree brown speaks on political strategies, healing, Octavia Butler, and the roles of love and liberation in building non-eugenic futures, with Cara Page of Changing Frequencies.

The host will open and close the day by weaving a synthesis of themes from the presentations, artistic performances, cultural work and dialogues to take place on the convening days theme of Non-Eugenic Futures. 

Welcome to Assembly for the Future, with our host Alex K and First Speaker Alice Wong. Disabled oracles have existed throughout time. What will they say in 2029, when some disabilities have disappeared due to technology and cures? Listen to the tale from Alice Wong, the Last Disabled Oracle, and the wisdom she shares from her ancestors. This Assembly took place on 6 August 2020 as part of BLEED Festival, commissioned, by the City of Melbourne through Arts House as part of BLEED 2020. Assembly for the Future is the first project of The Things We Did Next, co-created by Alex Kelly & David Pledger and produced by Not Yet It’s Difficult & Something Somewhere INC.

San Francisco’s 2019 Poet Laureate Kim Shuck reads a supplication for all of the blessings of nature.

CODED BIAS explores the fallout of MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini’s discovery that facial recognition does not see dark-skinned faces accurately, and her journey to push for the first-ever legislation in the U.S. to govern against bias in the algorithms that impact us all. 

Confronting the role of technology, big data, and surveillance, this conversation will address the implications of medical and policing technologies, public health surveillance used to vilify communities.  Exploring how and why we must challenge and dismantle these systems to interrupt dangerous eugenic narratives and violence.  Featuring movement organizers Hamid Khan of Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, Bita Amani of Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, and Courtni Andrews of Equal Health—with Brian Tate of Tate Strategies as moderator. 

The host will open and close the day by weaving a synthesis of themes from the presentations, artistic performances, cultural work and dialogues to take place on the convening days theme of Legacies of Eugenics. 

Featuring movement leaders, scholars and practitioners who are deconstructing and dismantling eugenics through new practices and traditions that are audacious and change setting. Dawn Wooten, LPN, also known as the ICE Whistleblower of the Irwin County Detention Center, Dr. Michelle Morse of Equal Health, Merle McGee Chief Equity Engagement Officer of Planned Parenthood of Greater NY, Sahar Aziz, Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School, and moderator, Tamika Middleton of Winds of Change Consulting & JustGeorgia, will speak to movement building strategies and community led interventions that dare to interrupt the erasure of those most impacted by eugenics.

Ebony Noelle Golden discusses her impactful and inspiring work with Jonathan McCrory, Artistic Director of the National Black Theatre

Some of us no longer fight with guns.  We are children of the sun. With revolution in mind, this is a visual ceremony.  Here, I ask what it means for the hunted to haunt.  I ask how the ghosted ghost with unavoidable light.  Perplexing and obtuse.  On purpose and never on cue.  SPECTER OF SUNLIGHT// is a telling and a witnessing of how Black women multiply themselves to be many in the collective work and ritual of liberation.  In intimate and impactful ways.  Waking the earth beneath them.  You hear?  They are working on this side and the others.   This work is a work that invites the “allness” of us.  Legions of light-bringers that surround.  Teeth glinted.  A miracle in their eyes.  This moment, I dedicate to my dear, too soon departed, sister of the heart Elandria Williams who took her last breath strategizing Black liberation.