Thank you for your interest in the Black Trans Ethical World(un)making Lab. The 2024-25 application is now closed. Applicants will be informed by mid-October 2024.
an experimental, local-national collective of black trans artists, scholars, and activists engaging their moral imagination toward more just worlds
The Black Trans Ethical World(un)making Lab consists of three virtual workshops and visioning + practice sessions over the course of the year that serve as opportunities for community-building and for co-working on each participants’ project/thought/provocation/invitation toward black trans ethical world(un)making. The Lab will run October 2024-May 2025.
The three workshops address the following themes: 1) community care and collective healing, 2) moral imagination, and 3) (un)making ethical worlds. The BTEW Lab is a space grounded in theory and practice toward countering the disembodied, anti-black and anti-trans, individualist ways of being and becoming often forwarded in many scholarly, artistic, and activist spaces to deepen into black trans epistemologies that value black trans wholeness, feeling, collaboration, and mutuality.
The aim of this Lab is mutual edification among activists, artists, and academics; broadening conceptions of the religious/spiritual/sacred/ethical work that is done to heal communities and bring about the liberative; disrupting notions of transness as antithetical to the religious/spiritual/sacred/ethical; and creating space for attending to both the joys of and affronts to black trans life/lives/living/aliveness.
The Black Trans Ethical World(un)making Lab is made possible by black trans imagination and co-sponsored by the Department of Black Study at the University of California, Riverside and the University of California Humanities Research Institute.
More Details
Eligibility
The Lab is co-created with artists, activists, and/or scholars who are black trans and working on a project that allows them to reflect with others on the theme of ethical world(un)making. It is open to:
1. Artists
3+ years of practice
2. Scholars
MFA and post-doctoral scholars in the humanities
Early or mid-career
Institutionally affiliated and independent scholars welcome
3. Activists
Connected and active in their local community
3+ years of practice
Benefits
The Lab offers:
Community: The Lab is a space for practice, collaboration, co-dreaming, thinking, feeling, and strategizing with persons committed to living into black trans thriving and more liberative worlds. The Lab also provides opportunity for co-working, workshopping ideas, and potential for programming in partnership with the Department of Black Study at University of California, Riverside.
Project stipend: Participants will receive a project stipend of $800. If University of California faculty, the stipend will be $500 in research funds.
Experimental & Reflective Space: The Lab is not outcome focused but invested in the process of collective reflection and creating. It is grounded in imaginative, liberative praxes and the magic that occurs when this visioning and practicing is done together. The Visioning + Practice Sessions serve this aim.
Expectations
The 2024-2025 cohort of the lab will meet October 2024-May 2025. The exact dates will be determined after participants are selected. Participants must attend each of the three virtual meetings that will be approximately three hours long. In part, these meetings will be opportunities to engage the workshop themes [ a) community care and collective healing, b) moral imagination, and c) (un)making ethical worlds)and to be in dialogue regarding the participant’s creative project/process.
Access application here.
