Shaping Change
Ayana Jamieson, the founder of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network, co-organized a three-day conference with me called "Shaping Change: Remembering Octavia E. Butler through Archives, Art, and Worldmaking," which took place at the Cross-Cultural Center at the University of California, San Diego, June 3-5, 2016. Jamieson has the deepest knowledge of Butler's papers at the Huntington Library of anyone that I know. She held a prestigious Helen Bing Fellowship there to continue her research for Butler's biography, which she is currently writing. She also leads the One Book/One College Program on Butler's Dawn at Pasadena City College. Butler's family states in a letter that they "especially wish to acknowledge and commend the scholarship, expertise, and guidance of Ms. Ayana Jamieson." Her knowledge of Butler's work and life as well as her expertise about the artists and scholars who are doing cutting-edge work in response to Butler was crucial for the success of the conference, which was an historic gathering of artists, writers, scholars, students, and activists inspired by Butler's memory to shape change and make a better world. It included an Undergraduate Research Summit and a Graduate Student Summit. The conference also sparked significant attendance and participation from community members.
We received $32,500 in funding, including $20,000 from the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, $5000 from UCSD's Culture, Art, and Technology Writing Program at Sixth College, $3000 from the Division of Social Science, $1500 from the Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, $500 from Theater and Dance, $500 from Music, $300 from Ethnic Studies. $250 from Critical Gender Studies, $250 from the Black Studies Project, $250 from Psychology, $200 from Education Studies, $250 from Literature, and $250 from the Division of Arts and Humanities. The Clarion Workshop and the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network were also co-sponsors.
Shaping Change Conference Schedule
All events will take place at the Cross-Cultural Center on the 2nd Floor of the Price Center East, UCSD. Registration and panels will take place in La Comunidad Room. Conference-related art, speculative design projects, and visions of the future created by Sixth College’s CAT (Culture, Art, Technology) 3 students will on display in the ArtSpace room.
Friday, June 03, 2016
8:45 am – 9:45 am
Registration and Continental Breakfast
10:00 am – 10:45 am
Welcome - Shelley Streeby & Ayana Jamieson
Screening - Invisible Universe footage and Q & A with M. Asli Dukan
11:00 am – 12: 15 pm
Panel - Latin American and Latinx Futurisms after Octavia E. Butler
Curtis Marez, “Future Lines of Flight: Octavia E. Butler, the Royal Chicano Air Force, and the United Farm Workers Movement”
Beatrice Pita and Rosaura Sánchez, “Octavia Butler's Kindred Spirits: Latino Futurisms in the Work of Mexican Speculative Fiction Writers Trujillo Múñoz and Schwartz”
Pepe Rojo and Grant Leuning, “Dispatches from the Magonista Front: Experiential Fictions”
12:15 pm - 1:15 pm
UCSD Undergrad Research Summit: Sixth College’s CAT 3 Students Imagining the Future in 2066
1:15 pm to 2:30 pm
Writers Expanding the Genre
Chair: Lisa Bolekaja
Ted Chiang, “Technology and the Narrative of the Self”
Nisi Shawl, reading an excerpt of her upcoming novel Everfair
2:45 pm to 4:15 pm
Panel - Borderlands of Science and Fiction
Elizabeth Losh, “Survival Kit for Speculative Design”
Emily Rose Schwab, “ ‘Take It Beyond the Limits’: Exploring Connections Between Science Fiction and Literacy Education”
Dagmar Van Engen, “ ‘Learn and Run!’: Fugitive Pedagogy in the Xenogenesis Series”
Lauren Marie Taylor and Alan Clark, “Speculations on the Cultural Influences of the Young Octavia Butler: The Space Race, The Cold War and The Civil Rights Movement”
Kim Kirkpatrick, “Voice and Language as a ‘Place of Struggle’ ”
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm
Panel - Worldmaking with the Clarion Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholars
Shelley Streeby, Lisa Bolekaja, Amin Chehelnabi, Sophia Echavarria, Melanie West
6:00 pm to 6:30 pm
Dinner
6:30 pm to 8:30 pm
UCSD Writers Showcase: Fiction Inspired by Octavia E. Butler
“Speculative Improprieties,” Anna Joy Springer, Pepe Rojo
Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, Tae Hwang and Melinda Barnadas, Paola Capo-Garcia, Amanda Solomon, Shelley Streeby, “Watching TV in 2066”
Open Mic: Rorie Still with “Octavia Butler Project: Seeing Star Children”; Brittany Johnson; Ricardo Dominguez’s CAT 3 students’ flash fiction, and more.
Saturday, June 04, 2016
8:30 am – 9:00 am
Continental Breakfast
9:00 am – 10:15 am
Panel - Resistance and Revolution: Post-Apocalyptic Yearnings
Esther Choi, “The Non-Profit Industrial Complex as Dystopia: Insights from the Revolution Will Not Be Funded and Octavia's Brood”
Jeanelle Horcasitas, “ ‘I’m Valerie Rye’: Body Language, World Building and Hope in Octavia Butler’s "Speech Sounds”
Jeanine Webb, “Wild Seed, Fledgling and Bodies That Resist”
Clayton Colmon, “The (Post-)Human Dance: Digital Humanities, Afrofuturism and Octavia Butler’s Patternist Series”
10:30 am – 11:45 am
Panel – Applications of Black Women’s Futurist Thought
Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha, “Reflections on Octavia’s Brood”
Olaronke Akinmowo, “Free Black Woman’s Library: Using Books to Build and Liberate Community”
Rasheedah Phillips, “Black Quantum Futurism”
Krista Franklin, "Holding the Pattern: Visual Language in Response to the Work of Octavia E. Butler"
11:45 am to 1:00 pm
Lunch Break
1:00 pm to 2:00 pm
Panel – Transforming Humanity
Chair: Moya Bailey
Alexis Lothian, “All That You Change: Shaping a Transformative Digital Humanities”
Aimee Bahng, "Plasmodial Improprieties: Octavia Butler, Slime Molds, and Imagining a Femi-Queer Commons"
2:15 pm to 3:30 pm
Roundtable
“Affect in the Archive, or Why I Sometimes Cried in the Bathroom of the Huntington Library”
Sami Schalk, Moya Bailey, Cassandra Jones, Ayana Jamieson
3:45 pm to 4:30 pm
Workshop
Katie Seitz, “Shaping Our Legacies: Using Butler to Vision Archival Futures”
4:45 pm to 6:00 pm
Panel – Reimaging Art, Family, Legacy, and Archival Futures
Ella Maria Ray, “Sankofic Meditations: Listening to an Africana Griot Using Fired-clay”
Katherine Agard and Murktarat Yussuff, “Reimagining Family and Genealogy”
Monica Hand, “Trilogy: Three Miniature Handmade Books Inspired by Octavia E. Butler Tomes”
6:00 pm to 6:15 pm
Reflections – Ayana Jamieson and Shelley Streeby
Sunday, June 05, 2016
8:30 am – 9:00 am
Continental Breakfast
9:00 am – 10:15 am
Panel - Parables of Change and Survival
Kim Hester Williams, “Earthseeds of Change: Post-Apocalyptic Mythmaking in The Book of Eli and Octavia Butler’s Womanist Ecologies”
Olaronke Akinmowo, “Lauren Olamina’s Life Tips”
10:30 am – 11: 30 am
Workshop
Allison Simon, “Manifesting Change: A Search for Ourselves through Time & Space”
11:30 pm to 1:00 pm
Community Council and Closing Ritual
Welcome - Shelley Streeby & Ayana Jamieson
Screening - Invisible Universe footage and Q & A with M. Asli Dukan
"Framed through the POV of a time traveling Archivist, the documentary explores 150 years of speculative fiction literature, its origins, developments, key personalities and current state, all through the perspective of Black people and history. The documentary demonstrates how the genres, which were premised on the ideology of white supremacy, have been adopted and adapted by Black writers as a form of artistic resistance for envisioning different worlds and futures.
The story is revealed to the audience through the comprehensive, independent research of the filmmaker, M. Asli Dukan, who began HD production in 2011. Ms. Dukan has compiled an extensive interviewee list of Black creators who have been producing SF works where Black people not only exist in the future, but are powerful shapers of their own realities, whether in magical lands, dystopian settings, or on distant worlds. In addition, she has documented an impressive number of academic, community and arts events dedicated to the work and analysis of Black SF, as well as to building connections between creators, organizers, academics and fans. In the past decade, the filmmaker has documented the cultural shift around Black SF and its development into an informal network and movement.
This feature length documentary includes interviews with Black writers of SF like Samuel R. Delany, the late Octavia E. Butler, Steven Barnes, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi Okorafor, Brandon Massey and N.K. Jemisin, actors like Nichelle Nichols and Wesley Snipes, filmmakers like Julie Dash and Ernest R. Dickerson, cultural organizers like Yumy Odom and Rasheedah Phillips, scholars like Moya Bailey and Ayana Jamieson, academics/artists like John Jennings and Nettrice Gaskins, social justice workers/artists like adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha, as well as numerous other filmmakers, artists, academics, archivists, fans - a virtual who’s who in Black speculative fiction."
Panel - Latin American and Latinx Futurisms after Octavia E. Butler
UCSD Undergrad Research Summit: Sixth College’s CAT 3 Students Imagining the Future in 2066
Writers Expanding the Genre
Nisi Shawl
