How might a world beyond gendered binaries actually reshape our built environment? What are the archival histories of this world? How can critiques of normative structures inform new interpretations of the built environment? And how might such ideas lead to less static planning frameworks and defy dominant planning histories and logics of (re)production?

Join us on Thursday 25 July as Lafayette Cruise and Sage Gerson present on the topic of Queer Pedagogies. The talk will be an immersive exploration into the creative practices of worldbuilding. This will be followed by a conversation with Janus Lafontaine Carboni, S.E. Eisterer, Favor Idika, Sergio Villanueva Preston, and Malcolm Rio, organizers of Toolkit for Today: Cross Wor(l)ds/Queer Wor(l)ds to discuss practical strategies for building socially and environmentally just worlds through narrative and archival exploration. The event will surface the objectives and lessons of the week-long workshop with doctoral students, where queer methods will ignite creativity and uncover unexpected histories.

This talk is free and open to the public.

Lafayette Cruise is an urban planner and futurist. Cruise’s practice engages projects at the intersection of urban planning and speculative fiction. He leverages the radical imagination and world-building capabilities of speculative fiction and the multidisciplinary, strategic implementation tools of urban planning in order to imagine, plan, and build a more just, liberating, and sustainable future.

Sage Gerson is a settler scholar who researches and teaches in the fields of Indigenous literatures and ecologies; environmental justice; twentieth and twenty-first century literatures; the energy humanities and infrastructure studies; Indigenous, Black, and Women of Colour feminisms; anticolonial and decolonial theory; and futurisms, futurity, and speculative fiction. At RISD, in addition to teaching in Literary Arts and Studies, she also teaches as part of the Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies (NCSS) and Global Arts and Cultures (GAC) graduate programs, as well as the NCSS undergraduate concentration.

The Toolkit for Today workshop is made possible in part by the support of Jean Labatut Memorial Fund through Princeton University’s School of Architecture.