"Imagining Better Futures"seminar from TASS Anti-Oppressive Studies allows students to explore how we get where we want to go and also to acknowledge how the legacies of racial injustice may continue to contour the possibilities before us. Students dive into future studies as well as into Afro-futurist science fiction, visual art etc., to create and curate museum from the future.

Non-credit

Residential

Accepts International Students

Financial Aid

What is TASS-AOS?
This summer, high school sophomores and juniors (“rising juniors” and “rising seniors”) will participate in six-week educational programs on topics in the humanities and social sciences, geared towards exploring the ways in which white supremacy and other oppressive powers have shaped social structures.

Telluride works with faculty to create exciting courses designed to inspire young people to explore the histories, politics, literature, art, and other areas within the humanities and social sciences through anti-racist and anti-oppressive frameworks.

Imagining Better Futures
Seminar Description: This seminar invites students to imagine better futures. “There is,” Octavia Butler tells us, “nothing new under the sun. But there are new suns.” In light of Butler’s insight, this course searches for “new suns,” or the infinite possibilities for creating futures brighter than our pasts and presents.

The search for better futures, however, encounters a self-evident difficulty. Karl Marx writes that “social revolution…can draw its poetry only from the future, not from the past.” But how can we study (or, in Marx’s words, “draw poetry”) from the future, which, technically, does not yet exist?

In order to answer this question—and, ultimately, to hone our capacity to plan and dream the actions today that will make possible better tomorrows—this seminar introduces the dynamic field of futures studies. With its foundational interest in re-imagining better and more just futures, futures studies scholarship allows us to pose practically minded questions about how we get where we want to go.

The field of futures studies, however, has not paid enough attention to how the legacies and reverberations of racial injustice continue to contour the possibilities and impossibilities before us. And so we pair readings in futures studies with capacious reading of Afro-futurist science fiction, poetry, and visual art, Native-futurist short films, coding projects, comics, and readings from fields ranging from law to sociology to physics.

The seminar begins by taking an inventory of your personal images of possible futures. From here, we imagine preferable (and cataclysmic) futures alongside futurists and creatives such as Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, N.K. Jemisin and Jamal Campbell, Joshua Whitehead, Skawennati, and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. Our conversation culminates in the creation and curation of a museum from the future.

What will I get out of TASS-AOS?
At TASS-AOS, you will improve your reading, writing, speaking, and critical thinking skills as you explore your interests in and out of the classroom. In order to encourage students in their love of learning, the program does not assign grades. You will also learn about and explore topics and ideas within the humanities and social sciences through an anti-racist, anti-oppressive lens. Finally, you will gain experience with community living and democratic decision-making.

"Telluride Association Summer Seminars in Anti-Oppressive Studies (TASS-AOS). Imagining Better Futures "

Jun 26 - Aug 06

6 weeks

Residential

0 USD

TASS Is Completely Free!
We cover all of the program costs—tuition, books, room and board, and field trips—for every student. If you need, we can help pay for all or part of your travel costs to and from the program.

Financial Aid

We understand that you may normally spend time in the summer working at a job, taking care of family members, or supporting your family in other ways. If this is the situation for you, we can provide additional financial aid to help replace earnings from your summer job. Financial aid decisions are made separately from decisions about program admission, so needing financial aid won’t affect whether you are accepted to the program.