Wild Futures: Taking Flight - Harriet Tubman Day Commemoration 2025
Monday, March 10, 2025 1:00 pm - 6:00 pm
The David C. Driskell Center, and Online
Wild Futures: Taking Flight offers a chance to reflect on how knowledge of the environment and ecology played crucial roles in the ways that freedom seekers pursued their escape from enslavement.
In narratives of freedom, we find an extensive engagement with bondage (“The Plantation”) and, on the other hand, arrival (“The North”). That said, the middle, that space in between, can sometimes be either obscured or ignored. What, then, in a practical sense, did seeking freedom require? How did freedom seekers deploy their knowledge of their natural environment to escape bondage? How were these knowledges acquired? And what kinds of responsibilities do we have to seek out and understand this knowledge as expertise?
This year, we in WGSS invite you into a conversation about what it means to make yourself ready to take flight, the kinds of knowledge integral to taking flight, and how these knowledges were deployed in seeking freedom. How was the wild/wilderness both an accomplice and constraint in these processes?
Wild Futures: Taking Flight, then, builds on multiple iterations of wild - metaphoric, literal, ontological – to consider why and how liberation calls us to wrestle with the wild and to be wild as integral to what it means to be free; and, to invoke Mariame Kaba, we want to reflect on the ways that these historical antecedents can function as a kind of technology that holds clues for contemporary modes of activism.
Thursday, April 3, 2025 5:00 pm - 7:30 pm
