Alternative Histories: addressing the challenge of systemic imagination through allohistorical speculation

In this workshop we invite participants to engage in a scaffolded practice of allohistorical alternate history speculation. Speculative pasts and alternate histories have a rich tradition of being used to interrogate the ethical, cultural, intellectual, political, and economic power structures from history that shape our present world and constrain our future (Pargman et al., 2017; Tanenbaum et al., 2012). These kinds of speculative methods parallel practices of restorying – a process by which marginalized and oppressed people narrate alternate pasts in order to recenter their voices in the narrative of history (Shaw, 2020; Stornaiuolo & Thomas, 2018; Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016). Restorying, when integrated into pedagogical practice, creates opportunities for students from marginalized backgrounds to imagine alternate pasts that empower them to inhabit identities and future narratives that have been systemically denied to them by existing power structures.

In our work we have been developing authoring tools and templates to support processes of speculative imagination, working with students and artists to construct a “wireframe” template for a specific kind of restorying. In this workshop we invite participants to engage in an act of personal restorying using our template. This exercise will introduce participants to methods of research and practice grounded in speculative imagination, provide them with an understanding of the role that restorying exercises can play within a pedagogical context, and allow them an opportunity to participate in their own act of transformative restorying.