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Post-X Info Session

Friday, May 1, 2020, 2:00-3:00pm

Please join us on a Zoom call to discuss Future Cafe’s call for entries for its forthcoming Post-X publication. Future Café student coordinators and 3CT staff will be available to share ideas and answer questions. We are excited to embark on this new iteration of Future Café with you.

The circumstances of COVID-19 appear as having an eclipsing immediacy; exponential curves and rapidly unfolding news cycles seem to overshadow the importance of a “far” future beyond the next few months or weeks.

Contrary to this, consideration of the far future has never been more relevant. The pandemic and quarantine have revealed the potential for rapid, planetary-scale re-evaluations of public modes of being, social virtuality, health, technological surveillance, and governance strategies.

In order to contribute to this urgent conversation, Future Café invites University of Chicago undergraduates to submit essays, artistic meditations, or other experimental projects, to be highlighted in a forthcoming publication, Post-X.

We are especially interested in amplifying undergraduate perspectives which place the particulars of the COVID-19 crisis in the longer perspective of deep futures on the order of hundreds of years. What far-future trajectories are being revealed at this very moment? Should exposure to rapid change and crisis force us to think about the arc towards the long future differently?

Past Future Café events have generated a wealth of imaginings of what the future may hold—some optimistic, some deeply pessimistic. The goal of this project is twofold: to invite past participants to dwell further with the ideas put forward this year, and to discover new and cutting-edge perspectives from those who have never attended one of our events.

We will be holding two informal Zoom information sessions on Friday, May 1 at 2pm Central, and Friday, May 15 at 6:30pm Central, and we are aiming for final publication at the end of the quarter. We can share ideas on these deep questions and projects to reflect. In keeping with the open-ended approach of Future Café, we want to provide the widest possible latitude in terms of considering the far future—both traditional forms of media and more experimental ones are enthusiastically welcomed. We are excited to embark on this new iteration of Future Café with you.

Send your completed work to postxzine@gmail.com along with a short bio. The deadline is midnight on Sunday, May 31 (updated 5/19/20), Feel free to reach out with any questions.

Save the date: We’ll celebrate the launch of Post-X with a Zoom event on Thursday, June 4 at 6:30pm Central. More details coming soon…

This event is open to all University of Chicago undergraduates.