FARAOYSC: BUILDING ALTERNATIVE WORLDS THROUGH JOY

Day02. Thursday, July 08, 18:45 EDT

Faraoyść (faw-row-she-tchi) is a portmanteau neologism that describes the moment when oppression appears to be coming to an end and a liberated world feels within reach. This talk will discuss the possible uses and limitations of faraoyść as a method to expand our capacity to build new liberated worlds for ourselves, laying the groundwork for systemic change, resisting damage-centered narratives, and contributing to the global decolonial project.

Faraošć (faw-row-she-tchi) is a portmanteau neologism that describes the moment when oppression appears to be coming to an end and a liberated world feels within reach. It is a combination of three of our languages: // Arabic: farah, English: joy, Polish: radość // as an exercise of translinguistic belonging, and came out of our experiences in our home countries: the Lebanese thawra, Strajk Kobiet in Poland, and the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States.

Our research demonstrated that when centering faraošć while imagining alternative worlds, participants create a shared relational liminal moment that sprang from their shared emotions evoked by their own memories. Once combined, these memories and our co-creative process expanded the boundaries of their Situated Imaginings, which are the systemic frameworks that restrains how one might imagine the ways the world has, is, will, and must work.

We tested our praxis of faraošć through two workshops at the UNESCO Futures Literacy Summit and later with Negligence Refugees from Lebanon by using memory recall, storytelling, naming and language generation, speculative object creation, and altering-led worldbuilding. We will use our time to present this research and facilitate a discussion about the possible uses and limitations of faraošć as a method to expand our capacity to build new liberated worlds for ourselves, which lays the groundwork for systemic change, resist damage-centered narratives, and contribute to the global decolonial project.

Julia W. Szagdaj is a Polish experimentalist, researcher and transmedia artist living in New York. Selected as YICCA 2020 finalist with her work, Accentful American Anthem. She holds an MFA in Transdisciplinary Design from Parsons School of Design at the New School and has a BA in Sustainable Communication from Copenhagen‚ KEA Design & Technology University. She has a background in nonprofits and social innovation, winning numerous Polish and European recognitions for her social start-up ‚RezerwujSport‚ (Dolno Öski Gryf by PwC, Sport UP! 2018, EU-XCEL...), which helped integrate technology into public schools.

Anna Lathrop is a futurist and design facilitator whose work lies at the intersection of climate- justice and decolonizing design. She has consulted and presented workshops at the UNESCO Futures Literacy Summit, Patagonia, and is a mentor in the Emerging Scholars program at Design and Culture Journal. She is also a teacher in the Strategic Design and Management (BBA) program at The New School. She received her MFA in Transdisciplinary Design from Parsons School of Design at the New School in 2021, is a member of the Impact Entrepreneur Fellowship, and a recipient of the John L. Tishman scholarship.

Nour Abou Jaoude is a Lebanese Strategic Designer who won numerous advertising awards (Cannes Lions, Dubai Lynx, D&AD...) through the #Undress522 campaign fighting for women's rights in Lebanon and Tunisia. She holds an MFA in Transdisciplinary Design from Parsons School of Design at the New School, where she focuses on creative thinking and implementation of human-centric behavior through research and foresight strategy. She believes that system change exists in the act of translation and language manipulation. She also has a BA in Graphic Design and Advertising from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts.