Lauren Williams
Lauren Williams (she/they) is a Detroit-based designer, researcher, and educator who works with visual and interactive media to understand, critique, and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power over Black life and death. She currently teaches in the University of Michigan’s Taubman School of Architecture and Urban Planning + the Digital Studies Institute. Going forward, she’s finding ways to align her capacities with revolutionary movements that build toward different socioeconomic systems entirely and usher in new dimensions of power and freedom altogether.
Presentations from Facing Race 2024
Art Gallery
Speakers: Brock Seals, Taishona Carpenter, Simiya Sudduth, Lawrence Kyere, Chassidy Tiner, RottenCorr, Gonz Jove, Billie Allen, Quintana Chatman, Autumn Breon, Charlyn Magdaline Griffith-Oro, Lauren Williams, Brian Ellison, Anu Yadav, Ino Adjani Kodjo, Lindy Drew, Muslim Counterpublics Lab, Gabriel JehuPresentations from Facing Race 2020
Imagining the economic liberation of people of color: Not speculative fiction!
People of color are living an economic nightmare. This interactive workshop invites participants to imagine and explore what our economy would look like if this nation centered the economic liberation of people of color. Because racism has always been profitable, we have never experienced an economy free from extraction and exploitation. As the seductive guise of neoliberalism breaks down, we, as people of color, have an opportunity to create and design a new economic philosophy that delivers freedom, dignity, choice and belonging in the coming generation. Our goals with this workshop are to:
Create a sense of ownership and agency among activists about solutions to economic oppression.
Identify ways of telling the story of a new economy; allowing space and time for dreaming and imagining a new economy.
Inspire actions that wield collective power and use this story as a basis for demands
Liberation in a Generation will share our take on the systems and policies that uphold our current Oppression Economy and possible values and policies that could usher in a Liberation Economy. We will then invite participants to create stories based on a set of predetermined fictional newspaper headlines set in 2050. We will facilitate a fun and engaging process to coach participants through the development of a story and an artifact that depicts the things that have happened to make this headline possible. We will share those stories, draw out themes and discuss how these do or do not connect to our current realities.
Speakers: Solana Rice, Jeremie Greer, Lauren Williams