CSUN College of Humanities Worldbuilding Festival
About this Event
Worldbuilding uses stories, culture, creativity, and technology to explore how communities are imagined, shaped, and transformed -- and how we might envision different futures.
The Worldbuilding Festival features sixteen different workshops on topics ranging from gaming to speculative fiction to civic hacking to data mapping and digital storytelling. A display area features current worldbuilding projects and information about programs that encourage this work.
This festival is free and open to the public!
Purchase free tickets to reserve a seat!
Saturday, November 7
🕑: 01:00 PM - 01:20 PM
Welcome (Flintridge Room)
Host: Colleen Tripp
Info: What is worldbuilding?
🕑: 01:30 PM - 02:20 PM
Building a Writing Community: Lessons from Television Writers' Rooms
Host: John Lynch
Info: Professor John Lynch shares what he learned working in the writers' rooms of television shows including That '70s Show and 3rd Rock from the Sun—where collaboration, brainstorming, and learning to build on someone else's ideas were part of the creative process.
🕑: 01:30 PM - 02:20 PM
Reclaiming the Fluid World: Worldbuilding a Final Fight in D&D
Host: Leilani Hall & Koa Johnson
Info: Players will fight the final battle against a Tyrant who has locked a fluid and adaptive world under evil magic that forces it into rigid, unchanging systems. During this play session, players will engage in equal parts worldbuilding and battle: they will imagine and create the changes their characters make to reclaim a fluid world, while also seeing how these changes influence the final battle against the Tyrant.
🕑: 01:30 PM - 02:20 PM
CSUN Escape Through Time (First Room)
Host: Kalani Heinz
Info: Groups will race against each other to solve different puzzles so that they can transport themselves from the past to back to the present day. Throughout their journey, they will learn about the history of the area including the development of history as well as significant historical events that took place on the CSUN campus.
🕑: 01:30 PM - 02:20 PM
CSUN Escape Through Time (Second Room)
Host: Kalani Heinz
Info: Groups will race against each other to solve different puzzles so that they can transport themselves from the past to back to the present day. Throughout their journey, they will learn about the history of the area including the development of history as well as significant historical events that took place on the CSUN campus.
🕑: 02:30 PM - 03:20 PM
Building New Worlds with the Tools of Philosophy
Host: Andrew Stewart, Justin Kitchen, Johnathan Flowers
Info: This interactive session consists of a short panel of flash-talks, followed by an interactive game exploring the concepts of justice and the ideal society. The panel will consist of 5-minute presentations from our faculty that describe how philosophers have engaged in world-building as part of the history of philosophy and of philosophical inquiry.
🕑: 02:30 PM - 03:20 PM
The World that Writes Back: A Participatory Worldbuilding Experience
Host: Rebecca Hyde-Gonzalez
Info: This workshop invites participants to discover what happens when an imagined world passes from one creator to another. Rather than beginning with maps, histories, or predetermined rules, participants begin with a single threshold: a door, path, border, window, sound, symbol, or other opening into a world that does not yet exist. The emerging worlds then circulate among participants. With each exchange, a new creator must first interpret what is already there before contributing something new. When the worlds return to their original creators, they will be recognizable but transformed.
🕑: 02:30 PM - 03:20 PM
Writing Los Angeles: Creative Interventions of Secondhand Images
Host: Kim Young/Northridge Review
Info: As a literary magazine deeply rooted in place and community, the editors of The Northridge Review invite participants to a creative writing session focused on writing Los Angeles beyond what historian Norman Klein calls the proliferating set of “secondhand images” that so often represent our metropolis. In this session, we will examine received images of LA—the beach at sunset, Hollywood, skid row—and participants will be prompted to look beyond surfaces so they can craft imagery that is vibrant, complex, and linguistically rich.
🕑: 02:30 PM - 03:20 PM
Fog, Stench, and Repetition: Three Ways to Worldbuild in Fiction Writing
Host: Chris Higgs
Info: Participants in this interactive creative writing workshop will examine the openings of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House and Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume to learn three important techniques of worldbuilding through particular attention on weather, the often under-utilized sense of smell, and the power of strategic repetition. Moving beyond the simple act of exposition toward a much deeper act of description, these techniques will help writers to develop immersive, captivating, and engrossing worlds for their characters to inhabit. Students will then apply this knowledge to their own writing by composing new worlds inspired by these techniques.
🕑: 03:30 PM - 04:20 PM
Prototyping Sustainable/Liberated Futures through Worldbuilding & Game Design
Host: M Coopilton
Info: In this talk and slideshow, I will describe how friends and I designed the project KaiUnearthed (featured in a proposed workshop) through community organizing, abolitionist teaching, and participatory worldbuilding sessions inside of social movements.
🕑: 03:30 PM - 04:20 PM
Culture Is Currency: A National Challenge
Host: CSUN Global HSI Equity Innovation Hub
Info: Culture Is Currency is built on a simple premise: culture, lived experience, creativity, and community knowledge are assets for innovation. The Challenge creates a distinctive pathway into STEAM and career-connected learning by inviting learners to build from what they already know and value—and connect those strengths to technology, entrepreneurship, storytelling, financial agency, and community impact.
Through five Innovation Pathways, participants can develop side hustle pitches, digital stories, financial projects, technology-enabled solutions, and community-centered ideas while strengthening career-connected and future-ready skills. Participants also gain access to mentorship, learning resources, innovation funding, and opportunities for national recognition. A dedicated K–12 pathway extends the opportunity to younger learners and educators.
🕑: 03:30 PM - 04:20 PM
Worldbuilding on the Page: Writing Beyond the Familiar
Host: Andzhela Keshishyan
Info: This interactive workshop invites participants to move beyond the familiar advice to “write what you know” and consider what becomes possible when writers imagine lives, perspectives, and experiences beyond their own. Drawing inspiration from novelist Elif Shafak’s TED Talk, “The Politics of Fiction,” participants will explore how culture, identity, and personal experience shape the ways people understand themselves and the world around them.
🕑: 03:30 PM - 04:20 PM
Coyote & Crow: Introduction to the Game
Host: Kalani Heinz
Info: Coyote and Crow is a role-playing game that imagines a world without colonization. Through participating in an abridged version of the game, participants will gain a deeper understanding of the impact of colonization and reimagine new ways to fight against colonization in the present and the future.
🕑: 04:30 PM - 05:20 PM
Culture is Currency: A National Challenge
Host: CSUN Global HSI Equity Innovation Hub
Info: Culture Is Currency is built on a simple premise: culture, lived experience, creativity, and community knowledge are assets for innovation. The Challenge creates a distinctive pathway into STEAM and career-connected learning by inviting learners to build from what they already know and value—and connect those strengths to technology, entrepreneurship, storytelling, financial agency, and community impact.
Through five Innovation Pathways, participants can develop side hustle pitches, digital stories, financial projects, technology-enabled solutions, and community-centered ideas while strengthening career-connected and future-ready skills. Participants also gain access to mentorship, learning resources, innovation funding, and opportunities for national recognition. A dedicated K–12 pathway extends the opportunity to younger learners and educators.
🕑: 04:30 PM - 05:20 PM
Tending the Wildness of Sustainable Worlds
Host: M. Coopilton
Info: In this play space, we will reflect on what it means to become ancestors to liberated and sustainable future worlds on Planet Earth. We will engage with Kai UnEarthed, an interactive meditation designed to encourage our unpoliced imagination. We will write and draw in analog journals while we take turns playing an open-world digital psychedelic scavenger hunt and audiovisual meditation projected on a screen in the room.
🕑: 04:30 PM - 05:20 PM
Mapping Worlds from Inside Characters
Host: Marcos Leon
Info: How do the characters we write inherit, navigate, and confront the systems of the worlds they inhabit? This interactive writing activity invites students to center their characters in World Building. Students will examine how a Character's interior life, community ties, history, physical appearance, and core beliefs guide how they interact with the world.
🕑: 04:30 PM - 05:20 PM
Another Non-Carceral University is Possible
Host: CSUN Carcerality Research Lab
Info: Carceral logics and practices that prioritize discipline and punishment over care and well-being are embedded throughout the university. This interactive workshop will engage participants in storytelling and consider the embeddedness of carcerality in higher education. Guided by an abolitionist framework that maintains that carceral responses mask but do not address social problems, participants will engage in creative efforts to reimagine the university our students deserve. The Carcerality Research Lab is Nataly Barragan, Destiny Carrera, Nicholas Deliberto, Martha Escobar, Veronica Hernandez, and Joana Mayorga.
🕑: 05:30 PM - 06:00 PM
Reception (Lakeview Terrace Room)
Info: All attendees and participants are invited to the Lakeview Terrace Room to mix and mingle. Appetizers will be served.
Friday, November 6
🕑: 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Keynote Address
Host: Tony Puryear
Info: The creator of "Concrete Park" discusses Worldbuilding and Afrofuturism. The title of his presentation is "A World to Gain: The Art and Politics of Building an Afrofuturist Story World."
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 0.00
