Excavating Queer Utopias: Gays Against the Machine

We need you! Participate in a workshop for the LGBTQ+ community to imagine diverse and collaborative worlds beyond gen AI and the algorithm.
About this Event

MSc Narrative Futures student and researcher Sophie Burnham is building a workshop that lets people analyze, interrogate, and imagine their way into the worlds they want to see. Edinburgh-based members of the LGBTQIA+ community are needed for a creative and collaborative workshop that will:

• invite you to imagine diverse and sustainable realities beyond generative AI and the algorithm
• equip you with essential futures literacy skills for a fast-changing world
• contribute to exciting new research on how queer perspectives can shift the field of futures studies

Sophie will guide you through a step-by-step process for envisioning how different challenge areas (any issue that is part of our current systems and institutions, from capitalism to artisan coffee shops) could be transformed into realities that better suit our diverse communities. This workshop will focus mainly on digital algorithms and generative AI, which currently present significant threats to queer and other minoritized communities.

The workshop day (10am-4pm) will involve group discussions, a smidge of group research, and various methods of creative output—collage, drawing, creative writing, etc. This workshop aims to be accessible to everyone and anyone. You do not need to consider yourself an artist, researcher, or expert on anything at all to participate! The more diverse, the better.

This workshop aims to equip participants with the futures literacy skills to apply this framework to challenge areas going forward, whether at work, in studies, or in everyday life.

As this is a pilot program, participants will be asked to fill out a feedback survey at the end of the day. This, along with documentation of creative output and observations made by Sophie during the workshop itself, may be used in formal research reporting as well as constructing future iterations of the program.