Welcome to the Department of Utopian Arts and Letters

Abstract

The Department of Utopian Arts and Letters (DUAL) is a project of public dreaming born out of our deepest desires for decolonization, climate justice, and collective liberation. The Department of US is a creative educational experiment to interrupt apathy and denial and disrupt naturalized habits of imagining the future through relational rigour, skill building, resource sharing, and planning for systemic change and interconnected social and technological innovation. Our faculty of diverse community-expert artists are agents of imagination and unlearning. The Department of US is informed by critical practices of deschooling and global citizenship education. Our courses are gift based and non-transactional. We know we will fail to live up to our lofty objectives, despite our best intentions. DUAL emerges from concerns about educational models that endeavour to support social change through a basic ‘description-prescription formula’ that begins with a description of the primary problem with our existing social, political, and economic systems and is followed by a prescription that purports to ‘solve’ that problem. Our classes, Plural Utopians of the Future (POUFs), are open to all students across all institutions. The department accepts problematization of the stability, certainty, and security of conventional course streams that repeat colonial patterns of knowing, in favour of self-guided un/learning and open-ended pedagogy at your own pace. The initial staff and faculty consists of Meghan Moe Beitiks, Aisha Lesley Bentham, Jenn Cole, Sanita Fejzić, Ian Garrett, Marilo Nuñez, and Kimberly Skye Richards.