This research studio examines, amplifies and co-creates narratives that unsettle colonial assumptions that remain prominent in public discourse to redress the harm of past and ongoing coloniality through practices with collective imaginaries, or fabulations.  Transdisciplinary praxis informs inquiry concerning myriad forms of organizing, mobilizing, caring and intentional collaboration through engagement with diverse stakeholders – institutions, environments, state and non-state, economic and non-economic, human and otherwise – and inclusive knowledge perspectives including Indigenous, settler-colonial and other non Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island and Abya Yala (North, Central and South America). 

To counter the Colonial narrative and to take seriously the challenges of the Anthropocene we need to change the way we think (raising doubts and questioning) in order to engender processes of transformation towards less destructive economies and ways of opening up the road for healing and regenerating and caring. The inquiry process is informed through deep listening with traditional knowledges and through socially engaged approaches (based on notions of spirituality, communality, relationality, ferality, pluriversality) for cinematic story experiments within myriad tactical and improvisational considerations. The potential for understandings of and expressions for responsible action and restorative justice are multisituated and contextual. How might these ways of learning through making (re)weave life force through lateral forms of relation and the recuperation of our vital connections with our bodies, all creatures, and the land? How might collective fabulation afford movements for transitions from the separation and captivity that are the result of ongoing coloniality and other carceral systems toward an interdependence supporting planetary health and collective liberation?

This studio joins the ongoing research led by faculty of the Transdisciplinary Design MFA at The New School / Parsons School of Design within collaborations concerning efforts for responsible actions resisting ongoing modernity and coloniality, and for efforts to redress devastation in the Brazilian rainforest, with the Transdisciplinary Network of the Amazon, RETA, not an NGO but a network formed by individuals, collectives, community organizations and social movements.