Coding Resistance is:

A nine-week Lecture Series bringing together stellar designers, researchers and activists: Morehshin Allahyari, Iyo Bisseck, Marwa Fatafta, Aimi Hamraie, Lucas LaRochelle, Maryam Mustafa, Minna Salami, Nakeema Stefflbauer, and Timnit Gebru.

A free-of-charge Fellowship for participants from marginalized backgrounds. Each person brings their research and interests to the group, and together, as a community of transnational solidarity, we support the crafting of independent narratives, which will soon appear on Futuress.

Under the guise of machine neutrality, technology captivates, fascinates, and entails a promise of imagined objectivity. At the same time, oppressive social structures are coded into technological tools that further reproduce social, spatial, and environmental inequality, subduing and subjugating racialized, gendered and non-abled bodies. The very design of artificial intelligence embeds human biases, which in turn creates harmful, destructive material and digital infrastructure.

Against the backdrop of algorithmic discrimination, reinforced by state and corporate surveillance, many activists and civil society movements have been striving to reimagine the relation between society and technology. Futuress wants to help connect and amplify the voices of designers, researchers, and activists who critically examine the politics of digital tools and seek to build more equitable and just practices. Our new study program, curated in collaboration with depatriachise design, aims to expose design’s role in sustaining inequalities, while at the same time imagining how technologies can be used to imagine new futures.

Lecture Series

The Coding Resistance lecture series was a para-academic space to critically engage with urgent topics around design technology and bias.

From September to December 2021, a row of inspiring speakers took us on a journey through complex multifaceted topics including discriminating algorithms, digital colonialism, emancipatory potential of virtual reality, interdependence as a political technology, speculative queer and trans futurities, and more.

Bringing insights from their activism, lived experiences, and research, our speakers reflected upon the social implications of technology hardwired with racism, sexism, classism, and other systems of oppression and the harmful, destructive digital and material reality it creates. They revealed multiple interconnected social justice struggles that reimagine digital tools and engage in “coding resistance” toward more just futures.

All lectures were available synchronously and asynchronously, and participants were invited to join the *Futuress *Slack platform to continue sharing and learning from others. The Futuress Slack gathers participants from past and present Futuress workshops, forming a growing community of designers, researchers and activists from all corners of the world.

In addition, registrations for the lectures helped to sponsor 48 participants to join our parallel Fellowship and craft their own unique counter-narratives. Their research was honed into stories published on our website!

Speakers Line-Up

Fellowship

The Coding Resistance fellowship was a learning community that nurtures the crafting of independent narratives.

Each fellow applied with an ongoing research project they wished to develop and make available to a broad audience— a thesis in the works, a final year project, a semester assignment, or a longstanding obsession. Alongside having full access to the Coding Resistance lectures synchronously and asynchronously, fellows met in smaller groups in collective brainstorming sessions to share their progress, give and receive feedback, and gain new insights from others. Workshop facilitators Cherry-Ann Davis, Iyo Bisseck, Maya Ober, and Nina Paim followed everyone’s work closely and supported participants with active listening, constructive critiques, and practical advice.

At Futuress, we believe in the power of accessible writing to bring awareness to inequalities and injustices in the world. We support each participant to craft their research into an accessible format—adhering to our guiding philosophy to make design research public.

Credits

Concept and curation: Nina Paim (Futuress) and Maya Ober (depatriarchise design)
Editorial assistance and design: Mio Kojima (Futuress)
Coding assistance: Iyo Bisseck
Copyediting: Sacha Fortuné (Futuress)
Typeface: Ronde by Rani Yasmine Putri