At FI, we’re excited to announce the newest addition to our monthly newsletter: “Classroom Closeup.” Each month, we’ll spotlight one CUNY class taught by members of the FI community, and the ways it’s advancing equity and innovation. We hope this feature offers practical strategies and insights for your own classrooms.

This month we’re grateful to hear from Dr. Anaar Desai-Stephens and Dr. RaShelle Peck on their FI-team taught course, “Performing Futurities” at the CUNY Graduate Center. I asked Dr. Peck and Dr. Desai-Stephens to share a few reflections on the course, how they approach teaching it collaboratively, alongside a few practical strategies they would recommend to other instructors. Read their reflections below:

“We are both trained in interdisciplinary fields (Peck in Comparative Studies and Desai-Stephens in ethnomusicology), and we both believe interdisciplinarity (and even anti-disciplinarity!) offers real strength in how graduate students learn and think through questions of performance, embodiment, and Black studies. Despite our different fields, we have found similarities in how we teach, including having students engage in art making, listening to music intentionally, and being mindful of our bodies and surroundings in the class space. We both recognize that teaching about anti-blackness and Black future-building, especially during the crisis of this moment, can elicit discomfort and difficulties for our students, which is why we are intentional about holding space as we encourage the thoughtful practices that Black futurity elicits.

One of our starting points in the class was recognizing that literary giant Zora Neale Hurston was an overlooked founder of performance studies. We felt it critical to acknowledge that, as a Black woman, Hurston had been disregarded in the field, despite her work as a playwright, anthropologist, and fiction writer, among other titles. It is crucial that professors acknowledge the anti-blackness that occurs in academia and make meaningful gestures to create more equitable and liberatory institutions of higher learning. This means reading Black authors and starting from their ideas. It also means getting BIPOC students and perspectives into the room. Developing Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies as a graduate program is an exciting step toward increasing the number of Black students and students of color at CUNY. In addition to contributing to the FI mission, our objectives in the course are to advance BRES’s mission of racial justice. What better way to do that than to imagine what futures could look like for all of us.

Our class is centered around this question: how might forms of performance – from the spectacular to the daily quotidian – serve as sites for the articulation, negotiation, and even refusal of certain futures? As such, we take embodied and creative praxis seriously as means for engaging futures and futurities. We’ve asked students to commit to a daily practice – artistic or quotidian – and to stick with it, seeing how the practice transforms or is transformative over the course of the semester. This is also a stepping stone towards the course’s final project, in which students will design (and maybe enact) a performative intervention that engages with one of the course’s core queries, such as: What might different futures look, feel, and sound like? What is the role of the body in sensing, envisioning, and producing futures? Which actors shape futures, and who gets to have a future? 

Now that we’ve established a rapport in our class sessions, we are starting to carve out time for some daily experiments around our discussion of texts. These include beginning with breath work and attuning the body; creating collaborative zines (in the spirit of exquisite corpse); and, later in the semester, reading and writing speculative fiction. We’re approaching this all in the spirit of playful and unfolding experimentation, and we’re excited to see what comes of it.”