Diverse Futures (S1E1): Who Broke the Future?

​Imagination makes impossible things possible. It jostles us free from our chimeric yolks. What can our future be? Imagine with us. Imagine a future where diversity is embraced rather than quashed. Imagine a future grounded in caring for each other and our planet.

​Northern Commons is hosting a series of lectures and discussions. Each session in the Diverse Futures series features a different presenter and their view of what the future can be.

​Our first presentation in this series will be Who Broke the Future? with T. Aaron Cisco:

​“Who broke the future? That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s the question I want us to sit with. Because many of us grew up on visions of tomorrow that felt expansive, hopeful, and full of possibility. Futures shaped by stories like Star Trek and Doctor Who, where curiosity mattered more than fear, and difference was something to explore rather than suppress.

​“Those stories taught us that the future could be better. More just. More inclusive. More human. And yet, somewhere along the way, that promise started to feel incomplete. Or distant. Or broken.”

​Cisco is an Afrofuturist writer and lifelong nerd. Their talk will move between personal storytelling, reading excerpts and speculative worldbuilding, and cultural reflection. Cisco will share how his own work wrestles with questions of power, memory, and responsibility, and how fandom itself can be both a refuge and a battleground for imagining who gets to exist in the future.