The Just Futures Co-lab at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design, and Technology, MAHE acknowledges technologically mediated futures in the plural and as visions that are also structurally accessible and socially just in the present. As faculty leads and founding members, Dr Naveen Bagalkot and I have come to call this trans-disciplinary space a “co-lab” to make explicit in name and practice the anti-caste, anti-race, anti-colonial, queer, and feminist processes and politics of collaborative and community-centered knowledge production in and with the digital. Within the two connected inquiry areas of “Care, Maintenance, and Information Infrastructures” and “Intersectional Feminist Histories and Futures,” we have located three project spaces: 1) Community Owned Health Knowledge Infrastructure; 2) Futures at the “Peripheries”; and 3) Queer Futurities.
Additionally, as a program of graduate scholarship and pedagogy, the members of the Just Futures Co-lab coordinate a seminar and reading group series to complement and deepen the work we do. The programming of this series involves graduate students who co-lead each session with discussion questions as well as reflective inquiries into our ongoing research. At one such recently concluded session, which we named “Citations in Practice,” for example, I collaboratively structured the session as a recital, a display, and a roundtable discussion of citations in co-lab research inquiries. Together, we produced 12 recitals each on works that we are thinking with. An overall listing of works cited and recited is as follows:
+ Ahmed, Sara. “Feminist Shelters.” In feministkilljoys, December 30, 2015,
+ Bagalkot, Naveen. “Manifesto of Infrastructuring for Community Care.” In Infrastructuring for Community Care, February 2016.
+ Cifor, Marika, TL Cowan, Jasmine Rault, Tonia Sutherland, Anita Say Chan, Jennifer Rode, Anna Lauren Hoffmann, Niloufar Salehi, and Lisa Nakamura. “Feminist Data Manifest-No.” 2019.
+ Cotera, Maria. “‘Invisibility Is An Unnatural Disaster’: Feminist Archival Praxis After the Digital Turn.” In South Atlantic Quarterly 114, no. 4 (October 2015): 781-802.
+ Dantec CAL, DiSalvo C. “Infrastructuring and the formation of publics in participatory design.” Social Studies of Science. 43:2 (2013): 241-264. doi:10.1177/0306312712471581
+ Escobar, Arturo. Design For The Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. London: Duke University Press, 2018.
+ Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” In Dancing At the Edge of the World Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Grove Press, 1986.
+ Liboiron, Max. “Q&A With Max Liboiron, Author Of Pollution Is Colonialism.” Interview by Jessica Covil-Manset. Duke University Press Website, May 14, 2021.
+ Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In Sister Outsider. Berkeley: The Crossing Press, 1984.
+ Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2019.
+ Nieves, Ángel David. “Queer Archives.” In Digital Humanities Queer Zine. Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), June 2019.
+ Patel, Kush. “Personal Communication.” In Futures at the Peripheries Project Space, Just Futures Co-lab, November 2021.
+ Ramakka, Field-Coordinator, MAYA. April 2021.
+ Rodrigues, Alex. CEO, MAYA. March 2021.
+ Singh, Priyanca. “What Does Feminist Film Theory Say?” In Feminism In India. Last Modified March 12, 2021.
+ Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. “Introduction.” In Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London and New York: Zed Books Ltd., 2013.
+ Whiteley, Peter M. “Archaeology and Oral Tradition: The Scientific Importance of Dialogue.” American Antiquity 67, no. 3 (2002): 405–15. https://doi.org/10.2307/1593819.
To learn more about our program, please visit us on the institute’s website.