#5: The Future is Soft with PG Watkins and Ni
[This event was broadcast on Tuesday, July 5, 2022]
As artist and author Alexis Pauline Gumbs reminds us, “The future is soft enough that my living shapes it.”
Over the past few months, we have been exploring how we might live into the caring, creative, kinful worlds we want to see–understanding that this requires repair and attention to historical wounds continuing to impact us today.
Just as our current national design was imagined and shaped to serve the well-being of Western Empire, we can also choose to imagine and shape world designs that nourish our collective well-being. Join us for a conversation with youth and practicing elders designing and building loving futures.
PG Watkins, Director, Black Bottom Archives
PG Watkins (they/them) is a nonbinary organizer, facilitator and organizational strategist from Detroit. PG believes that organizing and storytelling are interconnected and is committed to using both mediums to shift dominant oppressive narratives and change the material conditions of Black people in Detroit and beyond. They are the Co-founder and Director of Black Bottom Archives, a community media platform dedicated to cultivating the development and preservation of media created by Black Detroiters for the sake of amplifying our voices, archiving our histories, documenting our present realities, and transforming narratives about our city. PG is an abolitionist who believes that a world is possible beyond jails, detention, surveillance and punitive punishment and advances these beliefs through organizing locally and as a part of national networks. As a Program Coordinator for BlackOUT Collective, they support Black direct action trainers and practitioners around the country. They currently organize in Detroit against surveillance and policing through different coalitions and collectives, and sit on the Council of the James & Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership.
Ni, Troublemaker
Ni, she/they, is a detribalized Mixtec abolitionist and anti-authoritarian organizer rooted in stolen Tongva territory. Their work centers anti-colonial struggles internationally through the intersectionality of class, race, gender, and sexuality.