Using experimental methods, this workshop will encourage participants to think about the role of writing practices in responding to social violence. With a specific focus on the relationship between the imagination, political organising and time and driven by June Jordan’s astute observation that “writing back is not the same as fighting back” from her 1984 essay “Nicaragua: Why I Had To Go There,” it will use excerpts from the archive to help participants think about what it will take to build better worlds for themselves and others. This is a writing workshop about the things we want and what we will have to do to get them.

Dr. Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and Associate Lecturer based in the Design School at University of the Arts London. Her work focuses on the utility of the political imagination in the textual and visual cultures of radical social movements, examining the role cultural production plays in materialist resistance and collective conceptualisations of futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Pluto Press, 2020), Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (Hajar Press, 2021), the forthcoming Against Literature (2026) and a member of 'bare minimum', an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective. She occasionally curates and is a member of the organising team at the Feminist Library based in Peckham.