Each component of the Black Studies Collaboratory entails a great deal of individual and collective labor: reading, writing, researching, organizing, critiquing, etc. This work is both a mode of survival and an extension of collective passions. At the conclusion of these three years of work, we will take time to reflect, recharge, and be in celebration through a Black Futures Retreat. The retreat will take place in a remote setting in the Bay Area in Fall 2023, and will be a series of utopia-building workshops, art showings, radical experiments in world building, curated conversations, and healing spaces.
It will include Berkeley faculty, graduate students and staff, community partners, and a selection of Collaboratory participants from the previous 2.5 years of programming. We will also invite community organizations to be partners in the Retreat. They will participate in the planning of the retreat and commit to holding at least one workshop or curating a space related to black futures.