Subscribe

Livable Futures is about responding to conditions of crisis and uncertainty with creativity, courage, and love.

Subscribe to Livable Futures to become a part of our community and get full access to the newsletter, a living biome of ideas that inspire and activate even as we turn toward difficult conditions.

As we turn toward climate change and seek ways to live, to work, to be good ancestors and good neighbors, and to thrive in this unstable technoscientific lifeworld of the 21st century, we need to guidance.

As we seek teachers and guides, we share their wisdom with you, generating spaces for reflection, connection, and meaningful change offered right in your inbox when you subscribe.

Through our diverse offerings, including our podcast, newsletter, and a myriad of creative projects, events, and workshops, we provide a space where creativity meets resilience, and community thrives in the face of uncertainty.

Join our community to explore and discover creative solutions with us.

A dynamic community of artists, scholars and activists, members of the Livable Futures Community share impactful ideas and practices for surviving and thriving in unstable landscapes. Together we are researching, gathering, and inventing creative solutions for a deep engagement with the world as it is and as it can be including tactics you can put to work right away in your own life.

More info on the project and contributors is available on our website.

Connect

Never miss an opportunity for connection, communion, and inspiration.

This is an offering, a living biome of ideas and practices that inspire and activate us even as we face the challenges of living in difficult times.

Grounded in collaboration, compassion, justice, and diversity, we are seek to empower individual and collective efforts toward wellbeing for all life on the planet: human and more-than-human.

Origins

LivableFutures is a public practice art project with many origins.

Since its inception during the Collaboration for Humane Technologies in 2016 (co-founded with funding from the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Themes at The Ohio State University), Livable Futures has funded hundreds of artists, scholars, and activists but its roots go deeper still into my childhood in the Rocky Mountains, ecojustice education and activism in college, years learning from artist activists in Costa Rica and ecology monks in Thailand, and intercultural collaborations in Los Angeles.

Supporters

Several institutions recognizing the importance of collective, creative action have come together to support and share the project with their audiences, starting with the Movement Lab, Barnard College, DanceHouse Melbourne, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, The Joyce Theater, NYU Steinhardt, and the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design.

Early supporters who helped dream this project into being and give it shape include Peter Chan, Tommy Davis, Laura Rodriguez, Jenny Suchland, Mary Thomas, Michelle Wibbelsman, Jen Rae, Andre M. Zachery, Awilda Rodriguez Lora, Gabri Christa, Marc Ainger, Oded Huberman, Tara Burns, Michelle Ellsworth, Ohad Fishof, Noa Zuk, Pamela Z., and many others.

Land and Labor Acknowledgement: 

Livable Futures in an international project with contributors all over the world. Many of us are based in the U.S. and as the primary author for this newsletter and artistic director of the project, I (Norah Zuniga Shaw) currently live part time in Germany and part time in the lower plateau of the great lakes region, home to the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Delaware, Miami, Peoria, Seneca, Wyandotte, Ojibwe, and Cherokee peoples past, present and emerging, in what is now called central Ohio. In our work with Livable Futures we seek to always honor the resiliency of indigenous people.

Seed funding for the project in 2016 and again 2018 was provided by The Ohio State University which occupies the ancestral and contemporary lands of the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Delaware, Miami, Peoria, Seneca, Wyandotte, Ojibwe, and Cherokee peoples. The university resides on land ceded in the 1795 Treaty of Greeneville and the forced removal of tribal nations through the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

If you have not learned the indigenous history of North America, or are ready to refresh your understanding, we highly recommend Patty Krawec’s text Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining our Future. Patty Krawec offers an important and accessible historical account and several Aambes (practices) for taking action which we return to regularly in our Livable Futures community. She is on substack as well!

Ohlone activist Kanyon Sayers-Roods reminds us, 

“There have always been indigenous peoples in the spaces we call home, and there always will be. The acknowledgment process is about asking, What does it mean to live in a post-colonial world? What did it take for us to get here? And how can we be accountable to our part in history?”

In acknowledging stolen land, we also take time to acknowledge stolen people, enslaved Africans, that were kidnapped from their homelands and brought here to work these stolen lands of the Americas and histories of colonial violence and extraction of resources that have led us to contemporary conditions.

We encourage you, if you already do not know, to look up on whose ancestral land you reside here. And take action beyond acknowledgement by supporting Native and Indigenous communities.

Such statements become truly meaningful when coupled with authentic relationships and sustained commitment.

We therefore commit and re-commit in each moment to move beyond words into programs and actions that fully embody a commitment to Black and Indigenous rights and cultural equity. I am grateful to the student-led Anti-Racist Working Group for support in creating these acknowledgements.

Livable Futures projects are collaborative, inclusive and socially responsive always reaching toward anti-racist, queer feminist values. Our work is a dance of arriving into the moment, turning toward what is, de-centering, re-centering, and feeling into motion. Read our post for more on these practices.

Be well,

Norah Zuniga Shaw