HIVES is excited to announce its fall lineup! These events will take place on the Michigan State University Campus and most will be recorded to be engaged with asynchronously on our Recorded Events Page!
Welcome Conversation
September 15 @ 3:00 PM EST. Wells Hall C607
Join HIVES co-founders Jessica and Michael for snacks and conversation about what the HIVES Research Workshop and Speaker Series is about! Get a free copy of HIVES’ Buzz-Zine. (Not Recorded)
Art in Health: Building Social Connections Through Fandom and Artmaking
October 19 @ 2:00PM EST. Wells Hall C607
Invited Speaker Dr. Soohyun Cho will share her scholarly work as an invited speaker for HIVES.
Accessible Pedagogy Panel
November 17 @ 3:00pm EST. Bessey Hall 300 (The Writing Center)
Experts from across MSU will come together in The Writing Center to discuss everyday tips for leading an accessible classroom and to offer speculations on accessible tomorrows and tomorrows and tomorrows.
Do you have HIVES yet? From buzzing into a sci-fi future that’s not attuned to human biological needs? Because you’ve been touched by a well-meaning but misunderstood sewer mutant? Because you get goosebumps when you witness vibrant queer-crip communities? HIVES is capitalized not because it’s an acronym, but rather as a gesture toward the material reaction of bumps on skin and the physical space of a beehive. This research workshop reimagines the communities of the future, stretching towards a plurality of possible tomorrows that refuse the homogenous, all-chrome, all-superhuman narratives that occupy the temporal space beyond the now. In Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times, Aimee Bahng offers a means to speculate in ways that open futurity to a plurality of bodyminds and ways of being, she notes that “to think of migrant futures is to posit that which may never come to pass but must nevertheless persist speculatively, against all odds. Perhaps the primary function of their existence is to hold open the aperture to the beyond, where the systems that seemingly dominate cease to overwhelm” (170). HIVES programming for the 2023-4 year will stretch our limbs and mobility devices toward possibly unreachable beyonds. Working across a broad history of media, HIVES will open dreaming space for accessible and vibrant tomorrows and tomorrows and tomorrows.
Thinking about the movement of the human between the present moment into a multiplicity of futures, HIVES will incorporate a network of connections, thinking alongside Stacy Alaimo’s description of transcorporeality, “in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world, underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’… [while opening] a mobile space that acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors” (2). In this enmeshed network of speculation, HIVES will attend to ways present injustice limits our imaginaries of tomorrow as we expand our constellations of the possible. This year, HIVES will work with participants to consider how we’ve collectively imagined what tomorrow brings and then to recognize how we might expect more from the future. In this way, HIVES will embrace the possibilities of a “politics of mutation,” which Aimee Bahng puts in comparison with regeneration to note that “whereas regeneration’s aim is to restore a body to an original or normative state, mutation finds its expression in changing the materiality of a thing, likely in ways that alter conceptualizations of bodies, differentiation, origins, and copies” (151). HIVES will mutate material existence and speculative futures as we embrace practices of transformation.
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