LOCAL>> Survival: A Keywords Conversation

Headlands’ next Keywords Conversation convenes experts speaking on concepts of survival, survivalism, and self-determination.

With host Constance Hockaday (AFF ‘17–’18, AIR ‘16), and panelists Rindon Johnson (AIR ‘21) and Dr. LaNada War Jack, we will explore the effects of political fantasies of power and struggle alongside the legacy of lived histories of resistance, as we face an increasingly strained social and political fabric under quarantine in the United States.

As communities continue to stare down the COVID-19 pandemic, we as a nation are confronting death, notions of expendability, and failed states in ways both predicted and unimaginable.

How might artists, writers, and activists shape both pragmatic and visionary responses to crises of survival, and help us think critically and optimistically about forms of self-determination as a way forward?

About the Keywords Conversation series: conceived as an extension of Headlands’ Thematic Residencies—a cross-sectorial convening and residency experiment—the Keywords Conversations take their name from both a “keyword” project that resulted from a Headlands Thematic Residency on climate equity, and from Raymond Williams’ essential work, Keywords, a collection of cultural histories of words as sites of struggle. Keywords Conversations began as a distanced program at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when public health policies, guidelines, and practices began to lay bare fundamental, systemic inequities, tensions, and sites of struggle and power coursing through our cultural and social frameworks.

[Image: Constance Hockaday’s 2016 Project Space installation. Photo by Jonathan Sprague.]