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Conundrums

How can we build more communal secondhand economies?

 Given our embeddedness in individualistic and competitive cultures in capitalist spaces, especially as resellers within digital platforms, how can we create communal practices? Who is this ‘we’ to start with? This conundrum speaks to addressing the (im)possibilities of communality in a diverse group.

How can we unravel the ethical threads  in secondhand economies?

Thrifting and secondhand, as it currently stands, is an extension of consumerism rather than a curb to it. Changing this requires more transformative, imaginative and structural views of the global and colonial imbrications of secondhand economies for fashion, furniture, consumer products, etc. What is the role of workers of secondhand economies in reshaping this landscape?

How can we queer/resist the role of computing technologies in secondhand?
Increasingly relying on machine learning powered automation has deleterious effects for the environment, relies on invisibilized labor (of annotators in the global south mostly) and could entrench precarity in many occupations. Could these tehcnologies be used for more life-sustaining futures where well-being for earthlings is prioritized? 

More Resources

Afrofuturism
Indigenous Futurisms
Futuros Indigenas
Chicanafuturism
Decolonial Futurisms
Feral Feminisms - Black Feminist Futurity
Prefigurative Politics
Infrastructural Speculations
Design Fiction
Critical Fabulations