When We Win. Writing Our Futures.
How does speculative writing support organisers to imagine, strategise and re-build as part of wider social movements? How do we nurture the capacity to envision the world if we won?
Join writers and organisers Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone, Eman Abdelhadi and Yara Rodrigues Fowler in a conversation chaired by Hajar Press publisher Farhaana Arefin.
This conversation is part of Migrants in Culture's Saturday School, a creative practice space for organisers to imagine, embody and design for border abolition, in which Ama and Yara are both facilitating speculative writing courses using historical fiction and sci-fi to vision alternatives to the status quo.
Eman Abdelhadi is a Chicago-based scholar, organizer, and writer. An Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, she is author of the forthcoming Impossible Futures: Why Women Leave Muslim Communities (University of Chicago Press) and co-author of the sci-fi novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072 (Common Notions, 2022).
Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone is a British-Ghanaian Speculative Writer, Artist, Curator and Pleasure Activist who explores the kinships between Blackness, feminism, decolonial aesthetics, queer erotics and ecology to form a praxis she has named Intimate Ecologies, working toward liberatory interspecies futures.
Yara Rodrigues Fowler grew up in South London. Her first novel, Stubborn Archivist, was published in 2019. It was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2020 and the Desmond Elliot Prize 2019. Yara was named one of The Observer’s ‘hottest-tipped’ debut novelists of 2019 and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2019.
Farhaana Arefin - Hajar Press
Farhaana Arefin is the publisher and managing director at Hajar Press, an independent political publishing house by and for people of colour, which she co-founded in 2020. She is the editor of the elements anthology series, of which the first volume, The Hajar Book of Rage, was published in 2025.