Imagining Towards

Art for this year’s theme created by Cori Lin. Check out her work here.

There are some words that, for most of us, seem to turn off the creative, imaginative parts of our brain. Bureaucracy, for example, or infrastructure. While imagination and infrastructure might seem like contradictory ideas, we on the OCE Education Team have become deeply curious about the ways that all infrastructure carries within it imagined possible futures. Buildings famously direct us through space, and policies similarly guide us into worlds that are more or less oriented than our own towards functional public works, meaningful labor, access to resources, and systems of justice.

This year, the OCE Education Team has taken as its theme "Imagining Towards..." We'll be exploring how imagination imbues all kinds of deep and seemingly neutral structures, and thinking through concepts like safety, liberation, possibility, policy, desire, and courage. We're especially interested in how universities rehearse particular futures through governance, technology, labor structures, and culture, and exploring, along with you, how we might design conditions that make more generative, sustainable, and humane futures possible. Together, let’s explore:

What can we shift if imagination is at the core of building institutional change?
How might we rehearse new structures that have yet to be adopted by dominant entities?
What ways can we invite inquiry into our everyday lives through historically unheard voices?

Program Offerings and Highlights

Campus-Wide Workshops

How do we navigate the tension between who we are and who the world expects us to be? What does it mean to be accountable to ourselves and one another? And how can we approach conflict with courage and care?

The Practice of Showing Up: Workshops on Compassion, Conflict, and Community is a three-part virtual workshop series designed to help participants engage more thoughtfully and intentionally in moments of internal conflict, interpersonal accountability, and community tension. Designed as a sequence but welcoming to drop-in learners, each workshop stands on its own and offers concrete tools, reflective practices, and practical strategies that support both personal growth and collective responsibility.

Reading Group: A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

What might become possible if we stopped treating productivity, certainty, and endless growth as the measures of a meaningful life?

Becky Chambers’s A Psalm for the Wild-Built invites readers into a hopeful future where humans have begun repairing their relationship with the natural world. The story follows Dex, a tea monk searching for a renewed sense of purpose, and Mosscap, a robot returning to human society with a deceptively simple question: What do people need?

Warm, thoughtful, and quietly radical, the novel explores rest, purpose, ecological reciprocity, and the possibility of building lives around care rather than extraction. As part of our Imagining Towards theme, the book encourages us to see imagination not as escape, but as a practical way of questioning what we have inherited and rehearsing different ways of living. Together, we will consider what it means to imagine toward futures shaped by enoughness, interdependence, curiosity, and collective well-being.

All are welcome to join the reading group, and the first five people to sign up will receive a free copy of the book.

CoLAB

Every applicant completes one CoLAB application. As part of our review process, we consider where your idea will thrive most. Depending on the stage of your project, applicants may be invited to participate in one of two collaborative pathways.

CoLAB Project Pathway

For projects with a defined direction, established goals, or a clear opportunity for implementation.

Participants receive collaborative support to strengthen and advance their work through educational design, facilitation, partnership development, strategic planning, and project consultation. The goal is to help transform promising ideas into meaningful programs, resources, research, or community initiatives.

Futures Lab Pathway

Some ideas don't need immediate implementation—they need room to grow.

Futures Lab is an incubator within CoLAB for projects that show exciting potential but would benefit from additional exploration before moving toward implementation. Rather than focusing on producing a finished deliverable, Futures Lab creates space for participants to ask bigger questions, challenge assumptions, generate possibilities, and imagine new approaches to the opportunities and challenges they care about.

Through facilitated workshops, collaborative activities, futures-thinking practices, and creative experimentation, participants work alongside others who are also exploring what's possible. Some ideas may evolve into future CoLAB projects, while others may inspire new partnerships, pilot initiatives, or entirely new ways of thinking.

There is no separate Futures Lab application. All ideas are submitted through the CoLAB application, and selected applicants may be invited into the Futures Lab pathway when their project would benefit from an incubation phase.

Whether you are ready to launch a project or simply beginning to imagine one, we encourage you to apply.

Application Cycles

Fall–Winter Cohort

Applications Open: August
Application Deadline: Mid-September
Cohort: Late September – Mid March

Spring–Summer Cohort

Applications Open: January
Application Deadline: Late February
Cohort: Early March – Late June

We look forward to imagining, building, and learning alongside you.

Apply.

Zine-Making Workshop

Zines have long served as tools of resistance and cultural preservation—circulated by those pushed to the margins to share knowledge, spark dialogue, and imagine otherwise. This is a space to connect and create. Together, we’ll explore the theme “Imagining Towards…” by crafting zines that question prescribed narrative, embrace the fluidity of imagination, and unearth the invisible structures that uphold our current systems.

Reflective Writing Workshop (Speculative focused)

Speculative fiction is a lens for looking ahead at what is possible and dreaming boundlessly into the vast “what if…”. In this workshop, we’ll ask **ourselves what can be created when we center our reflection on possibility. Through writing prompts, images, and sounds, we’ll explore our “what ifs…: as a way to connect more deeply to our collective futurity.

Dates:

Winter: December 8th 12:15-1:15pm virtual

Spring: April 6th 12:15-2:00pn Women’s Center Lunch will be provided

Learn more.