Tackling how racial justice and climate crisis are entangled, The World We Became: Map Quest 2350 is a speculative cartography atlas.

Co-curated by Tao Leigh Goffe and Shannon Gleeson, the initiative is a collaboration between a collective of artists, poets, academics, curators, architects, and activists.

This digital humanities experiment maps global ecological crises and shared Black, Asian, Pacific, Middle Eastern, Latin American, Caribbean, and Indigenous futures. The names of the contributors are: Andrea Chung, Heidi Amin-Hong, Juhwan Seo, Melanie Puka, Priyanka Sen, and Tauren Nelson.

The special guest expert is Professor Kevin Escudero (Brown University).

Dark Laboratory is a creative technology collective, production company, and design studio that researches climate and race through theory and action. Each initiative we release forms another layer of an expanding galaxy of projects on Black and Indigenous futures. The lab’s philosophy is inspired by the ethos of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (1993). We imagine the Western hemisphere as a haunted house founded on stolen land and built through the labor of stolen lives.

This podcast was part of the Cornell Migrations Summer Institute, 2021, organized by Tao Leigh Goffe and Shannon Gleeson.

Original Music: Jesediah

Producer: David Gonzalez