“Faraoyść”: Imagining futures built on joy
Faraoyść (faw-row-she-tchi) is a portmanteau neologism, that describes the moment when oppression appears to be coming to an end and a liberated world feels within reach.
In trying to articulate this feeling, we realized that none of our three languages had a word to encapsulate and express the specific feelings we had each felt. It was only by combining the words // Arabic: farah, English: joy, Polish: radoścć // that we were able to name this emotion: Faraoyść.
This work is part of the thesis with Anna, and Julia my colleagues.
Workshop
Participants from the UNESCO Futures literacy Summit gathered their individual memories through the use of poetry because, “it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt” (Lorde, 1984).
The poems were later used during the futures-building sessions as a base to build futures based on their collective joy.
The workshop ended with a conversation about the worlds that they had created and the common themes that emerged. Dominant themes included: abundance, Being-With, a desire to reconnect with Nature, anti-technological future sentimentalism, and finally self-organized societies.
Our interpretation of these themes emerged both from the acute challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and from larger systemic oppression. The worlds our participants constructed were reactions against dominant narratives of scarcity, techno-futurism, capitalism, and a separation from Nature and each other.
