Hope and Collective Futures

PERC Seminar Series, 2026

Hope and Collective Futures

PERC Seminar Series, 2026

In a time of socio-ecological crisis, hope can feel both necessary and suspect. As Ernst Bloch reminds us, hope is not the same as optimism: it reaches beyond the present while looking within the world for what might help the world become otherwise.

This seminar series features global speakers practising a critical hope, one that neither denies ecological and political crisis nor surrenders to despair, but attends to the struggles, creative practices and collective agencies through which more just socio-ecological futures are made.

The next seminar is Transformative care in the meantime: Shaping the future through collective action with Professor Kelly Dombroski.

Thurs 1 October 12PM NZST, 10AM AEST; Weds 31 September 5PM PDT; 8PM EDT.

Join online here

Abstract

Scholars of care labour caution that care labour can be caught up in maintaining business as usual in the form of exploitative capitalist relations. But care labour also contributes to survivance — cultural and economic survival in the face of oppression. What else might care labour do?

In this seminar, I introduce an approach to thinking about care labour based on mapping 'care surplus flows' — the generation, appropriation and distribution of care surplus. Through an analysis of four case studies, I propose that the more collective forms of 'care surplus flow' enable place-based transformations, and that these transformations increase future-shaping capacities for a wider range of marginalised groups. Care labour can thus contribute to maintenance, survivance and resurgent transformation, depending on how it is organised.

Catch up with past events:

We opened the series with a seminar led by Dr Maya Weeks (Rutgers University, University of California in Davis Feminist Research Institute) "Conceptualizing Plastic Pollution through Artistic Research". View the recording of this session here.
A recording of Climate theatre as reversal agent: Eerie art and the anaesthesia of capitalism with Dr. Brian Tweed (Massey University) is here.

Transformative care in the meantime: Shaping the future through collective action

In this seminar, I introduce an approach to thinking about care labour based on mapping 'care surplus flows' — the generation, appropriation and distribution of care surplus. Through an analysis of four case studies, I propose that the more collective forms of 'care surplus flow' enable place-based transformations, and that these transformations increase future-shaping capacities for a wider range of marginalised groups. Care labour can thus contribute to maintenance, survivance and resurgent transformation, depending on how it is organised.

Prof. Kelly Dombroski

Kelly Dombroski is a Professor of Geography at Massey University and a long-time advocate for community-led environmental and wellbeing initiatives. Her work explores how local action, collaboration, and creative approaches can support place-based and postcapitalist economies. She is a Rutherford Discovery Fellow on the project Transitioning to caring economies through transformative community investment, and the author of Caring for life: A postdevelopment politics of infant hygiene (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). She is a founding member of the Community Economies Institute, and co-edited The Handbook of Diverse Economies with JK Gibson-Graham (Edward Elgar, 2020). You can find out more about Kelly's research work here.

“Nine Good Souls on a Tamarind Leaf”: Memory, migration and more-than-human urban futures

Indian filmmaker Debalina lives in a former refugee colony in the southern part of Kolkata. Next to her house, a giant tamarind tree, perhaps planted by revolutionary freedom fighter Parul Mukherjee spreads its canopy across several households in the neighbourhood. Parul Mukherjee, imprisoned and tortured in the Titagarh Conspiracy Case by the British Indian government, Mukherjee became a refugee in independent India, settling in the same squatter colony where Debalina’s refugee parents landed up. With generations, the tree became, in colony imagination, an urban commons, source of fruits, shade and stories alike.

In July 2024, Mukherjee’s descendants, faced with extreme financial challenges, decided to redevelop their property, and shared with Debalina the likelihood of the tree being chopped down. A Bangla proverb claims, “if you are good, then ‘even’ a tamarind leaf can hold nine people”. The informally named Tamarind Tunes Collective, raised alarm about the fate of the tree through songs of migration and resistance, made possible through the generosity of indie musicians in the city and the efforts of a host of well-meaning people connected to the tree through bonds of friendship, affect, shared space, or quite simply, concern. The Collective followed it up with a film titled Friends of Jilipibala/ Jilipibalar Bondhura¸ an experimental documentary short which documents the tree for over twelve years.

Tamarind trees are popular sights in India, shading avenues in Delhi and Chennai, populating sacred groves near Bangalore, sheltering flood victims in Hyderabad. The tamarind tree in Kolkata is protected by a loose, intergenerational collective of primarily queer women, forging an affective kinship with both the tree and Mukherjee. In my talk, I offer visions of a probable urban future that takes into account the kinship between the human and more-than-human inhabitants of a city, and the possibility of hope amidst rapid urban redevelopment through cultural resistance.

Dr. Samata Biswas

Samata teaches English at The Sanskrit College and University, Kolkata. She holds a BA in English Honours (Presidency College, Calcutta University) and an MA in English (Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad). She also holds an MPhil in English Literature and a PhD in Cultural Studies from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Her research interests include Body Studies, Migration Studies, Dalit Studies, Gender, and Popular Culture. Most of her work deals with gender and embodiment, in their various manifestations.

Internationally, she has participated in the US State Department's International Visitors Leadership Program on refugee and migrant issues in the Asia Pacific (2020), the Kultur Symposium in Weimar (2023), and was invited by the German Federal Foreign Ministry to explore skilled immigration pathways (2025). She founded the South Asia Network for Communication, Displacement and Migration (2022-23). In 2025, she produced her documentary short Friends of Jilipibala, now on the international film festival circuit, and in 2026 curated Moving to the City, an interdisciplinary programme for Women's History Month.

Climate theatre as reversal agent: Eerie art and the anaesthesia of capitalism

This presentation, co-authored by Prof Elspeth Tilley, examines short plays produced by Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA), using a lens from Mark Fisher who is living with us still (eerily haunting us, perhaps) through his two books Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009) and The Weird and the Eerie (2016). We first draw on Capitalist Realism to examine our current capitalist predicament and its numbing of sensation that makes it difficult to envision alternatives. We connect this with Fisher’s conceptualisation of the eerie as an encounter with obscured agents or agency which is how capitalism operates but, as a theatrical technique, might offer a chink in capitalism’s armour through which eerie art can make a Real impact on capitalist reality. We then examine three short CCTA plays written over the past decade and consider the part that eeriness plays in their anti-capitalism. From this analysis, we broaden out to consider whether, in our current capital-induced anaesthesia in which it is almost impossible to imagine how things would work outside of capitalism, eeriness might be one of theater’s most crucial contributions, offering not only a glimpse of capitalism’s obfuscation of causality, but also some concrete prototyping of alternatives.

Dr. Brian Tweed

Brian has worked extensively as a mathematics and science teacher and advisor in both English-medium and Māori-medium schools in New Zealand for the past 30 years. He is currently a senior lecturer in Te Kura o te Mātauranga/Institute of Education, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehūroa/Massey University teaching and researching the history, sociology, philosophy and politics of education.

Opening Seminar

Conceptualizing Plastic Pollution through Artistic Research

A vibrant and growing body of social science is engaging with plastic pollution, challenging and deepening understandings often laid out in the physical sciences. This is especially timely given the manifold grave concerns plastic pollution poses for a habitable Earth. For instance, the production processes to create plastics contribute to carbon emissions that warm the planet, plastics leach toxicants as they circulate in the oceans, and these toxicants cause harmful health effects across the food web among species ranging from plankton to humans. My research works at the intersection of critical social science and artistic research taking up concerns with marine plastic pollution through approaches that engage the senses as well as theory focused on accountability, responsibility, and relationship to place. In this talk, I will both deliver an example of this work—a body of poetry—and discuss the theory behind it, drawing on fields including but not limited to political ecology, science and technology studies, critical Indigenous studies, materialist feminism, and ecotoxicology.

Dr. Maya Weeks

Maya Weeks is a Californian feminist political ecologist and poet who merges qualitative and creative methods in her work on environmental issues. Her areas of interest include oceans, pollution, and land stewardship. She prioritizes interdisciplinary community-engaged research and works across academia, the arts, environmental policy, and agriculture. Maya is a lecturer at Rutgers University and visiting researcher at the University of California in Davis Feminist Research Institute. She is the author of Myth of the Garbage Patch (THOUSANDS Press, 2026). Maya serves on the board of the American Association of Geographers’ Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group and is a member of the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty. She is a settler of Russian Jewish, Polish, and unknown descent.

Images by Tania Niwa ('No Seabed Mining' in Taranaki) and Jas Min (plastic collected in Ontario)