Black Trans Ethical Worldmaking Lab

Elyse Ambrose
Study of Religion and Black Study
UC Riverside

The Black Trans Ethical Worldmaking Lab is an experimental, local-national collective of black trans artists, scholars, and activists engaging their moral imagination to yield more just futures. It consists of three virtual workshops over the course of a year that serve as opportunities for community-building and for co-working on each participants’ project/thought/provocation/invitation toward black trans ethical worldmaking. The three workshops address the following themes: 1) community care and collective healing, 2) moral imagination, and 3) building new ethical worlds. The Lab serves of a space of theory and practice oriented toward countering the disembodied, anti-black and anti-trans, individualist ways of being and becoming often forwarded in many scholarly, artistic, and activist spaces to deepen into black trans epistemologies that value black trans wholeness, feeling, collaboration, and mutuality. The aim of this Lab is to bridge academia with the meaningful work that artists and activists are engaging for mutual edification; to broaden conceptions of the religious/spiritual/sacred/ethical work that is done to heal communities and bring about social justice; to disrupt notions of transness as antithetical to the religious/spiritual/sacred/ethical; and to create space for attending to both the affronts to and joys of black trans life.