CREATIVE WORKSHOPS & COMMUNITY PROJECTS

Creative Projects & Community Workshops

Beyond formal courses and fellowships, CBP hosts an ongoing programme of creative workshops, skill-shares, and community-facing projects. These spaces are practice-based, accessible, and rooted in the belief that making — with one’s hands, one’s voice, one’s body — is itself a form of study.

Ongoing (2025-26)

[magnitude + bond]: a slow, multimedia Reading Group

Join us for a multimedia series of slow engagement with black cultural production & community-led ‘maker-thinker’ sessions.

Between Fall 2025 and Winter 2026, we’ll be reading Toni Morrison’s collection of essays & speeches on Western politics, Black culture, social rights, labour & autonomy, The Source of Self-Regard.

In Winter and Spring 2026, we’ll take up Fred Moten’s and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study Minor Compositions. The writers offer necessary primers on black study, culture, co-thinking, and dialogic imagination that has inspired many (whether they’ve read them or not). These are all worth slow, deep engagement for insights into navigating the present conjuncture.

From October to May, we begin each session with a read aloud from Cyrée Jarelle Johnson’s second major poetry collection, Watchnight, anchoring our gatherings with the power of contemporary Black trans poetics and root/memory work.

Format: In-person and/or hybrid
When:
We’ll gather on the 3rd Wednesdays of the month, with the exception of our first meeting which will take place on Wednesday, October 29th.
Winter 2026: 21 Jan; 18 Feb; 18 March
Spring 2026: 15 Apr; 20 May; 17 June (v)
Where: Room 307, Bissell Building, Faculty of Information, UofT
Link: Registration

Writing in Common

In search of an antidote to isolation and extractivist orientations of academic life, fellows and collaborators working within The Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis convene a space for writing both in common and communally—that is, writing towards individual research/creative projects with the common goal of contributing written work to our shared worlds. Our group fosters sustainable writing practices beyond productivity goals or definitive writing outcomes, and seeks to build rhythm of writing and reflection together, grounded in principles of Black study, freedom dreaming, and mutual care. Throughout the month, we gather (alternating between the Collaboratory space near UofT’s Robarts Library and virtually via Zoom) to share grounding practices and mostly spend sessions quietly writing alongside one another, with check-ins and progress updates.

Let’s co-create an intentional space for:
· supportive and sustained pace of dissertation/thesis and professional writing;
· collective accountability founded on shared principles;
· creative connections and co-thinking across disciplines or research methods; and
· modes of study and other creative practices beyond institutional constraints.

Format: Hybrid
When:
Fridays, 1-4pm EST
In-person: 16 Jan; 6 Feb; 6 Mar; 10 Apr
Virtual: 23 Jan; 20 Feb; 20 Mar; and 17 Apr

Where: Room 307, Bissell Building, Faculty of Information, UofT
Link: Registration

The Collaboratory is currently developing more participatory workshops around the themes of breathing, attunement, memory, and cartography. Stay tuned for more workshops!

Examples of past programming:

Abolition Open School

The Octavia E. Butler Annual Lecture Series

Collaborative Event: The Alchemy Lecture IV Sound—at the Interregnum (Oct 30, 2025)

Four (4) two-hour sessions in June, where enrolled community members and university-affiliated students participate in autonomous and facilitated reading groups to study abolitionist principles through assigned and provided texts. Each session is followed by a closed one-hour discussion between a student moderator and a guest speaker whose life’s work engages these themes. The school will be held virtually for accessibility. An (optional) in-person fifth session will be offered for Tkaronto-based members at UofT’s iSchool, featuring embodied learning activities (e.g., accessible yoga for “Response-ability;” personal digital security tutorials for “Registration;” an experimental theatre and sound workshop for “Improvisation”).

Participating students will receive a modest stipend for commuting and copies of all required materials to attend. We are also collaborating with public programmes to introduce pre-university youth of colour and working-class youth to the radical potential of archival methods, information, and Black Studies via the Collaboratory.

Each year’s themes will interconnect with ongoing Collaboratory initiatives. While different students may apply to attend public summer school programming annually, a developing public syllabus—including reading and writing prompts—will be available year-round, allowing participants to independently engage and build momentum in their daily lives.

The Octavia E. Butler Lecture Series aims to serve as a unifying beacon for all who seek progressive exploration into the critical intersections of race, technology, and information. By honouring Butler’s legacy, we invite speakers who, like her, have demonstrated the courage to navigate unexplored realms, defy conventional thinking, and contribute to a more inclusive and imaginative understanding of our world. These speakers teach us new pathways through creative writing, aesthetic and technoscientific enquiry, transmedia community building, and other interstices that resonate between and beyond the dynamic and multifocal scholarly terrains of Black Studies and Information Studies, troubling hegemonic understandings of traditional knowledge production, underrepresented communities, and disciplinary formations.

CBP proudly co-sponsors this year’s Alchemy Lecture, a multi-vocal model that brings together 3 to 4 thinkers and practitioners from different disciplines and geographies. Prof. Christina Sharpe, The Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University, hosts this event.

Each lecture culminates in the publication of a book bearing the title of that year’s convening in the imprint, headed by Dionne Brand, Alchemy by Knopf. Along with the inclusion of an introduction, each book extends the public lecture and builds on its alchemical form. These lectures (and the book that will result from them) speak into the interregnum of precipitous climate catastrophe and social and political reckoning.

Sonics & Storytelling with Rollie Pemberton (aka Cadence Weapon)

Zines, Print-Making & Collage with Emkay Adjei-Manu

Calling the Conjurers: An Otherwise Symposium for Technologies of Black Life and Study (May 23-26, 2024) ->

Poet, writer, rapper, and activist Cadence Weapon will blend the Black literary and musical traditions that inspire his work, with the acts of resistance and refusal he’s staged in his creative practice as an artist. This session functions as a workshop/knowledge-sharing space that resonates through the multi-dimensional storytelling in Black Studies, woven into our ancestral and emerging practices of crafting songs with dynamic lineages. The attendees will meditate on what it means to distribute art across mediums and spaces, with a clear focus on how to radically reimagine new paradigms of our work beyond the current limitations of creative industries.

Collective memory is a deliberate construct, with the process of who gets to be remembered playing a pivotal role in shaping perceptions of how we think, imagine, and legitimise reality and existence. While Black queer and trans people indisputably exist, their legitimacy is often undermined when they are systematically erased from public archives, distorting collective memory. In this WORKSHOP, interdisciplinary artist, researcher and community-engaged arts worker, Emkay Adjei-Manu, will lead a collage-based session on “Auto-Archiving: Methods in Black Trans Memory Work.” It considers the Black trans body as archive, inviting participants to utilise themselves as both the subject and source of archival material. Through “self-portraiture” collage-making, attendees will explore self-memory work and auto-archiving, cultivating a practice of attunement, autonomy, and a turning towards oneself.

A call-and-response invitation to tarry in the expansive entanglements that frame and forge Black life. We are weaving a wayward web of worldmaking methods, offerings, and strategies that exceed “information and technology” with the principled study of shared stakes, skills, techniques that allow Black life to persist and thrive by deepening coalitions of possibility here and now.

Through multi-sited gatherings in Tkaronto (23-26 May 2024) we will gather around some material and ideological concerns that challenge our understanding of what it means to study and seed “information,” “art,” “algorithms,” “archives,” “data,” “technologies,” “community,” and “belonging.” These polysemous terms conjure and affirm transnational configurations of Black life, diverse social formations, aesthetics, thought, and other related inventions. Here, we aim to dream as we build, conjuring the resources to adapt and (re)invent advanced skills required that sustain emergent coalitions and ongoing technologies Black life, stories, and communities. Join us as we critically and carefully cross-pollinate our toolkits with emergent and advanced technologies.

Interested in collaborating with us?

Our multidisciplinary hub for black study and black aesthetic practice welcomes proposals for programs, gatherings, or projects by and for Afro-diasporic, Black Indigenous, African researchers, students, communities, independent culture workers and all our relations.

We welcome proposals for a wide range of events, including but not limited to:

Questions?