10/01/2026
Puón Institute 2026
Creative Collectivity: Towards Collaborative Living Symposium
As the world faces the disasters of genocide, imperial fascism, climate change, and ever-intensifying racial capitalist wars of dispossession and extraction, people continue their struggles to sustain themselves and their communities through collective and collaborative means. Against state and corporate abandonment, predation, and corruption, which have thrown people into conditions of precarity and catastrophe, more and more people are searching for and relying on new, improvised, and inherited practices of socially shared life to support their own as well as their community’s very survival and sustenance, their endeavors to live freely and thrive, their aspirations and dreams of other worlds and futures. More than ever, these cooperative practices and relations are all that stand between people’s imperiled lifeworlds and their extinction.
The 2026 Puón Institute brings artists, writers, scholars, and activists who work on or within these emerging collaborative social environments and networks to explore and share the visions, practices, and challenges of collective and collaborative living and working.
Key questions for exploration will include: What is the world of our dreams? In the act of collectively dreaming, what forms of sociality emerge? How can collectives serve as innovative means of sociality, emphasizing interdependence and mutual reliance not only for survival but toward a life well-lived? Who, what, and where do current collectivities turn to for sources of renewal? In addition to exploring various forms, practices, and challenges of collectives and collaborative living, the Puón Institute gathering highlights the growing significance of communality and collectivization as essential methods of living at this time.
This symposium is organized by Puón Institute co-directors, Neferti X. M. Tadiar and Lucy Burns.
Alfredo F. Tadiar Library’s 2026 Puón Institute’s Creative Collectivity Symposium received support from Rutgers University American Studies & Global Asias.
