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Last Friday, January 30, 2026, I had the great pleasure of participating in the 2026 National Advanced Writing Symposium, which was organized by the University Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University. Following the theme of Continuous Collisions: Writing, Publics, Pedagogy, this online conference brought together educators from across the country to discuss what it means to teach advanced writing classes during a time of shifting institutional and political mandates. I served on a panel titled "Changing Times and Counternarratives," during which I shared about the design and goals of the advanced course that I am currently teaching at Stanford, "Ethnofuturist Rhetorics: Imagining the Future of Race." This course explores how writers, artists, filmmakers, and activists of color engage the rhetorical tradition of ethnofuturism to envision the future consequences of existing racial systems and to imagine alternative possibilities for race relations. During my presentation, I reflected on the experience of teaching about the rhetorical tradition of ethnofuturism in the current socio-political moment, in which anti-woke moral panics are threatening the academic freedom of higher education. Courses like mine, which are dedicated to centering the voices of people of color, have been criticized for indoctrinating students into leftist political ideology, promoting anti-patriotic, anti-nationalist beliefs, and fomenting division and shame among students. These criticisms collide and converge to create what feels like a very dystopian reality for us educators, where we might feel in danger of being doxxed or questioned for teaching such essential material. In this moment of crisis, I am struck by how ethnofuturism might offer a rubric for how and why we educators should keep forging forward and teaching this material even in the face of blowback. Ethnofuturism seeks to warn us about the future consequences of our current trajectories, invites us to dream about what might be possible, and offers an expansive vision of how we could shape our world for a more liberatory future.  With my fellow speakers on the "Changing Times and Counternarratives" panel. Comments are closed.
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