HEALTH

I am… Sick. Well. Better. Healed. Chronic. Unwell. Condemned. Different. Serene. Hospitalized. Insured. Uninsured. At risk. Predisposed. Infected. A carrier of. Healthy. Repaired. Augmented; Vaccinated. Anesthetized. Incurable. (Ir)Responsible. A smoker. An opioid addict. Equipped. Assisted. A caregiver. Caring…

I am… A doctor. A surgeon. A nurse. A midwife. A stretcher-bearer. A biologist. Underpaid. Overpaid.Paramedic. Pharmacist. Startup. Lab. Specialist. General practitioner. A.I.. Rural. Urban. Registered. Expensive. Overbooked. Public. Private. Exhausted. On strike. Homeopathic. Allopathic. Alterpathic...

These are some of the words of today’s dominant world of health and medicine - professionalized, high-tech, socialized, at the same time incredibly efficient, under stress and challenged by emerging or very old alternative paradigms.

So, tomorrow? How could or should we redefine health, sickness, and care? What, for instance, would post-collapse care look like? Or a trans- or post-human definition of health? Or definitions emerging from other cultures, frm alternative practice?

Imagine other words, other definitions, other narratives of health, sickness and care in the future.

TIME

“The baseline crisis we must understand and confront is not one of economics, climate change, resource depletion or alternate-reality Republicans. Below them all is a crisis in time. (…)
The trick is to move beyond time slavery and become, instead, a time-bender.”

Adam Fran, “The Tyranny of Modern Times”, NPR, 2011

Time isn’t just something that ticks forward from “before” to “after”. It is a set of fundamental questions in modern physics. It is also one of the bases of each civilization’s cosmology, for whom time has a very different substance and role. Time can flow fast or slow, in synchrony or asynchrony, forward, backward or in circles. It can be precisely measured as a key factor of production, or surfed along with other dimensions of life. It can feel too scarce or too plentiful....

And of course, our current, dominant use of time, as of other resources, is unsustainable. The faster we act, i.e. the more production we cram into a unit of time, the faster we overreach our Planet’s capacities – as well, it appears, as our own.

So how can we bend time (or rather, our experience of time), instead of being bent by it? We’re not looking for time-management recipes, rather for new or different ways of looking at time, to weave it into the fabric of society, to measure or uncount it, to make our individual and social use of it sustainable...

IDENTITY

At the beginning of the 20th century, Virginia Woolf’s writes in Orlando: “Orlando sipped the wine and the Archduke knelt and kissed her hand. In short, they acted the parts of man and woman for ten minutes with great vigour and then fell into natural discourse.”

In a world where gender and culture defines our identity and influences pretty much everything around us:our work, our relations, how other perceive us, how we will grow..This famous sentence from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando implies that gender and our identity are for one linked, they can be something moveable and enacted, temporary, chosen and culturally informed.

For this U+ZINE’s exploration, we turn to Judith Butler to add a bit of agency to Woolf’s imagination: the capacity to act and have the freedom to take position on this performative and culturally informed identity (be it on gender or other components of one’s identity).

Imagine identity as a blank slate. It is in no way culturally or biologically fixed and it calls you to explore it. Identity can be yours, a group, a person’s, a fiction. It can be performative, defend or represent a fictional or real situation. It just has to be transformative to our current state today. 

Send us a contribution: a story,a drawing, a project, a picture, that represents how you imagine how it is built.

PROGRESS

As today follows yesterday, progress seems to move quicker than it did before, challenging us to keep up with it. But it can also seem to move backwards, endangering life on the planet or setting whole communities back.

Many (not all) of us have an issue with “Progress”, but we certainly do not think of Progress in the same way - for some it’s technological progress, for others the loss of traditions, etc.

Progress achieves, emancipates, improves, completes; Progress destroys, leaves aside, selects. Sometimes, we are hopeful for the transformation it will bring, we await its arrival and cross our fingers it won’t be cancelled. Sometimes we fear it, refuse it, or just want to take a step back from it, to make it slow down.

Is it the idea that for better or worse, we need to move “forward”, but with no definable goal in sight, that needs challenging? Is it the speed? The unequal way in which it benefits some and not others? The unpredictability?...

In any case, “Progress” is no longer a universally positive word, even (or perhaps especially?) in the West.

For this U+ZINE, we are asking you to help redefine progress; to project it further or challenge it absolutely; to unbundle its characteristics and meanings, and weave them differently; or to find better words to describe what we should and should not hope and work for.

WATER

Water is many things to us - it is essential to our biological existence, it makes up most of our bodies and covers most of the Earth, it defines landscapes and territories, it is a central figure of most human cosmologies and religions.

Now, let’s suppose our established relationship with water becomes really unstable. Suppose there’s much less sweet water for drinking, cleaning, cooling, cooking, etc. Suppose the flows of water we’ve harnessed over time become unruly and more unpredictable. Suppose liquid sea water levels rise dangerously…

What, then, becomes of our relationship with water?

What makes a good topic?

• Something that you're passionate about
• A simple word + an intriguing / stimulating angle
• Accessible - can trigger interest in very diverse people and groups
• Open - many different worldviews can relate to the topic and its formulation