Black
Study

Futures of Black Feeling is an online, uninstitutional course with JohnPaul Zaccarini that invites Black, Brown and global majority participants into a study space beyond the white gaze.

It combines accessible theory, creative practice and collective care to explore how Black life thinks and feels itself through AfroPessimism, AfroOptimism and key contemporary Black thinkers.

What can you expect?

Everyday ways Black life keeps inventing itself

In a series of live online sessions, participants move between close reading, conversation, short writing experiments and gentle bodybased exercises.

AfroPessimism helps the group name the depth of antiBlack violence and structural negation.

AfroOptimism and kindred currents open onto joy, excess, fantasy and the stubborn, everyday ways Black life keeps inventing itself in spite of all that.

Rather than “balancing” the two, the course treats their tension as a generative engine for thought and art.

Each week focuses on one or two thinkers

With Michelle M. Wright, participants rethink neat, linear stories of Black history and identity, experimenting with her ideas of Black “when and where” in their own timelines and geographies.

Fred Moten’s work on fugitivity and the undercommons guides conversations about refusal, friendship and making life in the cracks of institutions.

Marquis Bey brings in Black transness, anarchism and abolitionist imagination, opening up Blackness as movement and unfixing rather than a closed identity.

With Tina Campt, the group learns to “listen” to images and sound—family photos, phone videos, the hum of daily life—as sites of Black theorizing.

Participants leave with a deeper, embodied grasp of contemporary Black thought

Across the course, Zaccarini holds a space that is more studycircle than classroom: no grades, no jargon gatekeeping, just shared inquiry, humour, and a commitment to taking Black feelings seriously as theory.

Participants leave with a deeper, embodied grasp of contemporary Black thought, a small portfolio of experimental texts or sketches, and a toolkit for creating their own future brown/Black spaces of study, care and resistance in the worlds they move through.

This is Black Study as groove and practice, not just reading list: a place to think, make and dream otherwise together

Minimal theory jargon
Strong emphasis on care, slowness, shared leadership, and cocreated guidelines

It is “uninstitutional” in tone: no grades, minimal theoryjargon, strong emphasis on care, slowness, shared leadership, and cocreated guidelines.

Sessions are live online (2–3 hours), with short readings, writing prompts and somatic checkins rather than heavy essays.

We would likely weave in performance exercises (voice, gesture, posture) to help us notice how theory shows up in the body.

The course emphasizes that Black Study is not only reading difficult books, but also laughing, mourning, gossiping, daydreaming; theory emerges from the ordinary.

Across the course, we hold a space that is more studycircle than classroom: no grades, no jargon gatekeeping, just shared inquiry, humour, and a commitment to taking Black feelings seriously as theory.

This is Black Study as groove and practice, not just reading list: a place to think, make and dream otherwise together.

Our participants say

Vad gör den här kursen? (svar till en kollega)

En konstnär guidar mig in i mig själv, han håller min hand och alla andras (hur gör han det?). genom att se mig själv kan jag se andra. Genom att se andra kan jag se mig själv. Vi är alla små universum som på något sätt håller Makten att släppa in fler, andra, inga genom dörren till ett utställningsrum, en utlysning, ett arbete, en upplevelse, en fika, ett samtal.

Om vi förstår varandra bättre, om vi är redo att låta Mer av vad det innebär att vara människa få ta plats, då kan vi förhoppningsvis också välkomna fler.
Jag börjar tro eller förstå att jag också gör ett bättre jobb om jag är mer snäll mot mig själv och förstår mina olika identiteter bättre.

The workshop allowed me to connect to both my knowledge, the ignorance I carry, learned patterns, and my inner intuition on where I want to go, who I would like to be, and what I would like to bring forward into the world.

Already after the first day I thought about how this workshop really shows the transformative power of art and what art can do in opening up important subjects and questions, by not only bringing them to the surface of our (my) consciousness, but also actively working with them on different layers.

The workshop uses artistic methods, in particular writing, to tackle sensitive, complex issues from perspectives that I have never experienced before.
It exposes structural and power structures that are diminishing us as human beings, no matter if our ancestry is Swedish from many generations or if we are newly arrived in Sweden.

The workshop provided a group of artists and producers coming from all around Europe not only to collectively reflect on representation, diversity and inclusion but also to individually question our relation to the realities of blackness and whiteness.

It offered a creative introspection which is needed to shift our mind-sets and therefore to impulse change in our perimeters of actions and power.

I left these two days of workshop feeling that I had started a personal journey, as much as a collective one.

Öppnade upp för nya tankesätt, självrannsakan och självmedvetenhet. Att se sig själv som en del av en struktur som är felaktig. Med de mallar och krav vi själva och samhället lägger på oss var det svårt att hantera. Det gav till en början ångest och frustration då jag kände hopplöshet. Men efter ett par dagars bearbetning känner jag ett visst hopp om att vi trots att vi är öar i våra egna universum ändå kan mötas. Måste mötas och att vi kan i alla fall öppna upp för ökad förståelse och medmänsklighet.

I was really grateful to a) have the opportunity to be guided through anti-racism work in such a comprehensive, and b) the format, setting, activities and opportunities were fantastic.

Being at home (online) changed the level of vulnerability. All the writing was only just for me, I was accountable to myself. No obligation to speak in a large group or pressure to do it ‘right.’ I think this format is very generous for people who are invested in it.

In nearly all of the small groups, other participants also expressed their gratitude for the artistic and individualized way the workshop was held.

The workshop and its library is a safe space to encounter hard truths. Two days of expertly organised listening, thinking and writing took me through deeply personal and widely organisational perspectives into intersectionality, racism and othering.

does what it says it's going to do.
It provides a safe space in which to explore your experiences and practice, as well as tools to transform these.
This is jargon others are using like catch-phrases without substance. FBS's workshop has the meat on the bones.
The workshop allowed me a real opportunity to tackle the messiness of my identity, as well as, my role in community during these trying times.

It helped me transition from a blurred image (that I thought was clear) of myself to a more illuminated one, revealing obscured nuances of my behaviors and the effects and consequences they can have.

It made me think about empathy, also from one of the postcard texts in the learning platform. It feels like a practise in deep empathy with a starting point that is me and from that being able to use empathy for myself as a tool for moving in my field.

For me the workshops have shown that we can talk facts and statistics, we can bang on about inclusion and diversity on a structural level, but what makes this different is that it comes from within by creating understanding for oneselves and others.
Is tangible change from within. I think the free form of poetry, writing and art as made that possible.
The main word that come to me is ‘care’ in any and every form.

Black Study