Time Has Grandmothers: Making and Unmaking Feminist Futures

Situated within the Laura C. Harris Series theme, Feminist Temporalities and the Futures We Strive For, this lecture features Rasheedah Phillips — a national housing policy expert, attorney, deputy director at the Western Center on Law and Poverty, and acclaimed interdisciplinary artist. Bringing a rich, multidimensional background as a writer, cultural producer, and founder of The AfroFuturist Affair and co-founder of Black Quantum Futurism, Phillips challenges Western linear models of time, conventional causality, and dominant historical narratives.

Drawing from her extensive creative and theoretical work — including her book Dismantling the Master’s Clock: On Race, Space, and Time (AK Press, 2025) and projects that span speculative fiction, archival practice, performance, and international exhibitions at institutions like the Serpentine Gallery and documenta fifteen — Phillips explores how dominant perceptions of time owe more to social constructs than universal facts of nature.

In this session, Phillips weaves together Afrodiasporic conceptions of time and womanist approaches to ancestry, community, and survival to examine how the past, present, and future exist in dynamic, layered relationships. Integrating her background in housing advocacy, racial equity, and community futurisms, she presents an expansive vision of futurity where the feminine serves as a vital site of intersecting histories, ancestral knowledge, creativity, and liberatory possibility.