Apocalypse Now

Please Note: This live online conversation was recorded on our CIIS Public Programs YouTube Channel. Watch it here.

Global pandemic, climate disruption, massive inequality, rising authoritarianism, looming ecological collapse. We live in a time of tumultuous change, which increasingly challenges and reshapes our existing story frameworks for understanding current events. How do apocalyptic narratives—from film, art, fiction, television, and beyond—function to shape our imaginations, rehearse different futures, and help us navigate profound disruption, denial, and dissolution? 

Join CIIS faculty Zara Zimbardo with narrative strategist and climate activist Patrick Reinsborough for a conversation exploring how we think about “the end” and what apocalyptic narratives can tell us about new beginnings.

Zara and Patrick describe versions of the end of the world that get re-played on heavy rotation, and the uncanny relationship between apocalyptic fiction and non-fiction realities. In this context, they explore how the collective nightmare of the COVID-19 pandemic has expanded the dreaming boundaries of what is considered imaginable, possible, and doable. 

Please note that this talk will be hosted live online. Instructions on how to join the webinar will be included in your event confirmation email. If you need additional assistance finding or joining the event, please email publicprograms@ciis.edu.

Zara Zimbardo, MA, received her Master's degree in Cultural Anthropology and Social Transformation from California Institute of Integral Studies, and has a BA in Religious Studies from UC Berkeley. For the last twenty years she has been a body-based therapist both in private practice and community health centers. She is a presenter and published writer on topics of the social construction of whiteness, critical media literacy, Islamophobia, subversion of stereotypes in a time of war, social justice comedy, modern monsters and the zombie apocalypse, and representations of gender, race, consumerism and US imperialism/militarism. 

Zara co-founded the White Noise Collective, an anti-racist feminist training and resource organization. She is a co-founder and Special Projects Director of Partners for Collaborative Change, which supports organizations to become more equitable through democratizing research planning and design, and through anti-oppression facilitation and coaching. A former member of the National Council of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the nation's oldest interfaith peace organization, she has worked in solidarity with nonviolent activists resisting militarism in the US, Palestine/Israel and Colombia. 

Her work is influenced by frameworks of critical pedagogy, postcolonial studies, feminist praxis and popular education that seek to make forms of shared knowledge and experience more conscious. She is passionate about facilitation that combines critical dialogue, somatic awareness and Theatre of the Oppressed, a form of community-based inquiry that uses theatre exercises as tools for transformation. Her passions include interdisciplinary cross-pollination, anthropologizing the West, and rendering what is considered "normal" strange. As an educator, she values opportunities to connect issues within the classroom to global and local realities, through deeper understanding of power dynamics, identity construction, histories of the present, unexamined assumptions, and applied projects of relevance. Her goal is to support a context of curiosity, critical thinking and compassion that supports skilled navigation and justice-oriented care for the diverse worlds we inhabit. To learn more about her work, visit Zara's personal website: http://www.zarazimbardo.com

Patrick Reinsborough is a strategist, organizer, and creative provocateur with over 30 years of experience in diverse US social movements. His work to address the ecological crisis through movement-building and shifting cultural narratives led him to co-found the Center for Story-based Strategy. Since 2017 he has been focused on people-powered responses to the climate crisis and is currently the US organizing director for the global climate organization 350.org. He is the author of the widely used activist manual Re:Imagining Change: How to Use Story-based Strategy to Win Campaigns, Build Movements and Change the World (2017 PM Press) and you can find his latest writings at www.patrickreinsborough.com.