Research
Kübra Gümüşay is a Visiting Fellow and Mercator Senior Fellow and will be at CRASSH from January to September 2022.
My current research explores how imaginations of the future impact our reality – individually, socially, politically and culturally. While public debates on the climate, gender or racial injustice revolve around the very existence of these, there is a lack of public discourse on more desirable futures and possible ways of implementation. To explore this further, I study utopian and dystopian narratives, conduct interviews with individuals from various social and political movements pushing for change and visit and observe so-called “real utopias“ – places, collectives, organisations that exist on the fault line between ‘dreams and practice’ (Erik Olin Wright, 2010).
About
Kübra Gümüşay is an award-winning writer from Germany. In her best-selling book Sprache und Sein she examines how language dictates politics and shapes the way we think. It was shortlisted for the WBG non-fiction book award and will be published in English by Profile Books in April 2022 as Speaking and Being. Gümüşay is the co-founder of several award-winning campaigns, organisations and initiatives. Most recently, eeden, a feminist co-creation space in Hamburg (selected as “Kultur- und Kreativpiloten Deutschland” in 2019), and future_s, a feminist research and advocacy organisation for desirable futures.
In 2018, Forbes Magazine selected her as one of “30 under 30” in Europe in “Media & Marketing”. In 2021 she was recipient of the Tarabya Artist in Residency Fellowship of the German Kulturakademie. As of 2022, Gümüşay is recipient of the Mercator Fellowship program for “outstanding personalities from academia and practice“.
Kübra Gümüşay will join CRASSH and the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence as a Mercator Senior Fellow. Her Mercator Senior Fellowship is funded by Stiftung Mercator.
