Location: Oakland, CA
Founding: 2019
Founders/leadership: Calvin Williams
Wakanda Dream Lab is a collective fan-driven project that bridges the worlds of Black fandom and #Blacktivism for Black Liberation. It functions according to a value emergence and celebrates the organic self-organizing nature of fandom. The intention is to build on the aesthetics and pop-culture appeal of Wakanda to develop a vision, principles, values, and frameworks for prefigurative organizing with a new base of activists, artists, and fans for Black Liberation. This project is rooted in the belief Black Liberation begets liberation of all peoples.
Wakanda Dream Lab catalyzes and co-creates vision-led, future-facing world-building resources like toolkits, curricula, podcasts, webinars, Twitter town halls, and events rooted in the Black Panther universe and Wakanda. Participants are invited to immerse themselves in world building and visionary solution making through design labs, hackathons, and workshops.
In October 2019, Wakanda Dream Labs published Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Reimagining Gender in Wakanda, an anthology of revolutionary social justice-oriented art, poetry, and fiction from all across the gender spectrum. In August 2021, the Oakland Museum of Art exhibit “Mothership: Voyage Into Afrofuturism” featured work from Wakanda Dream Lab’s Calvin Williams. In a continued exploration of Afrofuturism, Williams collaborated on a film entitled Space to Dream, and it was selected as a 2021 Docs in Action Film Fund recipient.
Read what Calvin Williams, founder of Wakanda Dream Lab, had to say about about the passing of ibrahim abdul-matin on the Move Blog.
