"engaging publics" fellowship
Engaging Publics is:
A free 6-month hybrid public workshop program diving into engaging practices from spatial interventions, creative writing, and design for social transformation to approaches to inclusive cultural spaces.
A funded, 12-month online and on-site fellowship for emerging cultural practitioners exploring community-oriented projects, cultural mediation, and activist practices from digital worlds to urban space, and rural environments. The open call in November 2025 invites three Basel-based on-site fellows and two international online fellows to develop a participatory project and an accompanying text to be published on Futuress.org.
From compulsive scrolling on our phones to AI-generated content flooding our feeds, digital interfaces increasingly mediate our worlds. Yet despite this hyperconnectivity, social media’s algorithmic echo chambers and filter bubbles merely reinforce existing beliefs rather than foster genuine discourse. As tech magnates influence policies, the internet has increasingly become entangled in capitalist, neoliberal systems of surveillance and exploitation, turning the very platforms that were meant to connect us into vehicles of a new authoritarian status quo. However, the internet has also revolutionized access to information and connections across different geographies and lived realities. From viral hashtag campaigns—such as #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, #NiUnaMenos, #RhodesMustFall, or #WomanLifeFreedom—to encrypted messaging, digital communication enables civil society movements to coordinate and mobilize collective action with unprecedented speed and scale.
Simultaneously, resistance persists—and thrives—beyond the digital realm. Educators discuss politics in the classroom, publishers amplify dissenting voices, community spaces build resilience, and protesters take to the streets to demand justice and fight against precarity, instability, injustice, and exploitation.
As globalization and digitalization have profoundly shaped political discourse and practice, new forms of mediation are urgently needed to foster conversations, build relationships, and imagine collective life.
The Engaging Publics fellowship and public program explore participatory practices that span across digital worlds, urban spaces, and rural environments. It asks: How do we engage in conversation across differences? How do we create resilient communities amid fragmented attention and the temptation of our glowing screens? How can we reimagine public engagement in the face of growing precarity, instability, and systemic fatigue?