Feminist Tea Talk with V Phipps: 'Life Force: A Speculative Design Workshop'

Situated at the pinnacle of verbal irony, the term "peacekeeping" has become synonymous with the use of force both globally (military force) and locally (police force). These realities serve as a backdrop for this exercise in speculative worldbuilding.

Framed by artist and professor V Phipps’ ongoing design fiction project entitled Life Force (synopsis below), workshop participants will imagine an alternate future in which our current methods of peacekeeping are upended and redesigned. After a brief primer on speculative design, this interactive workshop invites participants to develop narratives and create fictional artifacts as provocation for group discussion. The session concludes with a reflection on the ways in which this imaginative exercise questions the assumptions embedded in real-life efforts at establishing justice and securing liberty for ourselves and future generations.

The event runs 1-2:15 p.m. and is part of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Tea Talk Series.

Life Force synopsis

Sparked by Sweden’s abandonment of Feminist Foreign policy in 2022, feminist and queer communities started exploring how the power of AI could be harnessed to redesign the art of peacekeeping. From these efforts, the agency Life Force was founded in 2025. We design products and systems that render the arsenal of weapons made by mankind—and we use that term intentionally—obsolete. Life Force’s mission is to create equitable and sustainable communities both locally and globally. Because we believe a prosperous future is for all of us to design,  our tools for ensuring domestic tranquility and providing for the common defense are developed and deployed in real communities by real people just like you.