A Facilitator’s Notebook

“Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.”

— Ruha Benjamin

Imagine this notebook travelled here from the year 2050. It smells like dried orange peels and has notes in the margins that are half prayer, half protocol. This isn’t a manual. It’s a trace.

My name is Ouassima, and I’ve been co-facilitating this process grounded on the belief that facilitation is relational, embodied, and futures-making. What does it mean to co-convene across discomfort, difference, and fatigue? How do we shape a space that is not just about sharing knowledge, but about sensing power, joy, and contradictions together? This notebook gathers some of the do’s and don’ts we stumbled through.

It reflects on the beauty of creating and holding space, and it dreams about what co-convening could mean when it’s not reduced to logistics, but expanded into politics of presence. Think of it as a time capsule of the process, shared in conversation with those who held space alongside me.

Not linear. Not complete. But honest, and full of possible futures.

Political Context and the Urgency of Now

This gathering unfolded in a charged political moment in Germany: one marked by intensifying surveillance, a sharp rise in anti-Muslim racism, increased repression against Palestine solidarity, and a broader securitization of dissent. As digital technologies are weaponized to silence, profile, and criminalize, our very tools of connection become terrains of control.

The ongoing genocide in Palestine, the criminalization of solidarity, and the entrenchment of hegemonic security discourses are not abstractions. They shape our bodies, our possibilities, and our futures online and offline. In Germany, this is felt acutely through racialized policing, digital repression, and shrinking spaces for migrant and feminist organizing.

To gather in this moment is not neutral. It is a political act of refusal and care. At the same time, we recognize the contradictory landscape in which we meet: while civil society spaces are increasingly shrinking across Germany – through legal restrictions, funding threats, and intensified surveillance – Berlin remains an extraordinary hub for resistance, imagination, and translocal organizing. We hold both. We are here to listen deeply and act collectively. To name the harm and also name the horizon.

This gathering insisted on a different mode: one where digital justice cannot be detached from global justice, and where futures are not dictated from above, but shaped from the ground, by those most impacted, most excluded, and most visionary.

Our Shared Vision

The Digital Futures Gathering is a radical, collaborative space for confronting digital violence and imagining futures rooted in justice, care, and collective power.

We gathered across movements, geographies, identities, and generations to ask: Who is digital justice really for? And what becomes possible when survivors, especially those at the margins, are not only centred but co-shaping the field? In a world where digital spaces are often sites of harm, control, surveillance, and exclusion, this convening insisted on reclaiming them as spaces of healing, hope and transformation.

We began not from what is broken, but from what is possible. From feminist encryption to reparation without punishment; from intergenerational learning to human-oriented/life-oriented tech imaginaries – we invited curiosity, conflict, and courage. This gathering did not promise safety in abstraction. Rather, we were committed to building layered, transparent spaces: where power is acknowledged, where expertise from lived experience is honoured, and where participation is not a checkbox but a practice. We came together to unlearn logics of isolation and criminalization, and to reimagine what digital solidarity can mean – not just for ourselves, but for and with those who are most often excluded from the discourse. We came together to listen. To ask hard questions. To hold contradictions. To map possible futures. And to ensure that when we leave, we leave not only with ideas: but with connections, roadmaps, and visions we can act on.

Methodology and Agenda Design

The majority of participants did not know each other before the gathering. A core objective of the gathering was dedicated to building trust and connections between participants, by putting care for each other, active listening, and a space for learning, healing, and exchange at the centre.

Leading up to the event, the co-conveners identified key topics and the needs in the field of digital violence that informed the agenda. The idea was not to set a strict agenda beforehand, but rather to see how the different topics and frameworks merge and interact during gathering.

The event was structured as two days of collaborative working sessions. The agenda was designed as a combination of planned sessions and participant-driven discussions, with additional topics being placed into time slots based on input at the gathering. Sessions were dialogue- and outcome-oriented rather than being presentations or lectures.

The program was designed to enable collaboration and learning across the network of practitioners in order to collectively improve knowledge, implementation and impact in projects and practices as we collectively strive for just, equitable and inclusive digital futures.

I sent out a booklet to the participants beforehand including the agenda, vision, context, and logistical information, but also some guidance on actively shaping the agenda by the participants themselves. Under the premise of “how to hold space and be held in it”, I invited everyone to bring something into the gathering – a session, a story, a practice, a question. The space was shaped by those who stepped into it – and therefore I offered the participants a few grounding principles for facilitating or participating to help to move with care, intention, and courage through the event. Just as important as everyone’s expertise in the room were also their presence, courage, and collective holding.

Re-Imagining Just and Violence-free Futures

As a facilitator with years of experience and expertise in futuring methods (among others from leading the Muslim Futures project at SUPERRR), I weaved different futuring methods into the agenda – as one of the objectives of the gathering was to create an understanding of the futuring work. Among others, I included the “artifacts from the future” in the disruptions from the future moments during the two days, which I had asked participants to bring an beforehand while offering them some guidance on what to bring through a set of prompts that would help to identify everyone’s personal artifact. In the end, some of the most memorable stories and artifacts included a letter, a box of chocolates, a camera, and a hammer.

1. A Tool of Liberation

Something that once belonged to a system of control, now repurposed for collective freedom. Or an artifact that was once outlawed, erased, or deemed dangerous, now restored to its rightful place. What does it look like? Who holds it now? How has its purpose shifted?

2. A Fragment of Kinship

An object that carries the scent of belonging and the warmth of interdependence. Who offers it as a gift? Who holds onto it? What stories does it carry? In this world, wealth is measured not by profit but by connection, trust, and reciprocity.

3. A Remnant of Resistance

A fragment of something larger – a torn banner, a reprogrammed device, a map with new borders. It remembers an uprising, a moment when the future could have gone another way. What forces tried to erase it? What truths does it reveal?

4. An Artifact of Joy

This object holds the weight of laughter, the rhythm of movement, the texture of pleasure. It stands in defiance of the bleakness of the present – a testament to joy as radical resistance. What power does it hold? Who carries it forward?

5. A Letter from the Future

Words once impossible to speak, now etched into something tangible. A decree, a love letter, an apology, a demand. Who wrote it, and for whom? What changed because it now exists? There will be spaces during the gathering to share your artifact (as disruptions in the program, during dinner etc.) through storytelling, quiet presence, or display. You can speak about it, or let it speak for itself.

Ouassima Laabich founded Muslim Futures (www.muslimfutures.de) at SUPERRR Lab, where she wove together critical futurology, digital cultures, arts, and visionary politics. As a PhD candidate in Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin and former fellow at Yale University, her academic path is shaped by deep engagement with carceral logics, (anti-)surveillance, and Critical Muslim Studies. Ouassima is an experienced facilitator, speaker and moderator. She designs transformative spaces that center care, resistance and collective imagination—across movements, disciplines and communities. Her work is dedicated to imagining and enacting futures where justice and joy are inseparable.