Speculative Worldbuilding: Misreading Le Guin

The spaces around us tells stories of the power structures that made them. How can we begin to rewrite these narratives?

This participatory workshop positions architecture as a form of storytelling. Inspired by Ursula K Le Guin’s speculative writing, the session invites participants to worldbuild collectively through misreading, glossing, relating and deliberately wandering off script. Building from Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which challenges the linear, conquest-oriented hero’s tale, we consider how architecture – as a narrative practice – can be a vessel for care, multiplicity and relationality and a vehicle for feminist, decolonial and postcapitalist imaginaries.

Facilitated by Leela Keshav, Kirsty Edgington and Béné Jakel, the workshop takes excerpts from Le Guin’s texts as a point of departure for storytelling, reflection and collective making. Participants are encouraged to share their experiences, doubts and desires in creating and naming imagined worlds, revealing the power held in plurality and shared imagination – because it matters what kind of stories we tell, whether in words, or through architecture.

Accessibility:

- If you need this description in a different accessible format (for example: large print, plain language, or audio), please contact bene.jakel@aaschool.ac.uk and we will be happy to provide it

- If you have specific access needs or require support to participate fully, please feel free to contact bene.jakel@aaschool.ac.uk in advance or speak to us at any moment during the event

- The event will be conducted in spoken and written English, while welcoming all verbal and non-verbal languages and ways of communicating as equally valid forms of contribution

Leela Keshav is a writer and artist-researcher based in London. Her work weaves political ecology, counter-cartography and speculative writing to imagine liberatory futures. She was the inaugural writer-in-residence at Hauser & Wirth Somerset in 2024 and holds a master’s in architecture from the Architectural Association, where she now works as an editor.

Kirsty Edginton is the systems and discovery librarian at the AA. Alongside managing the libraries digital resources, she teaches information and AI literacy and conducts research on esoteric and slow Artificial Intelligence. In this work she curated the series Systems Overhaul at the AA (2025) where artists and practitioners imagined foundational AI systems and practices that served communities over corporations.

Béné Jakel is a German-French artist and spatial practitioner based in London and Berlin, with a transdisciplinary practice of art, architecture and activism. Having studied at the AA in London and the University of Stuttgart, Béné now teaches a Media Studies Elective in the Diploma Programme of the AA and has taught in both the AA Summer School and the Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Stuttgart, as well as trustee on AA Council. Since 2024, their work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025. In their practice “Smash” Béné explores transformative approaches to material, objects and space as means for subversive storytelling, vehicles for decolonial processes, and sites of struggle for social, political and ecological justice.

Image: Béné Jakel, “The quiet whisper of stone II”, (2024), ink on paper