Request free copies of the Conflict Systems zine, and join the launch event
Our latest zine, Conflict Systems, is nearly ready!
This zine contends that many recent sites of community building, especially online, have lacked the tools and norms for the practice of conflict. Many reasonable expectations that go by names like due process, justice, accountability, or mediation are unavailable or not even considered in emerging communities. The platforms that communities rely on treat conflict as a corporate liability, not a chance to strengthen relationships.
Conflict Systems offers an invitation for design, for skill-building, and for tool-sharing. We gather here the ideas of people with experience and expertise that ranges from social-movement facilitation to digital court systems, from user-experience design to family law. Where these perspectives meet, there is the chance to cultivate far healthier systems for supporting conflict in the spaces where people find each other today. Drawing together many lineages of knowledge and the lessons of recent research, this gap is an opportunity.
Once again, we're thrilled to be working with our longtime design partner, Drew Hornbein, who created the design through physical weaving to accompany the metaphorical weaving in the text.
Request a zine here—the first 100 requests will receive two free, physical copies.
And on August 12, join us for the virtual launch event for the digital edition as part of the Metagov Seminar—register here.
Apply for the Worker Friendly Media cohort
MEDLab is proud to be hosting Start.coop’s Accelerator for Worker-Friendly Media, in collaboration with Defector Media. This accelerator is designed and curated for worker-friendly media organizations who want to build their revenue and cooperative values so their publication can be sustainable and make a true impact. The Accelerator helps teams refine both their business and ownership models so their businesses can be more successful and have a bigger impact. Each participating team receives 1:1 business coaching, peer support, and more. More details here.
- Program Dates: October 13, 2026 - January 28, 2027
- Information Sessions: July 7, 2026 (2:00 pm MT & July 23, 2026 (11:00 am MT)
- Application Deadline: July 30, 2026
Learn more, sign up for an information session, and apply at start.coop/accelerator.
Magic Mountain Talks: Amia Srinivasan on politics and psychoanalysis, in conversation with Hermione Hoby
July 16, 2026
6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
MEDLab, along with collaborators on and off campus, is helping to build a new event series around the intersection of literature and politics. The events take place at Trident Booksellers & Cafe, an employee-owned business. This month:
Amia Srinivasan is a philosopher and author noted for her work in epistemology and feminist philosophy. She is Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. She is the author of The Right to Sex (Bloomsbury 2021) and a contributing editor of the London Review of Books.
Hermione Hoby is the author of the novels Neon in Daylight, which was twice listed as a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and Virtue, which was shortlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature award. She is a 2024 Macdowell Fellow in Literature and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Guardian, The New York Times, Bookforum, and elsewhere. Raised in London, she lives in Boulder, Colorado.
Podcast: How can VR tell the story of genocide?
MEDLab's radio show, Looks Like New, comes out the fourth Thursday of every month on KGNU, 88.5 FM, or online as a podcast. Last month's episode is now available:
MEDLab’s Stephanie Abdalla speaks with Dr. Naim Aburaddi, artist, journalist, and PhD graduate of CU Boulder whose work explores how immersive tech can document destruction. Aburaddi is the co-founder and co-director of the Phoenix of Gaza XR Project, an interactive virtual reality experience that documents life in Gaza through its culture, history and decades of subjugation by outside powers. It has been exhibited at institutions including MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Brown, and Yale, as well as internationally. Naim is A Data Justice Fellow at Princeton’s Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab and recipient of the 2024 Mellon ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship. His work has been featured by the BBC, WGBH, Colorado Public Radio, and the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
Their conversation moves from the personal to the political, following Aburaddi’s life growing up in Gaza and pursuing journalism abroad, to how storytelling became both a survival tool and a form of resistance.
Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or directly through our website. You can also follow the show on Instagram, Mastodon, and X.
