Folded futures: the exquisite corpse of citizenship and the emergence of planetizen

Abstract

This paper introduces the planetizen as a speculative figure of more-than-human planetary belonging, emerging not through coherence but through rupture, absurdity, and relational composition. Drawing on a semester-long collaboration with students in the Planetizing Citizenship course at Arizona University, we explore how citizenship – as historically defined by exclusionary state structures – has become an ‘exquisite corpse’: a fragmented narrative assembled through conquest, policy, bureaucracy, and erasure. Using arts-based, posthumanist, and diffractive methods – including a classroom adaptation of the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse—we trace how students co-composed partial, affective, and often surreal micro-narratives of life in planetary collapse. We approach these fragments as sites of inquiry in their own right: speculative openings into what it might mean to belong otherwise. We propose the planetizen as a figure that holds together grief and imagination, composts citizenship’s normative logics, and invites layered, relational ways of being-with the world in ruins. Rather than offering answers, this paper unfolds through conceptual, affective, and methodological folds, embracing the absurd, the unfinished, and the entangled as conditions for planetary justice and collective repair.