Rasheedah Phillips is a 2020–2022 Vera List Center Fellow, whose fellowship project, Time Zone Protocols, is part of the Vera List Center’s As for Protocols cycle of programs.

Using Afrofuturism and Black Quantum Futurism as a framework, Time Zone Protocols explores the agreements, protocols, and rules underlying Westernized time constructs. Analyzing the “Protocol Proceedings’’ developed at the 1884 International Meridian Conference in Washington D.C., Time Zone Protocols situates the international and U.S. time zones in their sociopolitical and historical contexts, illuminating the sociological toll such time standards take on Black American and other marginalized communities, and how they help catalyze and perpetuate systemic oppression denying Black communities access and agency over the temporal domains of the past, present, and the future. Time Zone Protocols will result in inter-media work-including maps, zines, and digital films–and the Prime Meridian Unconference, proposing to rewrite protocols of time and offering more equitable time zones developed with a Black temporal lens.

Rasheedah Phillips is a queer Philadelphia-based public interest attorney, mother, interdisciplinary artist, and Black Futurist cultural producer whose writing has appeared in Keywords for Radicals, Temple Political and Civil Right Journal, The Funambulist Magazine, Recess Arts, and more. She is the founder of The AfroFuturist Affair, a founding member of Metropolarity Queer Speculative Fiction Collective, co-founder of Black Quantum Futurism, and co-creator of Community Futures Lab. She is a social justice advocate, a 2016 graduate of Shriver Center’s Racial Justice Institute, and a 2018 Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity. As part of BQF Collective and as a solo artist, Phillips has been A Blade of Grass and Velocity Fund Fellow, and has exhibited, presented, been in residence, and performed at Institute of Contemporary Art London, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Serpentine Gallery, Red Bull Arts, Chicago Architecture Biennial, Akademie Solitude, and more.