Why We’re Building a Lab for Arab Futures at MIT

The Arab story has been stuck in the past. We’re told about golden ages, poetic ruins, and endless decline. That’s the mythology that structures funding, defines scholarship, and shapes global curiosity. It’s why creative practitioners from the region are often rewarded for nostalgia, not speculation. It’s why we see our past printed more often than our future imagined.

The MIT Institute for Worldmaking is breaking that frame. We are building a lab dedicated to Arab futures — futures as articulated by artists, researchers, designers, architects, writers, educators, technologists, and others who refuse to inherit someone else’s ending. This isn’t a new optics play. It’s infrastructure.

From public interventions to publishing, machine learning to oral history, we are creating systems that support Arab cultural production that looks forward. We are mapping the artists already doing this work, and designing tools that help amplify it — not extract or explain it away.

We treat worldmaking as a working method — a framework for building the systems, spaces, and cultural conditions that shape what comes next. By anchoring it at MIT, we’re shifting who participates in the design of the future.