Tag: speculative futures

Three PhD positions + One Postdoc in Science Fiction & Contemporary Futurisms (CoFutures & Science Fictionality)

Three PhD positions + One Postdoc in Science Fiction & Contemporary Futurisms (CoFutures & Science Fictionality)

Posted on by bodhisattvac

Three PhD positions and 1 Postdoc position is now available with CoFutures (ERC) and Science Fictionality (NFR): Chinese Science Fiction/Sinofuturism (PhD-ERC), Latin American Science Fiction/Latin@futurisms (PhD-ERC), Nordic and European Futurisms (PhD-NFR), and Museum Studies with an Environmental focus (Postdoc-NFR). All positions will be based at the Department of Culture Studies. Short proposals (3-5 pages) and other documents are requested by 30th April 2020, and the positions start in August 2020. Proposals should contain the basic project outline/proposal, methodology and theory, progress plan, and a brief bibliography, among other things. Full details, including link to the proposal template, are available on the advertisment pages below.

PHD POSITIONS

  1. Chinese SF and Sinofuturisms: https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/183134/doctoral-research-fellowship-on-contemporary-chinese-futurisms-and-chinese-science-fiction
  2. Latin American SF and Latin@Futurisms: https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/183138/doctoral-research-fellowship-on-contemporary-latin-american-futurisms-and-science-fiction
  3. Nordic and European Futurisms: https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/184793/doctoral-research-fellowship-science-fictionality

Environmental changes, demographic changes, and technological changes are the main focus for these positions.

POSTDOC POSITION

https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/183914/post-doctoral-research-fellowship-science-fictionality

Museum studies (or similar, preferably with curatorial experience in  the Nordic region) with an environmental humanities focus will be the main criterion for this position.

For Environmental Humanities focus at our department and the Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo, see the pages of Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH).

More positions will be advertised later.

PLEASE CONSULT THE INFORMATION GIVEN IN THE ADVERTISEMENT LINKS. THE ADVERTISEMENT TEXT IS THE OFFICIAL JOB CALL AND IT IS THE SOURCE OF ANY OFFICIAL INFORMATION.

FAQ

Since the advertisements were posted, I have received a number of queries already, some of them relevant, others less so. To respond to them in one go, here’s a quick FAQ below:
Q1: Do I need to work on Chinese for the Chinese SF position or can I work on Korea, Japan, X…?
A: You need to work on Chinese SF. Transnational perspectives on Chinese SF and comparative studies with SF from other regions are also welcome if these perspectives are in addition to untranslated Chinese language contemporary materials from China.
***
Q2: Do I need to work on Latin American SF for the Latin American SF position, or can I work on SF from anywhere such as Spanish SF or Portuguese SF or Anglophone SF?
A: You need to work on Latin American SF in Spanish and/or Portuguese. Comparative studies with SF from other parts of the world are welcome if these are in addition to the work on Latin American SF in Spanish and/or Portuguese. See also Q1 above.
***
Q3: Do I need to work on Nordic SF for the Nordic and European SF position, or can I work on SF from anywhere outside Europe or in the English Langauge?
A: You need to work on Nordic SF in any of the Nordic languages. The PhD position is a comparative one, so you must work on at least one Nordic language SF. The other SF may be any other major or minor European language except English. English or Anglophone SF  is not the focus of this position.
***
Q4: Do I need to be fluent in/know Chinese for the Chinese SF position
OR
Do I need to be fluent in/know Spanish or Portuguese for the Latin American SF position
OR
Do I need to be fluent in any of the Nordic Languages for the Nordic and European SF position?
A: Yes, you need to be fluent in the languages you are working on. Non-native users are most welcome and encouraged to apply if they have certified fluency.
***
Q5: Can I work on any European language for the European SF position?
A:  The comparison has to be either between SF from (a) two Nordic languages; OR (b) one Nordic language and one European language excluding English. You need at least one Nordic language. The other European language can be any language, but preference might be given to lesser internationally known traditions, for instance Eastern European SF traditions, or Welsh SF.
***
Q6: Do I need to work on literature?
A: Not at all. You can work on other materials, including film, TV, visual arts, video games and other interactive media. The focus is on contemporary materials. Even within literature for instance, you can focus on untranslated fandom materials, fan literature, online fandom communities etc. But you need to make an argument on how these are related to the core issues in CoFutures, including environmental change, demographic change, and/or technological change.
***
Q7: I don’t know Chinese or Spanish or Nordic or European Languages. Will there be more PhD positions?
A: Not at the moment. Further positions from our research networks might be advertised in the next years. Please follow our facebook page for updates (https://www.facebook.com/cofutures/).
***
Q8: I already have a PhD. Should I apply?
A: The likelihood of getting a PhD fellowship if this is your second PhD are quite slim.
***
Q9: Do I need a masters degree to apply for the PhD positions?
A: Yes. Unlike some other parts of the world, you can join UiO for a PhD only if you already have a master’s degree in hand at the time of your application. Please follow the instructions in the advertisement.
***
Q10: I already have a PhD. Can this be turned into a postdoc/research fellowship/research position instead?
A: No.
***
Q11: I already have a PhD and the postdoc position does not suit my specialization. Will you be advertising more postdoc positions with your project?
A: Yes, we will be advertising more postdoc positions. Like our facebook page for updates (https://www.facebook.com/cofutures/). However, these postdoc positions will not be on Latin American SF or Chinese SF.
***
Q12: I don’t have a PhD in Museum Studies. What do you mean by related disciplines?
A: Disciplines that have a close relation to museums, design, exhibition making, and curation processes. These can include disciplines such as Art History or Architecture.
***
Q13: I already have a PhD and I don’t qualify for your postdocs since I mainly work on other topics/languages/ regions/ anglophone materials. But your project is really relevant/interesting/etc. Is it possible to get a postdoc to work with your team?
A: Yes, there are other ways of getting a fully funded postdoctoral fellowship to work with our team. Depending on circumstances, we might announce these options in 2021.
***
Q14: Are there ways of staying updated with project developments?
A: Thank you for your interest! We will have seminars, workshops, conferences, author events, etc. Please like our facebook page for updates: https://www.facebook.com/cofutures/
***
Q15: Are there other positions in CoFutures that are not PhDs or Postdocs?
A: At the moment, no. If there are any positions at any point, those will be advertised through official channels, and updates will be posted on our facebook page.
***
Q16: Is there such a thing as Norwegian SF?
A: Oh this question! I used to face it all the time when I started working on Bangla language SF! And much as I replied then, I will say yes, there is, has been, and will be! And yes, there will be people working on that too in CoFutures. The goal of CoFutures is to think with marginal future visions, including Nordic ones since these have received less attention in the SF world internationally. To get a teaser from Norwegian SF, perhaps you might be interested in the Algernon archive, the most important fanzine in Norwegian SF history.
***
Q17: Why are you against Anglophone SF?
A: I grew up with and work on Anglophone SF myself, and support quite a lot of research in Anglophone materials in other capacities. We will work with Anglophone materials in CoFutures as well (quite a lot in fact). But the advertised positions focus on other regions and materials. And there is a lot more out there in the world that is not written in the English language, but available in English translation. Rachel S. Cordasco / SF in Translation does the whole SF world a favour with her work cataloging and in many cases reviewing all the SF in translation available. Check it out here.
If you are interested in learning more, this article of mine from 2013 might give you an idea about the origins of the CoFutures project.
***
Q18: Do I need to live Oslo for doing the PhD or can I live elsewhere?
A: Up to six months of fieldwork outside Oslo or Norway is permitted during the fieldwork period.
***
Q19: What do you mean by SF arts, community, or fandom work?
A: This means that ideally the candidate should have participated in SF community activities,  whether as writers/artists themselves, or as fans who have organized fandom events or exhibitions.
***
Q20: Will the deadlines be pushed due to the ongoing global pandemic?
A: As yet we have no indication that the deadlines for applications will need to be pushed due to the global pandemic. We will post on our Fb page if we have updates.

The list will be updated if I get more questions. Last updated Saturday, 28 March, 2020.

The UiO image featured is by GK von Skoddeheimen from Pixabay

Origins and Possible Futures

Origins and Possible Futures

Posted on by bodhisattvac

There has been quite a firestorm about a new SAS airlines ad, which says “What’s Scandinavian?”, and answers it with “Absolutely nothing. Everything is copied.”[i] Then it goes into all kinds of things and ideas that are imported, even though those are considered “Scandinavian,” such as democracy from Greece, windmills from Persia etc. Much of the attack has been driven by the cultural Right and those with Right-leaning politics. But the person who showed it to me was struck that I was not at all impressed as someone who genuinely believes in the strength of multiculturalism. The long and short of it is that it is an airline ad, so it tries to sell the message that Scandinavian travellers travel, bring ideas home. Things can have their origins anywhere, but they are at home in Scandinavia.

The ad conflates genuine achievement that might have been invented in any part of the world, whether in Scandinavia or elsewhere, with the facile facts about origins of Swedish meatballs and Danish pastries. I live in Norway, and every single banana pack in the supermarket says where it was grown, every box of tea carries country of origin. I don’t think any Scandinavian would claim a banana or tea while enjoying it. The biggest visibility of China is in that tiny string of words in almost everything we use: “Made in China.” This is just how the world is. Perhaps every person who has some elementary civic education knows about democracy having one of its important origin points in Ancient Greece (Grecian democracy was undemocratic by today’s standards – and Norwegian democracy is probably one of the best in the world at present).[ii] But does that trivia tell us anything useful about democracy today? Technology-wise, I’m fairly certain that there are many technologies invented or innovated in the Scandinavian region, because that is true for every place. Technology and knowledge transfer is precisely what helps us grow as a species. I genuinely think the Danish LEGO is one of the greatest inventions of the modern age, since it trains in and accelerates modular thinking. Scale that up and one can turn to everything from everyday furniture from IKEA, the principles of programming, Minecraft, to millions of kids around the world who grow up with a spectacular method for problem solving and learning basic engineering skills (I want to go into games and education in another blog post soon, so won’t press the point here). But is LEGO Scandinavian culture? What would that even mean?

Not that there isn’t a genuine problem of conflation: people think yoga poses are Indian or spiritual or some such shit,[iii] for instance, and love or hate it for that reason,[iv] instead of going after Swedish turn of the century gym routines, where they originate. And many people think the Arabic numerals and the number system we use are Arabic and have something to do with Islam so shouldn’t be taught in schools.[v] The ad tells us that Scandinavia was brought here piece by piece – and makes no reference whatsoever for instance to the Sami populations. It often becomes necessary to question origins when those origins are tied to questions of violent nationalism. In wartime nationalism serves a different purpose, including promoting a mindset geared towards freedom, community values, and individuality. But only in peacetime can it be questioned enough to prevent war to begin with. Humanities especially and all its wings whether in academia or in any other field have to deal with this fact if they are to be objective and critical, which is why humanities is often the first target of governments when nationalism grows in peacetime. But one must question stupidity in all its forms, including replacing one centre with another. The ad expects us to be mind-blown by the trivia it digs up, couching it in provocative language of “What’s Scandinavian?” and saying “Absolutely nothing”, but the looseness of terms means we can just as easily say, “Everything.” And it would be equally pointless. The ad seeks to be provocative and succeeds, but it also pretends to be historical without an understanding of history, and thus fails.

Perhaps a much better question is: what allows/allowed the development of certain technologies and their transfer, rather than others, and, for the future, how can we learn and make better, faster, and smoother processes of technology and knowledge transfer that do not rely on epistemic or other violence? The first one takes us into the domain of historical enquiry, a pathway that is essentially turned towards the past as a mechanism for understanding the present. The other takes us in the domain of the future and speculation for working on strategies for the present, or, in CoFutures terms, pathways to possible presents. The two are not mutually exclusive, and they depend on each other, but the two are not to be conflated in terms of their goals. For the former, an enquiry into origins is often important, and invaluable. A historical enquiry can put things into perspective, including the conditions under which knowledge is produced, technology created, innovations made and so on. It can lead us to questions such as the treatment of the working classes, labour, slavery, capitalism etc. After all, modern day industrial production, whether technology or food, is built on top of exploitative structures, and a historical enquiry can indeed get us to the origins of these structures. There is also the clear question of disproportionality in innovation and in visibility of innovation, and the money to generate new technologies and to disseminate them is also tied to different kinds of exploitative structures. But then how far do we go with all of it? Which historical era or eras do these enquires lead to? What time? Whose time? Where does it begin? History is not metaphysics, but the quest for origins is a metaphysical one. Ultimately, it only reveals the origins and sources of the problem, and knowledge correction – filling in gaps in what we know about the past – is useful but only part of the solution.

The second one takes us towards a different track, where origin is the nightmare. The second seeks to go beyond those futile quests in order to find some other way of being. This other way of being is not ahistorical, but decidedly transhistorical – where scale is transformed so completely that we are no longer reliant on the limitations of ancestry, blood, or origin, to feel like we belong. The more flexible the scale the more the abundance. The other reason for the second is that if the problems we are facing are global, then the solutions must come from everywhere. If the world is burning no place, no country, no people can escape it. The rich might hold out longer and have greater capacities for survival, but it will eventually destroy everyone. That’s the nature of catastrophe and violence, including climate violence. Point of origin becomes irrelevant in this view. It doesn’t matter if windmills came from Persia – is the region today a primarily oil economy? Yes! And that’s a far more important issue to raise.

My partner is still amused at times by the fact that I love walking around the city so much, and spend so much time at kitchen, hardware, miscellaneous tools stores. I have tried to explain that it’s because these places give me a sense of human imagination, history, and ingenuity. The rolling pin or stone that is in every kitchen connects us across all lands to much of human history. A simple, smooth tool, purely mechanical, timeless. And while knowledge or technology may not save us – human ingenuity is often expressed through that which we make. That human ingenuity may save us yet.

[i] https://onemileatatime.com/controversial-scandinavian-airlines-ad/
[ii] The strength of democracy lies in the simple measure of flexibility: how much difference, dissent, and protest it can tolerate and still be a functioning civil society.
[iii] I use the term EMS (Eastern Mysticism Shit) to call the general tendency to attribute some kind of special mystic wisdom or spiritual values to the so-called East, whether that is seen as positive or negative, and no matter who ascribes these values. The “East” has no special mystical or spiritual knowledge to impart to the rest of the world, even if some of us would like to think so. It is anthropological garbage and a ridiculous way of ascribing difference.
[iv] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/09/why-schools-are-banning-yoga/570904/
[v] https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/56-percent-of-americans-dont-think-we-should-teach-arabic-numerals-in-school/
Begumpura by Ravidas (aka the first Indian utopia)

Begumpura by Ravidas (aka the first Indian utopia)

Posted on by bodhisattvac

This came up during the desert lab project, so I thought it would be a good idea to have a place where the original and the translation could be seen alongside each other. Begumpura by the Bhakti poet Sant Ravidas (c.1450 – c.1520)  is not the first utopia from India (that belongs to the mythological realm), but it can certainly be considered one of the first speculative utopian places from the subcontinental imagination.

रविदास : बेगमपुरा   /  /  Ravidas : Begumpura

बेगम पुरा सहर को नाउ।।
दूखु अंदोहु नहीं तिहि ठाउ।।
नां तसवीस खिराजु न मालु।।
खउफु न खता न तरसु जवालु।।1।।
अब मोहि खूब वतन गह पाई।।
ऊहां खैरि सदा मेरे भाई ।।1।। रहाउ।।
काइमु दाइमु सदा पातिसाही।।
दोम न सेम एक सो आही।।
आबादानु सदा मसहूर।।
ऊहां गनी बसहि मामूर।।2।।
तिउ तिउ सैल करहि जिउ भावै।।
महरम महल न को अटकावै।।
कहि रविदास खलास चमारा।।
जो हम सहरी सु मीतु हमारा।।3।। (पन्ना 345)		 The regal realm with the sorrowless name:
they call it Begumpura, a place with no pain,
No taxes or cares, none owns property there,
no wrongdoing, worry, terror, or torture.
Oh my brother, I’ve come to take it as my own,
my distant home where everything is right.
That imperial kingdom is rich and secure,
where none are third or second – all are one;
They do this or that, they walk where they wish,
they stroll through fabled palaces unchallenged.
Oh, says Ravidas, a tanner now set free,
those who walk beside me are my friends.

Source for the original: https://www.punjabkesari.in/dharm/news/sri-guru-ravidas-jis-prakash-utsav-746842

Translation: Songs of the Saints of India, edited by Hawley and Juergensmeyer, page 32, sourced here: http://roundtableindia.co.in/lit-blogs/?p=1968

Doing Things with SF and Speculation

Doing Things with SF and Speculation

Posted on by bodhisattvac

There is a perception that SF is about predicting the future. While that may be the case for some SF, far more common is SF that deals with trends, and buried in those trends, possibilities, while other SF is more in the nature of what-ifs and general speculation. SF thus may or may not be technological, although to maintain a semblance of difference from garden-variety fantasy it often has the veneer of the technoscientific as a distinguishing feature. I have discussed SF previously as a composite of technological futurism, epistemological futurism, and conditions of possibility, in other words that takes the future as a starting point for thinking about possible presents, but that description works only for a certain kind of SF, as all descriptions do. More specifically, that description of SF works for the kind of SF that I find interesting as a researcher, as this kind of SF helps me think through certain problems and questions I am dealing with.

This kind of SF has been seen as useful by any number of organizations, including think tanks and governments, who think that SF provides particularly fertile grounds for speculating about future societies and technologies. Both NASA and ESA have had numerous projects drawing upon SF.[1] Just a few months ago, newspapers widely reported the French Government recruiting SF writers for assistance in military strategy (the truth is a little more complex than that, but not by much).[2] There are any number of websites out there which focus on what SF got right and what it didn’t (or hasn’t yet) when it came to predictions about future technologies.[3] Within natural science domains, SF often turns up as a general thinking tool, allowing the kind of gee-whiz excitement about possible technologies and ideas that may or may not be feasible. In many cases, people and organizations also actively work towards making such ideas real, or at least exploring the possibilities of translating some ideas into reality.[4] A whole bunch of innovations literature has used SF to think with possibilities in technoscientific development. University centers such as the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University [5] and the Arthur C Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego [6] have done an incredible job thinking with the science and science fiction model, dealing with a wide variety of imaginative responses to global problems such as climate change. Such responses have also spawned new tools and methodologies such as prototype fiction, coined by Intel’s Brian David Johnson, which encourage prototyping both ideas and effects of SFnal technologies that are within the realm of possibility.

Yet, when talking about SF, three main problems remain. First, how does one create a process for such speculative thinking that can be used by people with SF or non-SF interests, such that speculation itself is seen generally as a positive activity: an essential part of rather than dissociated from reality. This is not a problem unique to SF, it is a problem for other speculative genres such as fantasy or fairytale and folklore. But the problem is particularly acute when discussing SF, since folklore and fairytale at least have a certain cultural claim which SF lacks in most parts of the world. Second, how do we encourage speculation that is geared towards more positive possibilities. Much speculation today is dystopic, which is unsurprising given the state of the world, where climate change, demographic change, and technological change cause numerous anxieties about the future. but one of the advantages of speculation is that it can help us think past those mental and social blocks. As Samuel Delany put it in his Paris Review interview, “Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works differently.”[7] Third, how do we ensure that those who most need it to think of possibilities use such tools and strategies effectively: the marginalized, the oppressed, and the suffering. By effective, I mean to say that these speculations are seen, heard, and taken seriously, and such speculations are not co-opted into technocratic or technofascistic views or co-opted into top-down managerial visions.

There are no easy answers to these, but luckily I can at least work on some of these problems in the next years. I also intend to investigate strategies used by others to address these same problems, and explore if some of these strategies can be scaled up or distributed when talking about the globe.

 

 

[1] For instance, check out this cool project Innovative Technologies from Science Fiction for Space Applications, edited by David Raitt (https://www.esa.int/esapub/br/br176/br176.pdf)

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49044892

[3] Perhaps the most comprehensive source of such hits and misses is the technovelgy database: http://technovelgy.com/

[4] NANORA, the EU Nano Regions Alliance that focuses on nanotechnology, has done cool things with nanotech ideas in science fiction literature. http://www.nanora.eu/nano-dimension-science-fiction

[5] https://csi.asu.edu/

[6] http://imagination.ucsd.edu/index.html

[7] Delany, Samuel R. “The Art of Fiction No. 210.” Interview by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah. The Paris Review, Issue 197, Summer 2011. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6088/samuel-r-delany-the-art-of-fiction-no-210-samuel-r-delany.

Oslo School of Environmental Humanities: Opening Conference

Oslo School of Environmental Humanities: Opening Conference

Posted on by bodhisattvac

So yesterday I was at “Nordic Environments,” the opening conference of the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities.

Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH)[i] is the Faculty of Humanities and UniOslo’s flagship 5 year research and education initiative for the environmental humanities (EnvHum). While OSEH has been in operation for nearly a year, under the leadership of director Ursula Muenster (Associate Professor at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages) and some of the coolest people at the Faculty of Humanities, UniOslo, the opening conference[ii] was a celebration of the different kinds of initiatives and dialogues that OSEH has facilitated or participated in both at the university level and the wider public level over this year, as well as a statement of its goals and projects over the next years. The conference was held at SALT,[iii] which was an unusual location for an academic conference for those outside Scandinavia, being a “nomadic art project”, sauna, and exhibition space. However, it fit well with the Norwegian celebration of nature, the environmental focus of OSEH and its desire to promote interdisciplinary knowledge production including the arts, as well as the general academic goal of increasing public participation and bidirectional knowledge transfer. OSEH has also been doing it with a number of cool events, such as their EnvHum lunchtime discussions (check out the OSEH webpages for more!), so in that sense having a venue outside the university space made sense.

Due to other commitments, I was unable to attend the post-lunch panel, but I did manage to attend the morning sessions as well as the full evening program. So what follows are some general and haphazard thoughts on the event, and some of my takeaways from the opening day.

* Heather Swanson’s keynote: this was an amazing keynote, not only because Swanson is an engaging speaker, but because the topic was “failure”, which is an increasingly relevant theme for our times. The failure ranges from the personal (managing precarity; reviewer two etc., themes that came up during the Q&A session as well), to the disciplinary (true “interdisciplinary” exchanges between humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences; having an actual impact on the state of affairs in the world etc.), to the academic-political (increasing corporatization of public sector institutions; failure to facilitate meaningful and progressive political change in these times of political crisis; balancing research responsibility with other kinds of political activity, balancing environmental, queer, and left activism, etc.). Swanson’s talk brilliantly and beautifully captured all these failures, and went beyond them.

There was one issue for me however and that was the notion of genre and breaking genre. But it was “more a comment than a question” so it was better to write it out than bring it up in the conference space. From my literary training standpoint, genres are always already broken. There is no such thing as a “pure” genre, and therefore breaking genre doesn’t make sense. This goes as much for an academic lecture as it does for academic writing, or self-presentation, or performance. It also brings up another issue, as visual anthropologist and my friend Moumita Sen puts it: there are many occasions where it makes no sense to subvert the subversion, because it only serves to bring us back to the status quo. This is particularly an issue when constant subversion becomes the norm to such an extent that the only way one can “subvert” is by being apolitical, or by being strongly against political correctness. In the last few years, we have seen some strong instances of “breaking genre,” such as dressing informally for an academic talk which have been nothing more than reinstatement of the status quo in different forms. Take as example Matt Taylor’s misogynist t-shirt which sparked quite a debate a few years ago – because on the one hand it did subvert the genre of serious academic talk, while reinforcing the general misogynistic problem within STEM and academia.[iv] At what point do we set the limits of subversion, at what point is breaking genre a valid exercise, and when does it become yet another capitalist way of marking the path of progress: innovation as the continuous breaking of genre? The question of failure can also lead one down the same path – what really constitutes a failure if it is a “productive failure” (after all, science and knowledge progress through failures), or if it is the seed of something else (particularly true of political revolutions, when we talk about the “failure” of Occupy or the Ukrainian Orange Revolution or the Arab Spring)?

Swanson did distance herself from the problems I raise here, especially during Q&A when she emphatically asserted that her objective to bring up “failure” was not a call to abandon political struggle, or academic work, or any of those things, nor was her call for productive failure a Silicon Valley-esque call for innovation. And I agree with her that they are not, but they are connected and the problems raised by using the same strategies towards progress and conservative ends are not easy to ignore.  This, and the problem of genre and breaking genre, are also at the heart of the CoFutures argument, so a lot of these are thoughts that came up due to my own preoccupations rather than Swanson’s talk alone, but I raise them to point to the richness of her talk and the concerns she brought up. I am not sure some of these contradictions can be resolved. I will just mention in context the epigraph by Nic Pizzolatto in Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Agents of Dreamland, which is on top of my tbr pile at the moment, that an answer isn’t the same thing as a solution.[v]

*Another question that Swanson raised was the point about “Environmental Humanities” as a problem term, and how “environment” serves as a boundary object that allows negotiations with other disciplines, while humanities serves to exclude interdisciplinary collaborations. Somehow, she argued, we are stuck with it, even though EnvHum should perhaps be called not- environment, and not-humanities. This was a fun idea to think with, because a lot of us have similar problems with the term science fiction.

*Speaking of SF, Muenster ended her introduction with a list of six powerful women who have transformed our way of thinking, and she included two people those of us in the SFF field are proud to think of as our own in some ways: Ursula Le Guin and Donna Haraway.[vi] SFF and EnvHum have never been far apart, and CoFutures will also focus on these connections, including eco-fiction, environmental literature, climate fiction, anthropocene fictions, etc. There is a lot to say and I will write about it at some other point, but it was really wonderful that she brought it up.

*Interventions: the evening programme is worth focusing on. Muenster and OSEH created a packed but extremely engaging programme with speakers from public organizations, artists, architects, and finally, a concert with Sami Joik artist Vassvik.[vii] In brief presentations, we learnt about GrowLab which stages urban interventions in the Oslo city space, marine creatures in the inner Oslo fjord, the popping and crackling sounds of oxygen escaping the slowly declining iceshelves of the Arctic from the Future North project, about Natur og Ungdom and the anti-oil drilling climate lawsuit brought about by children, youth, and others against the Norwegian government, a supremely tragicomic performance by Kristy Kross (dressed as a fish) about extinction adapted to “Don’t Worry Be Happy”, and a presentation of the weird Anthropocene Cookbook. The broad range of topics and presentations, with the common theme of anthropogenic climate change but focusing on it from a variety of lenses from legal perspectives to aesthetic concerns to overconsumption to neoliberal capitalism to settler colonialism, offered us a snapshot of academic, political, and artistic ways of strategizing for a common cause, and the ambition of OSEH to work across disciplines and initiate different kinds of discussions going forward. And the concert that brought it all to a close was out of this world.

Altogether, it was a perfect day. Many congratulations to the organizers and OSEH putting this amazing event together! I am really excited about the next years!

 

[i] https://www.hf.uio.no/english/research/strategic-research-areas/oseh/

[ii] https://www.hf.uio.no/english/research/strategic-research-areas/oseh/news-and-events/news/opening.html

[iii] https://www.salted.no/

[iv] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/13/why-women-in-science-are-annoyed-at-rosetta-mission-scientists-clothing

[v] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0765394324

[vi] https://people.ucsc.edu/~haraway/PilgrimAward.html

[vii] https://grappa.no/en/artist/vassvik/

 

The “Origins” of the CoFutures project

The “Origins” of the CoFutures project

Posted on by bodhisattvac

CoFutures originates in the different strands of engagement with future fictions and science fiction that have emerged in the last couple of decades. These new future fictions are a response to the predominantly Anglophone, predominantly ethnic white, imaginaries of the future that have been common in future oriented fictions and science fiction. This limitation in the availability of possible futures can be seen in the works that are available internationally, in the more prominently highlighted non-fiction narratives about the future (including scenario, policy, and strategy documents), the theorizations of the future, and theories and criticism of future fictions more broadly. If postcolonial studies eroded the general sense of certainty about the qualities of canonical Euro-American literature, then it failed to go past its implicit valorizations of alternate canons based on the works produced in these formerly colonized locations. Genres such as science fiction, or fantasy, broadly, had to fight out their own battle on a pop cultural battlefield, on separate terms from the postcolonial battlefield. The postcolonial struggle was the academe reasserting its rights to determine what was to be studied and what qualified as high literature; the pop-cultural struggle was about the everyday, the fandoms, the communities: it was about the people who had grown up reading other people’s visions of the future over and again and wanted to see themselves in the futures they read.

 

One such battle was the Racefail ’091 which among other things highlighted the poor representation of POC voices in fandom communities, including producers, consumers, and critics. For me, sitting in India far from these debates, trying to write up a PhD proposal on studying Bangla science fiction or kalpavigyan written in the colonial period, postcolonial theory was one of the key entry points in the discussion, as it is for most Indians studying EngLit. While I had been planning my PhD project since 2006 on the same subject, it was really John Rieder’s already classic study Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction2 that gave me the perspective I was looking for. Rieder’s fantastic work did not include the colonized parts of the world, certainly not India, but it did make me wonder why that was so, given that the Indian history of future histories begins in the colonial period as well, and for much of the same reasons as highlighted by Rieder, only sometimes in the reverse. I learnt about Racefail in 2010, after I moved to Norway for my PhD, but I spent the next few years buried in archives and lit-crit. But fandom environments, including in Norway. were rapidly transforming in those years. By 2013-14, there were full blown crises, with Gamergate3 and Puppygate4 in the gaming industry and the SFF fandom communities respectively. What I call my first CoFutures essay (“Recentering Science Fiction And The Fantastic: What Would a Non-Anglocentric Understanding of Science Fiction and Fantasy Look Like?”, published in Strange Horizons in September 2013)5 came at the end of my PhD, just when these crises were completely taking over fandom discussions.

 

With the crises we have clarity, new assertions, and strength. Cixin Liu’s Hugo for The Three Body Problem in 2015, and N. K. Jemisin’s consecutive victories are the most easily visible signs of this strength. The process of naming that marks the edges of a new aesthetic formation has also already begun. New histories and new excavations of the past show the global origins of future fictions, while new strategies are being carved for the future from the problems of the present. This trend began with Afrofuturism to a large extent, but the work of a whole generation of scholars has highlighted the scope of the phenomena from one corner of the globe to the other, but especially in the context of the global South from South America to South East Asia. Creators have brought forth new strategies and coined new terms to represent different experiences of the future, such as in the Middle East with Fatima Al Qadiri and Sophia Al-Maria’s chrome-pastiche Gulf-futurism,6 or the possibilities for the future offered in Grace Dillon’s Indigenous futurism.7 There are other labels floating about in the recent years. Some of these are geographically inflected while others thematically oriented, such as Lawrence Lek’s Sinofuturism8 and Yudhanjaya Wijeratne’s Ricepunk.9 These changes also highlighted the strong Anglocentric (and to a certain extent Francocentric) biases of the producers and consumers when it came to recognizing future fictions in other languages and other geographical regions, for instance even within Europe, such as Eastern and Northern Europe. Rachel S. Cordasco’s brilliant project Speculative Fiction in Translation has done much to raise general awareness of these fictions from everywhere around the world, in many different languages.10

 

Not all developments have been positive, and I plan to discuss some of these in more detail at a later time.

 

CoFutures is the result of all these discussions. It is as much about the personal journey as an Indian working on things far away from home and about the different experiences that have shaped my own work, as it is about global fandom and academic debates on gender, ethnicity, Anglocentrism, translation, and other related topics. In the next few years, the project hopes to bring in numerous academics and creators, from writers to artists to games designers, to discuss better ways for envisioning the future. CoFutures is not a solo project. It is a community project: community is where it comes from, to which it contributes, to which it seeks to give back. This was the reason I wore my shiny Star Trek TNG combadge even to the ERC interview in Brussels, taking the risk that they wouldn’t fund me because of my refusal to dress “properly” for the interview. But perhaps they saw it for what it is: that CoFutures is about the community, the fandom, many possible futures, and more than anything else, hope. LLAP! ?

1 http://annsomerville.net/a-themed-summary-of-racefail-09-in-large-friendly-letters-for-those-who-think-race-discussions-are-hard/
2 Rieder, John. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Wesleyan UP, 2008.
3 https://www.vox.com/2014/9/6/6111065/gamergate-explained-everybody-fighting
4 https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/04/the-culture-wars-come-to-sci-fi/390012/
5 http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/recentering-science-fiction-and-the-fantastic-what-would-a-non-anglocentric-understanding-of-science-fiction-and-fantasy-look-like/
6 https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/15037/1/al-qadiri-al-maria-on-gulf-futurism
7 Dillon, Grace. Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction.  Arizona UP, 2012
8 https://vimeo.com/179509486
9 http://yudhanjaya.com/2019/05/the-ricepunk-manifesto/
10 https://www.sfintranslation.com/
Science Fictionality and Speculative Futures / Workshop

Science Fictionality and Speculative Futures / Workshop

Posted on by bodhisattvac

Title: Science Fictionality and Speculative Futures / CoF Workshop

Instructor Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay

Location MMAG Art Foundation / Amman

Date 19-26 August 2019.

Objective The objective of the workshop is to discuss ways of working with the speculative imaginary and speculative futures with artist residents. A secondary objective is to introduce some thematic concerns related to The Kalpana collective’s ongoing project Speculation: Desert / Maps and Prototypes of Science Fictional Presences and discuss the desert imaginary in speculative fiction.

Structure The workshop unfolds as five half day (3 hours each; total 15 hours) thematically structured sessions. On the final day (3 hours) participants will be developing extended new speculations. On all days, participants will also be invited to play specially selected boardgames in the evenings that will push them to think with speculative futures.

The sessions are arranged as follows:

Day 0 / Introduction / General introduction to the course, participant backgrounds, and workshop expectations.

Day 1 / Speculating / The first introduces the theme of speculation, and what role speculation can play in imagining alternative and more egalitarian futures. Through a series of readings and viewings of classic and contemporary speculative texts, our goal will be to explore, identify and find reasons for why we might wish to think with a genre such as speculative/science fiction for our creative practices.

Day 2 / Prototyping / The second shows different contemporary strategies of prototyping futures, and building a toolkit to work with the speculative for arts and research.

Day 3 / Imagining / The third takes us through several works and manifestos that can serve as cues for our creative practices.

Day 4 / Building / To make is to know, so the fourth session will be used to develop and critique several starting speculative scripts, or incorporate speculative themes in existing projects.

***

Workshop participants are expected to have gone through the assigned materials before the workshop starts. During the workshop, participants are invited to comment on one or more of these materials, discuss the themes, what worked for them and what did not, and how these ideas connect to other things they have read or worked with.

Syllabus

Day 1 / Speculating; or why to do what is to be done

Margaret Atwood. 2009. “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet.” The Guardian. 26 September 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/sep/26/margaret-atwood-mini-science-fiction

Ursula LeGuin. 1973 (1991). “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (Variations on a theme by William James).” Utopian Studies 2 (1/2):1-5. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20719019

N. K. Jemisin. 2018. “The Ones Who Stay and Fight.” How Long Till Black Future Month? Orbit.

J. G. Ballard. 1962. “Which Way to Inner Space?” New Worlds Science Fiction 118 (5/1962): 2-3 & 116-118.

Vandana Singh. 2008. “A Speculative Manifesto.” The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories. Zubaan Books.

Stanislaw Lem. 1981. “Metafantasia: The Possibilities of Science Fiction (Metafantasia: Les possibilités de la science-fiction)”. Translated by Etelka de Laczay and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay. Science Fiction Studies 8(1): 54-71. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4239383

Historical Turns // Ken Liu. 2011 (2016). “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary.” The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. Head of Zeus. https://kenliu.name/binary/liu_the_man_who_ended_history.pdf

Historical Turns // Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind. 2015. In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain. Film.

Historical Turns // Vandana Singh. 2015 (2018). “Ambiguity Machines: An Examination.” Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories. Small Beer Press.

Day 2 / Prototyping; or how to think up what to do

Bruce Sterling. 2009. “Design Fiction.” Interactions May-June 2009: 21-24. http://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/may-june-2009/cover-storydesign-fiction1

Brian David Johnson. 2011. Science Fiction Prototyping. Morgan & Claypool Publishers. Extract.

Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. 2013. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. The MIT Press. Extract.

Stuart Candy & Kelly Kornet. 2017. “A Field Guide to Ethnographic Experiential Futures.” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317837102_A_Field_Guide_to_Ethnographic_Experiential_Futures

Stuart Candy & Kelly Kornet. 2019. “Turning Foresight Inside Out: An Introduction to Ethnographic Experiential Futures” Journal of Futures Studies 23(3): 3–22. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331857932_Turning_Foresight_Inside_Out_An_Introduction_to_Ethnographic_Experiential_Futures

Rebecca Onion. 2008. “Reclaiming the Machine: An Introductory Look at Steampunk in Everyday Practice.” Neo-Victorian Studies 1(1): 138-163. http://www.rebeccaonion.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/OnionSteampunk.pdf

Desert Discussions // Anonymous. 2011. Desert. Armin Press. Extract. http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-desert

Desert Discussions // Corey S. Pressman. 2018. “Divided Light.” The Weight of Light: A Collection of Solar Futures. Edited by Joey Eschrich and Clark A. Miller. 141-155. https://csi.asu.edu/books/weight/

Desert Discussions // Paolo Soleri. 1969 (2006). Arcology: The City in the Image of Man. Cosanti Press. Extract. https://www.organism.earth/library/document/76

Day 3 / Imagining; or how to do what is to be done

Samuel Delany. 1978 (2009). “About 5750 Words.” The Jewel Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press. 1-15.

Geoff Ryman. 2004 (2006). “The Mundane Manifesto.” New York Review of Science Fiction 226 (June 2006): 4–5. https://sfgenics.wordpress.com/2013/07/04/geoff-ryman-et-al-the-mundane-manifesto/

Martine Syms. 2013. “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto.” Rhizome 17 December 2013. https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/dec/17/mundane-afrofuturist-manifesto/

Ursula LeGuin. 1977 (1982). “Do-it-yourself Cosmology.” The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Berkeley Books. 118-122.

Futures and Futuring // John Akomfrah. 1996. The Last Angel of History. Film.

Futures and Futuring // Wanuri Kahiu. 2009. Pumzi. Film.

Futures and Futuring // Biju Vishwanath. 2014. Shadow Tree. Film. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1WOWbgi-wU

Futures and Futuring // Jason Wishnow. 2014. The Sandstorm. Film. https://vimeo.com/104436803

Day 4 / Building; or verum ipsum factum

Participants will be introduced to the primary elements of story and plot development, and then encouraged to produce a new work of flash fiction.

Theme: Overlay by Kaira.  Extra Text
Cape Town, South Africa