Environmental Humanities and Speculative Fiction Reading Group

This reading group will explore the places where environmental humanities, archaeology and speculative fiction overlap.

Photo: Gennaro Leonardi, Pixabay

”I found, at last, the town I had been hunting for. After digging in several wrong places for over a year and persisting in several blockhead opinions - that it must be walled, with one gate, for instance - I was studying yet once more the contours of my map of the region, when it dawned as slowly and certainly as the sun itself on me that the town was there, between the creeks, under my feet the whole time."

Extract from “Towards an Archaeology of the Future” from Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin.

We will meet to discuss a range of texts - academic and fictional - and perhaps create our own texts about possible futures. In the process we might think about Octavia’s Butler’s prescient visions, Donna Haraway’s notion of “SF” (speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, science fiction, speculative fiction, science fact, science fantasy, string figures), and Le Guin’s writings about a people who “might be going to have lived a long, long time from now”.

Meeting dates and suggested readings:

Thursday 15 May 2025, 16:00 at SU and Zoom

Please register at: https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/meeting/register/chUsnZyJQk-O4dYCaHRPEA
This time, we are mixing places, origins and themes in water, with some academic papers.

Speculative short stories:

Nana Afadua Ofori-Atta (2023). The Strange Folk, Omenana, Issue 25 (March). Available at: https://omenana.com/2023/03/31/the-strange-folk-nana-afadua-ofori-atta/
Emmi Itäranta (2015). Memory of water. London : Harper Voyager. Chapters 1-3. Available in pfd format in Box.
Tang Fei (2016). Call Girl. In: Liu, K. (Ed.), Invisible planets. Head of Zeus. Available in pfd format in Box. Also as an e-book at SU’s library.

Academic papers:

Astrida Neimanis (2018). Posthuman Phenomenologies for Planetary Bodies of Water. In: C. Åsberg, R. Braidotti (eds.), A Feminist Companion to the Posthumanities, Springer International Publishing. Available in pfd format in Box.
Melody Jue (2020). Wild Blue Media. Duke University Press. Only the Introduction. Available in pfd format in Box.

In this meeting, we will wonder around the concepts, representation, embodiments and lives experiences of water and bodies of water, around three short fictional texts and two academic articles around these themes. You are welcome to come with comments, questions or reflections.

Read at your convenience and talk to you soon! Looking forward to it.

Thursday 5 June 2025, 15:00 at SU and Zoom

This date is preliminary, the final date will be confirmed two weeks before the meeting on this web and by email. Please write to elisa.viterimarquez@su.se if you want to be part of the mailing list. The readings are decided collectively at the previous meeting. If you are not able to attend but have a suggestion, please email us.

Previous meetings:

Thursday 3 April 2025, 15:15 at SU and Zoom

Place: Room 439 at the Archaeology and Classical Studies building (Lilla Frescati) and Zoom.

We continue with Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, with some EH readings.

Speculative short stories (suggested order for discussion):

Dare Segun Falowo. We are born. In: Fantasy and Science Fiction (September/October 2017). Available in Box.
Mazi Nwonwu (2020). The Rainmaker. In: Wole Talabi (Ed.), Africanfuturism: An Anthology. Brittle Paper. Available in Box and SU library.
Vaage, N. S. (2024). Soiling the Anthropocene. In S. Rollig & V. Gamper (Eds.), Angelika Loderer. Soil Fictions (Exhibition catalogue) (pp. 56 – 92). Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König. (English text from page 85). Available in Box.
Christina Fredengren (23 Nov 2024): Thinking with soil in heritage matters, Landscape Research, DOI: 10.1080/01426397.2024.2424601. Available in Box.

This time we will focus of soil, soiling, materials on the ground.

Thursday 6 February 2025, 15:00 at SU and Zoom

Place: Room 439 at the Archaeology and Classical Studies building (Lilla Frescati) and Zoom.

Please register here for final access details and the Zoom link:
https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/meeting/register/J4fXyN7TQZ-QDE8po11ikA

We start this reading group with two short pieces:

In Le Guin, U. K. (2017). Tsing, A. L., Bubandt, N., Gan, E., & Swanson, H. A. (Eds.). Arts of living on a damaged planet. University of Minnesota Press. The book is available online at SU library. This short text is available in Box as a pdf file.

Haddad, S. (2019). Song of the Birds. In: Ghalayini, Basma (Ed.). Palestine +100. Manchester: Comma Press. The text is available in Box as a pdf file.

During the session, we will be able to share our impressions over the suggested readings. There is not much to prepare. For those who would like to have a guide, we can primarily suggest the following issues:

Technology and biopolitics for colonization and control.
Violence, war and insecurity in our relationship with the environment, how do we feel disconformt through certain narrative techniques?
What can home mean to different beings at different places, even dimensions?
Le Guin (2017, p. M16) writes: ”Science describes accurately from outside; poetry describes accurately from inside.” Any thoughts about that?

Thursday 6 March 2025, 15:15 at SU and Zoom

Place: Room 439 at the Archaeology and Classical Studies building (Lilla Frescati) and Zoom.

Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism

Speculative short stories (suggested order for discussion):

Talabi, Wole (2019). Parse. Error. Reset. In: Incomplete solutions. Available as a pdf in Box.
Okorafor, Nnedi. (2011). Spider the Artist. Lightspeed, Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. Available at: https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/spider-the-artist/
Butler, Octavia E. (1996). Bloodchild. In: Bloodchild and other stories. Seven Stories Press. Text available as a pdf in Box.

Reflections:

Okorafor, Nnedi. (2019, October 19). Africanfuturism Defined. Available at: http://nnedi.blogspot.com/2019/10/africanfuturism-defined.html
Akomolafe, Bayo (2023, September 13). Anthropy / Entropy. Available at: https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/anthropy-entropy

This time we link the readings from last session into new horizons of existance and reproduction. Possible avenues for discussion are:

Location and spatiality: does it matter where the speculation is coming from? How do we define spaces and location inside and outside the story?
Death, transcendence and materiality: has our conception of death and transcendence changed? How does speculative fiction point at different ways of understanding life, death and its aftermath?
Reproduction and injustices.

Registration and Zoom link