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:

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

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