At the 2024 RGS-IBG conference in London, I co-hosted a GFGRG and PolGRG sponsored session and presented a paper.
Didactics of estrangement through Science Fiction
Paper presented by Anke Schwarz
Despite the limitations implied by the neoliberal university, teaching and learning continue to serve as sites of future-making. Embracing critical future thinking has the potential to stimulate creative visions of different and more just futures in social, political, and ecological terms. This lightning talk explores ways in which Science and Speculative Fiction (SF) as a literary genre can support teaching new, collective, emancipatory forms of future-making in Political and Urban Geography. It draws on the work of Octavia E. Butler and others to outline how fictional texts provide incentives to imagine transitions of established geographical concepts such as territoriality and may foster transformative practices. Considering SF as a catalyst for stimulating thought about novel forms of collectivity and multi-positionality thus supports a critical engagement with prospective futures and future spatialities.
Aug 28, 2024, 09:00 AM
Future techniques, protagonists and spaces: A critical reflection on geographical speculation
Paper session sponsored by the Gender and Feminist Research Group and the Political Geography Research Group
Organized by Frank I. Müller and Anke Schwarz
Contributions by Ilia Antenucci, Alberto Duman, Miza Moreau, Tolulope Onabolu, Norman Ornelas Jr., Irene Raverta, Maria Rusca and colleagues.
Drawing inspiration from feminist geographical thought and its commitment to envisioning an alternative future (MacLeavy et al. 2021), this session delves into speculative geographies and geographical speculation. This creative exercise allows us to anchor abstract concepts of “the future” in diverse experiences and emotional connections to the potential transformations of the (life)worlds we inhabit. Speculation involves navigating the risks and aspirations associated with future developments, employing diverse methodologies to make well-informed conjectures about what could (and should) unfold. We aim to explore speculation both as a “mode of attention” and a “practice of worlding” (Haraway 2016: 230). While speculation has garnered attention across various disciplines, influencing realities in economics, physics (Stengers 2005), and philosophy (Savransky et al. 2018), it is also inherently geographical. This is because it demands thoughtful consideration of the connections between “thinking and the earthly” (Williams and Keating 2022: 13) when envisioning tangible utopias capable of sustaining a livable life for all. This imperative prompts us to investigate the boundaries and intersections of seemingly distinct approaches to future spaces, encompassing both declaredly improbable and fictive scenarios, as well as more probable, probabilistic, and factual ones. This quest for radical otherness is already embedded in queer worldings (Muñoz 2019) and challenging the conventional boundaries of geography as a discipline (Kinkaid 2023).
How are futures made present through speculative techniques? Who are the protagonists involved in imagining, performing, and narrating futures? And who has the right to shape collective futures, who is being excluded from doing so? In what kinds of environments, technologies, things, and territories do protagonists of speculation ground their practice?
Aug 29, 2024, 14:40 PM at Imperial College London, Blackett Lecture Theatre 3.