Critical Future Studies

A particular focus at the chair lies on critical and interdisciplinary approaches to human-technology-environment relationships and the imagination of possible futures against the background of the climate emergency and technocultural transformations. We are interested in amplifying the role of literature and culture in the production, translation, critique and contextualization of technoscientific developments and their implication for social and ecological systems. Technological revolutions and innovations have cultural effects and histories. The humanities can help trace these cultural reverberations and offer visions of viable futures, while staying critical of the belief that all it takes is a technological fix. This entails questioning and historicizing the narratives, values, aesthetics, and ideologies that have driven technological and scientific progress, from the early modern period to the present. The formation of western modernity is inextricable from the histories of colonialism, ableism, patriarchy, and ecological devastation. In the face of these entanglements, what does it mean to envision the future otherwise? Who imagines or designs the future? Every future has a story, a setting, a context, and a protagonist.

The following interrelated fields are part of what we understand as critical future studies:

Science Fiction Studies | Critical Posthumanisms | Critical Futurisms | Environmental Humanities | Energy Humanities and Petrocultures | Literature and Science | Materialist Media Theory | Contemporary North American Indigenous Studies | Critical Disability Studies

Science Fiction Studies

Science fiction is a quintessentially modern genre that continues to reflect, translate, anticipate, and critique the implications of technoscientific developments. Famously understood via the mechanism of cognitive estrangement, it defamiliarizes the relationships among humans, technology, and society. Yet, importantly, science fiction needs to be problematized vis-à-vis its entanglements with ideologies of colonial expansion, techno-utopianism, militarism, male supremacy, and conservative politics. Since the 1970s, the genre has increasingly become a powerful tool to envision futures differently, informed by social justice movements, rather than technocratic science. Beyond recurring tropes of cyborg identities, alternative embodiments, space travel, or artificial intelligence, science fiction offers a platform for emancipatory and critical speculations about what it means to live in and extrapolate from the contemporary moment. With a focus on North America, we are interested in critical examinations of the whole breadth of science fiction formations—from 19^th century visions of progress, to the SF Golden Age, New Wave, Feminist SF, Cyberpunk, Steampunk, Afrofuturisms, Indigenous Futurisms, Solarpunk, Utopia/Dystopia, and Climate Fiction, as well as intersections with horror, the (new) weird, and post-apocalypse fiction.

Useful resources:

Bould, Mark, et al., editors. The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. Routledge, 2009. | Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Duke University Press, 1993. | Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Istvan. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press, 2008. | Evans, Arthur B., et al., editors. The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press, 2010. | Imarisha, Walidah, et al., editors. Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. AK Press, 2015. | Latham, Rob, editor. Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Vint, Sherryl. Science Fiction: A Guide to the Perplexed. The MIT Press, 2021.

Critical Posthumanisms

Critical Posthumanism is an interdisciplinary theoretical framework within the humanities that critically revisits the legacy of liberal humanism and its definition of “the human” in relation to what has historically been considered non- or less than fully human (e.g. machines, nature, animals, etc.). It needs to be understood in sharp distinction to transhumanism, which tends to perpetuate ideologies of unquestioned technoscientific optimism and human transcendence with echoes of eugenics and toxic libertarianism. With a pronounced investment in social justice debates and intersections of culture and science, critical posthumanism, by contrast, helps uncover the exclusionary, racist, colonial, misogynist, and ableist undercurrents in the western humanist tradition. Against historical practices of “ontological hygiene,” it apprehends the human as always already entangled (materially and imaginatively) with the other-than-human world and, thereby, offers critical insight on modes of ecological, social, and technological enmeshment. As a sprawling field with strong philosophical and literary anchors, critical posthumanisms frequently draw on science fiction and horror, among others, to think about non-anthropocentric visions of subjectivity beyond the historical figure of “the human.”

Useful resources:

Braidotti, Rosi, and Maria Hlavajova, editors. Posthuman Glossary. Bloomsbury, 2018. | Clarke, Bruce, and Manuela Rossini, editors. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman. Cambridge University Press, 2017. | Ferrando, Francesca. Philosophical Posthumanism. Bloomsbury, 2020. | Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016. | Hayles, Katherine N. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999. | Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Critical Futurisms

In sharp contrast to its origins in the proto-fascist technological enthusiasm of Italian artists in the 1910s-1930s, the term “futurism” has been reclaimed by a number of activist movements to emphasize and articulate cultural futurity against the forces of settler-colonialism, racism, ableism, and heteronormativity. Most notable are the contexts of afrofuturism, Indigenous futurism, Latinx Futurism, disability (crip) futures, and queer futurity. Led by scholars, artists, writers, and activists, these fields have a long history that in some cases go back at least to the 19^th century and forcefully renounce a dominant discourse that has systematically generated visions of the future without Black, POC, Indigenous, Queer, or Disabled people. Many works of such alternative futurisms draw on the world-building potential of science fiction and utopia, emancipatory recodings of hybrid (or cyborg) identities, politics of decolonization, the revitalization of cultural traditions, and nonlinear or non-western temporalities.

Useful resources:

Allan, Kathryn, and Djibril al-Ayad. Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Speculative Fiction Anthology. 2015. | Drew, Kimberly, and Jenna Wortham, editors. Black Futures. One World, 2020. | Dillon, Grace L., editor. Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction. University of Arizona Press, 2012. | Lavender, Isiah. Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement. 2019. | Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York University Press, 2009. | Nicholson, Hope, editor. Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time: An Indigenous LGBT Sci-Fi Anthology. Bedside Press, 2016. | Womack, Ytasha. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Chicago Review Press, 2013.

Environmental Humanities

The environmental humanities are anchored in the recognition that “nature” and “the environment” are not self-evident, objective entities, but complex and discursively negotiated ideas with histories and consequences. Drawing on the methodologies of literary and cultural criticism, philosophy, social sciences, science and technology studies, media studies, history, and environmental science, scholarship in this burgeoning interdisciplinary field widely examines the socio-cultural representation, production, and imagination of human-environment relationships. Guided by the insight that cultural negotiations of nature or the nonhuman are inextricable from broader scientific and political debates around sustainability, resource extraction, progress, social justice, modernity, climate change, pollution, and globalization, the environmental humanities are invested in amplifying the role of art and activism to envision paths towards more equitable climate futures. Critically mobilizing the concept of the Anthropocene (a new geological epoch that positions “the human” as the predominant climatological factor), an emphasis is laid on questions of environmental justice, drawing attention to the fact that the environmental crisis intersects with gendered, racialized, and colonial structures of power, oppression, and exploitation that have their roots in industrial capitalism. Euro-Western idealization of “nature” associated with the trajectory from romanticism to conservationist movements are rejected in favor of a systemic analysis of the material enmeshments between the human and the non-human world. With a specific focus on North American literature and culture, we examine how cultural texts shape and problematize particular ideas about human-environment relationships—from myths of wilderness, to haunted landscapes, the representation of animals, the aesthetics of ecological disaster, the return of the nonhuman in eco-horror, and visions of ecotopia.

Useful resources: 

Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana University Press, 2010. | Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. University of Minnesota Press, 2016. | Heise, Ursula K., et al., editors. The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities. Routledge, 2017. | Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann, editors. Material Ecocriticism. Indiana University Press, 2014. | Oppermann, Serpil, and Serenella Iovino, editors. Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene. Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017. | Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew, and Brent Ryan Bellamy, editors. An Ecotopian Lexicon. University of Minnesota Press, 2019.

Energy Humanities and Petrocultures

The energy humanities are a growing interdisciplinary field that examines the cultural traces and translations of energy production, consumption, and politics. With a strong commitment to envisioning a path beyond fossil fuels or petromodernity, the transition to more sustainable energy futures is approached not as a simple technological fix but in need for a whole-scale restructuring of socio-cultural relations, habits, attitudes, values, and aesthetic strategies. Propelled by the recognition that the climate crisis is a direct consequence of western modernity’s addiction to fossil fuels, scholars in the field are particularly interested in examining symptoms of a cultural “energy unconscious”—the cultural mechanisms by which particular forms of energy relations are naturalized, glorified, repressed, or obscured through imaginaries of freedom, cleanliness, comfort, progress, etc. Part of reckoning with the cultural consequences of energy consumption is finding ways to render the social entanglements with resource extraction sites, energy infrastructures, exploitative labor practices, and toxic landscapes perceptible. In North American literature and culture, traces of oil are ubiquitous and yet often hide in plain sight—from road trips to rockets, suburbia, and plastic bags. An important aspect of thinking about energy cultures in this context is to not only understand their aesthetic and ideological dimensions but also their complicities with settler-colonialism and environmental injustices. Following the traces of energy in American literature and culture can mean to contextualize the rise of the automobile, to problematize the invisibility of pollution in Golden Age science fiction, to historicize fantasies and anxieties about nuclear energy, to consider the visual culture of extractivism and the Anthropocene, to foreground Indigenous pipeline protests and energy justice movements, or to analyze dys/utopian scenarios of the post-oil future. 

Useful resources:

LeMenager, Stephanie. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. Oxford University Press, 2014. | MacDonald, Graeme. “Improbability Drives: The Energy of SF.” Strange Horizons, no. 15 February 2016, http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/improbability-drives-the-energy-of-sf/. | Szeman, Imre, and Dominic Boyer, editors. Energy Humanities: An Anthology. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. | Wilson, Sheena, et al., editors. Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017. 

Literature and Science

More than 70 years after the British chemist and novelist C.P. Snow made the influential diagnosis of a divide between “the two-cultures,” literature and science are (at least in parts of the humanities) no longer seen as antithetical but as mutually resonant cultural formations. As an interdisciplinary field of academic inquiry, “literature and science” goes back to the second half of the 20th century and can be understood as a precursor to the formation of posthumanism and the environmental humanities. Scholars working at the intersection of literature and science are engaged with a broad range of topics that include examinations of the epistemological dimensions of fiction, metaphor and thought experiments in physics, the representation of scientists in cultural production, fictionalizations of the history of science, and literary negotiations of quantum mechanics, relativity theory, cybernetics, biology, or chemistry. The study of literature and science is somewhat distinct from science fiction studies in that it is not confined to a particular literary genre but rather asks broader questions about relationships between scientific knowledge formation, narrative, and society. With ties to the history and philosophy of science, poststructuralism, the German Medienwissenschaften, and feminist critiques of scientific positivism, it provides an important anchor for what it means to critically think about the future of culture-technology-environment relationships.

Useful resources:

Ahuja, Neel, et al. The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science. 2020. | Clarke, Bruce, and Manuela Rossini, editors. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science. Routledge, 2012. | Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991. | Meyer, Steven, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science. Cambridge University Press, 2018. | Serres, Michel. Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy. Edited by Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell, John Hopkins University Press, 1982.

Materialist Media Theory

Building on the work of Marshall McLuhan and others, materialist media theorists apprehend media as extensions and enabling environments of human subjectivity. Beyond a focus on meaning or the socio-semiotic analysis of TV, film, radio, telephone, or the internet, an emphasis lies on the material composition, history, and effects of communication systems and networks. In this sense, media are understood broadly and can include trains, highway systems, telegraph wires, oil, atmosphere, rivers, clothing, minerals, and DNA. Important subfields are media ecology, media archaeology, environmental media theory, and critical infrastructure studies. What unites these approaches is their attempt to draw attention to the concealed, naturalized, subterranean, or forgotten systems and histories of human entanglements with technology. Especially in the context of the digital turn and the Anthropocene, it is imperative to critically examine the physical traces and infrastructures of seemingly disembodied media networks. In this sense, materialist media theory scholars may be interested in, among other things, fuel-guzzling server farms and sewage systems, undersea cables and the circulation of chemicals, the afterlife of cellphones and material-digital waste. In recurring dialogues with science fiction, art, and design, a focus on the materiality of media environments can raise  awareness of the ways in which technocultural practices are always embedded in wider ecological systems that defy classical distinctions between nature and culture.

Useful resources:

Kittler, Friedrich A. Grammophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford University Press, 1999. | Marshall, Kate. Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction. University of Minnesota Press, 2013. | Parikka, Jussi. A Geology of Media. University of Minnesota Press, 2015. | Parikka, Jussi. What Is Media Archaeology? Polity Press, 2012. | Parks, Lisa, and Nicole Starosielski, editors. Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. University of Illinois Press, 2015. | Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. The University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Contemporary North American Indigenous Literatures

A critical and future-oriented approach to North American literature needs to amplify contemporary Indigenous literatures and draw attention to the ongoing structures of settler-colonial violence. While the specific histories, ideologies, and politics of settler-colonialism are different in Canada and the United States, the formation of both nation-states relies on the systematic attempt to erase, assimilate, dehumanize, disenfranchise, and displace the Indigenous population. This (cultural) genocide was as much propelled by racist politics and science as it was by writers and artists who have vilified, romanticized, commodified, and erased Indigenous subjectivity in cultural representations. Against this background, contemporary Native American, First Nation, Métis, and Inuit artists, activists, scholars, scientists, and writers have since the 1960s increasingly mobilized for the resurgence and revitalization of Indigenous cultures. United by calls for decolonization, the emphasis lies on Indigenous futurity, survival, and resistance. Writing against the colonial undercurrents of science fiction and North American environmentalism, some of the most vibrant activities of contemporary Indigenous art and scholarship takes place in the genre of Indigenous speculative fiction and in resonance with environmental justice movements. Increasingly, Indigenous cosmologies and and knowledges are brought into a critical dialogue with western science, philosophy, and ecology discourses. It is crucial for North American Studies (especially in Europe) to engage with these developments and take them as an occasion to critically reflect on the colonial histories of our own knowledge systems. Yet, there are limits. At the chair of North American Literatures, we aim to amplify contemporary Indigenous voices generously and respectfully, while also recognizing the intellectual sovereignty of Indigenous traditions and narratives.

Useful resources: 

Justice, Daniel Heath. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018. | King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. House of Anansi Press, 2003. | McCall, Sophie, et al., editors. Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories From Turtle Island. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2017. | Vowel, Chelsea. Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis & Inuit Issues in Canada. HighWater Press, 2016. | Whitehead, Joshua. Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit & Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction. 2020. | https://indigenousfutures.net

Critical Disability Studies

With an anchor in the civil rights activist movements led by people with disabilities in the 1970s, disability studies has emerged as a vibrant scholarly field that critically examines the historical, medical, social, and cultural constructions of the concepts of dis/ability and “the norm.” With a critical eye to normative discourses of rehabilitation and health, which tend to view disability as an individualized biological condition in need of repair, critical disability studies scholars draw attention to the disabling factors of the social, cultural, political, and material environments. With an emphasis on intersectional approaches that include considerations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, the emphasis lies on ways to promote self-determined and empowering visions of disability in sharp rejection of a history of dehumanizing stereotypes and practices of exclusion. In resonance with insights from posthumanism, human subjectivity, agency, and autonomy is understood as always already articulated through more-than-human networks that can include social relations, care facilities, assistance animals, feeding tubes, chemicals, and wheelchairs. The subfield of literary and cultural disability studies examines the representation and negotiation of dis/ability, health, and illness in cultural production. Through the metaphorical translations between prosthetic embodiment and cyborgs, science fiction is a particularly rich field for the study of disability representations. Important sf scholarship on disability problematizes the recurring ableist trope of “technology as cure” and asks for ways to imagine prosthetic embodiment beyond exoticizing invocations of the superhuman or techno-utopian visions of a future without disability. In this context, the cyborg is a contentious trope—embraced by some as a figure of self-empowerment and rejected by others as the display of disability as spectacle or in need for technological compensation. The field of disability studies also contributes critical and important perspectives to current debates in the environmental humanities, especially with regard to issues of exposure, vulnerability, extended subjectivity, and shifting human-environment relationships.

Useful resources:

Allan, Kathryn, editor. Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. | Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. Columbia University Press, 1997. | Goodley, Dan, et al. “Posthuman Disability Studies.” Subjectivity, vol. 7, 2014, pp. 342–61. | Hamraie, Aimi, and Kelly Fritsch. “Crip Technoscience Manifesto.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, vol. 5, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1–34. | Mitchell, David T., et al., editors. The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect. University of Michigan Press, 2019. | Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. University of Michigan Press, 2001. | Ray, Sarah Jaquette, et al., editors. Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory. University of Nebraska Press, 2017.