Showing papers on "Dystopia published in 2016"

The limits of our imagination: design fiction as a strategy for engaging with dystopian futures

Abstract: In this paper we explore how design fiction -- an increasingly common and relevant strategy within HCI and the Digital Humanities -- can be used to get purchase on the future. In particular, we address how design fictional methods allow researchers to construct arguments about feared or dystopian futures within the context of collapse informatics. Fiction, as a research tool, allows us to do several important things with proximal futures: it allows us to adopt a range of different intellectual commitments and values about the future and explore the consequences of those commitments; it allows us to articulate these consequences to a broader public in a format that is more readily consumed and understood than a research paper; and it allows us to insulate ourselves from the emotional consequences of perceived proximal dystopias by creating space to "play with" and explore alternative visions of the future. We argue that paying attention to how popular culture represents scenarios of collapse can provide insight into how to express and communicate the challenges and potential solutions framed by the LIMITS community to a broad public audience.

From Ephemeral Planning to Permanent Urbanism: An Urban Planning Theory of Mega-Events

Abstract: Mega-events like the Olympic Games are powerful forces that shape cities. In the wake of mega-events, a variety of positive and negative legacies have remained in host cities. In order to bring some theoretical clarity to debates about legacy creation, I introduce the concepts of the mega-event utopia, dystopia and heterotopia. A mega-event utopia is ideal and imaginary urbanism embracing abstract concepts about economies, socio-political systems, spaces, and societies in the host during events. The mega-event utopia (in contrast to other utopian visions other stakeholders may hold) is dictated by the desires of the mega-event owners irrespective of the realities in the event host. In short, a mega-event utopia is the perfect event host from the owner’s perspective. Mega-event utopias are suggested as a theoretical model for the systematic transformation of their host cities. As large-scale events progress as ever more powerful transformers into this century, mega-event dystopias have emerged as negatives of these idealistic utopias. As hybrid post-event landscapes, m ega-event heterotopias manifest the temporary mega-event utopia as legacy imprints into the long-term realities in hosting cities. Using the Olympic utopia as an example of a mega-event utopia, I theorize utopian visions around four urban traits: economy, image, infrastructure and society. Through the concept of the mega-event legacy utopia , I also provide some insight toward the operationalization of the four urban traits for a city’s economic development, local place marketing, urban development, and public participation.

Between Utopia and Dystopia: Colonial Ambivalence and Early Modern Perception of Sápmi

Abstract: The northernmost regions of Fennoscandia attracted attention of travellers and geographers for centuries. These regions were often imagined in ambivalent terms as homelands of evil and dearth or as places of true happiness. From the seventeenth century onwards, Sapmi (Lapland) became a destination of regular exploration undertaken by Swedish and foreign travellers. These travels made it possible to verify, dismiss, or authorize all that what was previously only speculated about, and ultimately led to the construction of new sets of representations. This paper studies the modes of imagining Sapmi in early modern writing, explores how these were intertwined with state programs in the region, and how the rhetoric and ideological underpinnings of the representations authored by the domestic authors differed from the visions of Sapmi produced by contemporaneous foreign travellers.

Changing humanity: a study of four dystopias at the dawn of the biotechnological age

Abstract: This thesis analyses two British and two German technological dystopias published between the First and Second World Wars: Konrad Loele’s Zullinger und seine Zucht (1920), John Bernard’s The New Race of Devils (1921), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and Paul Gurk’s Tuzub 37 (1935). While there has been a considerable amount of scholarly research into interwar British dystopias, German texts have rarely been analysed; furthermore, dystopian studies have often focused on a small number of novels that were considered canonical and particularly influential. This thesis compares Huxley’s canonical Brave New World with Bernard’s less known The New Race of Devils and the two German texts, reading all of them from the standpoint of the early twentieth-century crisis of the traditional notion of humanism. Chapter 1 focuses on the two earlier novels and on their portrayal of the creation of ‘perfect’ workers and soldiers with the use of eugenics. Chapter 2 centres on the two later novels and on their depiction of a completely mechanized World State where citizens are mass produced and incapable of independent thought. The thesis shows that the four dystopias envision a radical change in the nature of men and women as a result of the mechanization of society, and concludes that they all speculate on the future of the human race once the traditional conceptualization of humanity has been destroyed by contemporary technology. Loele’s and Bernard’s texts introduce the idea of a partly artificial ‘eugenic liminal being’ who is difficult to fit into the established taxonomy of living beings. Huxley and Gurk highlight how the inhabitants of the technocracy will not be capable of meaningful action and traditional rebellion will become impossible. The four texts prove more radical than other contemporary technological dystopias and anticipate some of the most important issues of late twentieth-century posthumanism.

Violence, Home, and Comrmnunity in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Abstract: he terms home and community are frequently uttered with reverence by feminists, non-feminists, and anti-feminists alike. These terms and the spaces they conjure up are invoked as the cure to no end of social ills, from stress and malaise to crack addiction and corporate downsizing. Calls for the return to home and to community are both nostalgic and utopian. In "Coming Home," Carol Pearson discusses a feminist utopian narrative through which, "A . . upon discovering a sexually egalitarian society, the narrators have a sense of coming home to a nurturing, liberating environment" (63). Other feminist theorists of utopia, such as Lucy Sargisson, worry that such blueprints represent an "inappropriate closure" to feminist utopian imaginings. Because domestic spaces have worked out for many women as places to be domesticated and/or to be a domestic, it is not surprising that most have mixed feelings about a structure that contains the often unfulfilled dream of possession and the lived experience of servitude. Beloved, a novel published during the domestic retrenchments and anti-feminist "backlash" of the 1980s, shows both the dystopian and utopian properties of the space named "home"

Various Joyful Encounters with the Dystopias of Affective Capitalism

Abstract: This article contends that what appear to be the dystopic conditions of affective capitalism are just as likely to be felt in various joyful encounters as they are in atmospheres of fear associated with post 9/11 securitization. Moreover, rather than grasping these joyful encounters with capitalism as an ideological trick working directly on cognitive systems of belief, they are approached here by way of a repressive affective relation a population establishes between politicized sensory environments and what Deleuze and Guattari (1994) call a brain-becoming-subject. This is a radical relationality (Protevi, 2010) understood in this context as a mostly nonconscious brain-somatic process of subjectification occurring in contagious sensory environments populations become politically situated in. The joyful encounter is not therefore merely an ideological manipulation of belief, but following Gabriel Tarde (as developed in Sampson, 2012), belief is always the object of desire. The discussion starts by comparing recent efforts by Facebook to manipulate mass emotional contagion to a Huxleyesque control through appeals to joy. Attention is then turned toward further manifestations of affective capitalism; beginning with the so-called emotional turn in the neurosciences, which has greatly influenced marketing strategies intended to unconsciously influence consumer mood (and choice), and ending with a further comparison between encounters with Nazi joy in the 1930s (Protevi, 2010) and the recent spreading of right wing populism similarly loaded with political affect. Indeed, the dystopian presence of a repressive political affect in all of these examples prompts an initial question concerning what can be done to a brain so that it involuntarily conforms to the joyful encounter. That is to say, what can affect theory say about an apparent brain-somatic vulnerability to affective suggestibility and a tendency toward mass repression? However, the paper goes on to frame a second (and perhaps more significant) question concerning what can a brain do. Through the work of John Protevi (in Hauptmann and Neidich (eds.), 2010: 168-183), Catherine Malabou (2009) and Christian Borch (2005), the article discusses how affect theory can conceive of a brain-somatic relation to sensory environments that might be freed from its coincidence with capitalism. This second question not only leads to a different kind of illusion to that understood as a product of an ideological trick, but also abnegates a model of the brain which limits subjectivity in the making to a phenomenological inner self or Being in the world.

Resistance is Fertile: Design Fictions in Dystopian Worlds

Abstract: Current work on design fiction has discussed their use for personal reflection, sharing with collaborators, forming a public "vision" but with small numbers of participant readers. We wanted to explore a new way of using design fictions as a tool for discussion with large global audiences via social authoring web sights. To achieve this, we wrote a highly read, science-fiction novel called I'm a Cyborg's Pet (The Thinking Girl's Guide to Surviving a Robot Apocalypse), on an online, social, serial-writing website called Wattpad. We found our readers confounded our initial expectations of dystopian fiction.

Environmental dystopias: Margaret Atwood and the monstrous child

Abstract: The future of childhood is often described in terms of utopian thinking. Here, the turn is towards dystopia as a fertile source of wild imaginings about the future. The dystopian literary fictions featured here act as a message and are projections of an uneasy future requiring a reader to see the present differently. Such projections make reading dangerous as they create an alternative world often disorderly and dismissive of contexts that are familiar and safe. In these scenarios, the child is often a key figure. In the work by Atwood (Oryx and Crake; The Year of the Flood; MaddAddam), the world is an environmental nightmare. The focus is on MaddAddam, in which the child is an object of desire and both monstrous and redemptive. A reading of MaddAddam as a posthuman text is undertaken and it is argued that Atwood's dystopia creates a discourse of monstrosity (both weird and beautiful) that contaminates thoughts about the child/children/childhood and the future.

The pragmatic university: a feasible utopia?

Abstract: ‘Imaginings’ of the modern university include such ideas as ‘the ecological university’ and ‘the pragmatic university’ In his attempt to separate utopian from dystopian visions of the university, Ronald Barnett concentrates on an analysis of the ecological university and ignores, for example, the case of the pragmatic university In this critical response the author focuses on the feasibility of the pragmatic university and argues that it easily passes four out of five of Barnett's tests of utopian adequacy: depth, emergence, ethics and range The main problem arises with the fifth criterion, that of feasibility, given that most modern universities as well as their local and global contexts are infected with such ‘pernicious ideologies’ as entrepreneurialism, globalization and managerialism The author concludes by suggesting that, nevertheless, there is at least a faint gleam of utopian hope about the future of the modern pragmatic university

Cities Utopian, Dystopian, and Apocalyptic

Abstract: The city has always held the promise of utopia, the intimation that it be the spatial form within which a harmonious and wholesome society could take shape, as the emanation of a civic, rational, or holy order. And as often, the city has been associated with the opposite: with the failure of such an order to take hold, and with the sense that an imminent end-time could upend the social and cultural fabric of humankind in the form of its perhaps most celebrated cultural artefact. This chapter examines utopian, dystopian, and apocalyptic renderings of the city in literature.

The Modern Synthesis: Genetics and Dystopia in the Huxley Circle

Abstract: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) has influenced public debates over genetics more profoundly than any other work of literature, with the possible exception of Frankenstein. Both works have been misremembered, misunderstood, and misused in polemical contexts more often than not. In Huxley’s case, the problem arises from readers failing to admit that his satire cuts in more than one direction. The novelist was witness to the birth of the modern synthesis in biology, and he was a strong advocate of the biological sciences. But he was a moral relativist and a satirist too, and he was always ready to satirize the people he loved and the ideas he embraced. He had the curse of being able to see through everything. To grasp the real meaning of Brave New World for society today, we need to understand Huxley’s relationship to both the modern synthesis and the art of satire. To scientists, “the modern synthesis” names the shift in biology that occurred in the years between the two world wars when scientists brought together Darwin’s theory of evolution with the new science of genetics. One of the pioneers of the modern synthesis was J. B. S. Haldane, a longtime friend of Aldous Huxley; another proponent was the novelist’s older brother, Julian Huxley. Haldane (along with R. A. Fisher and Sewall Wright) demonstrated with compelling mathematical analyses that Darwin was correct to assert that natural selection was the primary cause of evolution. Adding genetics to the theory of evolution supplied one of the key elements missing from Darwin’s concept, namely an understanding of how the inheritance of traits actually took m ode rnism / modernity

Needing ‘Tomorrow as Fish Need Water’: Dystopia, Utopia, and Freire’s Pedagogy

Abstract: In this article, I discuss the philosophical-educational attention to Freire’s utopian pedagogy of the future and I argue that equal attention should be due to Freire’s dystopian account of the present. To this end, Freire’s utopia and dystopia are associated with the interplay of his notions of annunciation and denunciation. The role of dystopian denunciation for conscientization is then investigated and the ethico-political key characteristic of Freire’s utopianism is concomitantly emphasized. It is shown that, if we are to avoid lopsided interpretations of Freire that blunt the transformative-critical edge of his utopianism, we must supplement epistemological curiosity and radical hope with the ethico-political utopian aspect and recuperate the dialectical unity of denunciation and annunciation.

The Journey to Nature: The Last of Us as Critical Dystopia.

Abstract: As an instance of the critical dystopia, The Last of Us lets the player enact a postapocalyptic story in which human society has been severely decimated by the Cordyceps infection and where nature has made an astonishing return. This paper examines the ecological rhetoric of The Last of Us by laying emphasis on the empirical player’s emancipated involvement in the gameworld (virtualized storyworld) and how s/he engages in a creative dialectic with the implied player. In suggesting the utopian enclave of a life in balance with nature, The Last of Us scrutinises the ills of our empirical present and lays a negative image on the latter. As such, The Last of Us is a magnificent example of the video game dystopia and succeeds in triggering a powerful aesthetic response in the empirical player, which might result in a call to action in the real world.

“I’m beginning to know who I am”: The Rebellious Subjectivities of Katniss Everdeen and Tris Prior

Abstract: Scott Westerfeld's dystopian "Uglies" series depicts a world that claims to have eliminated the pressures through mandatory plastic surgery that makes all sixteen-year-olds equally attractive. However, as protagonist Tally Youngblood discovers just before her surgery, the procedure modifies minds as well as bodies. By focalizing the narrative through Tally's perspective during her pre and post-operative days, Westerfeld interrogates assumptions about what constitutes beauty and how individuals and societies respond to beauty, as well as the very concept of feminine identity itself. Tally's ability to take on new identities might seem to resemble that of a teenager who changes herself to become popular. However, it is concern for others that motivates Tally to submit herself to society's dictates of how she should look. The leaders of Tally's society claim to have determined that giving all citizens the same degree of beauty averts judgments based on appearance and related problems, including racial tension and war.

Identity, Complicity, and Resistance in The Handmaid's Tale*

Abstract: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is an explicitly political novel which became an immediate bestseller when published in Canada in 1985 and the United States in 1986.1 The novel emerges from the long traditions of Utopian fiction, particularly the anti-utopia or dystopia, which, prominent since Swift's "Voyage to the Houyhnhnms," has become a common feature of this century's political and literary landscape. Atwood also joins the ranks of the writers of specifically feminist Utopias and dystopias. This sub genre, rejuvenated in the early seventies with the women's liberation move ment, includes works such as Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. The feminist novels show that power is gendered, that gender distinctions are pervasive and extensive, and that the personal and political interweave. In The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood's narrator tells a very personal tale of under standing and ignoring, activity and complicity, fidelity and betrayal, in the political settings of the contemporary United States and the future dystopian society of Gilead. Many commentators on The Handmaid's Tale have characterized the narrator as a heroine, a developing consciousness, or an emerging woman. Some have looked to the pre-Gilead period (our present) as a happy (or tol erable) alternative to the Gileadean nightmare; others have interpreted the Gileadean society as, in part, a by-product of cultural feminism; and a few have found hope or assurance in Gilead's obvious demise before 2195, the date of the epilogue's academic conference.2 But these interpretations are unseated by a close reading of the text and attention to its dystopian context,3 which demonstrate the need for sustained political, feminist con sciousness and activity among women by exploring what may happen in their absence.

Utopia : a revised translation, backgrounds, criticism

Abstract: Based on Thomas More's penetrating analysis of the folly and tragedy of the politics of his time and all times, Utopia (1516) is a seedbed of alternative political institutions and a perennially challenging exploration of the possibilities and limitations of political action. This Norton Critical Edition is built on the translation that Robert M. Adams created for it in 1975. For the Third Edition, George M. Logan has carefully revised the translation, improving its accuracy while preserving the grace and verve that have made it the most highly regarded modern rendering of More's Renaissance Latin work. "Backgrounds" includes a wide-ranging selection of the major secular and religious texts-from Plato to Amerigo Vespucci-that informed More's thinking, as well as a selection of the responses to his book by members of his own humanist circle and an account by G. R. Elton of the condition of England at the time More wrote. "Criticism" now offers a more comprehensive survey of modern scholarship, adding excerpts from seminal books by Frederic Seebohm, Karl Kautsky, and Russell Ames, as well as selections from stimulating and influential recent readings by Dominic Baker-Smith and Eric Nelson. In the final section, on "Utopia's Modern Progeny," the opening chapter of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is now complemented by excerpts from another great work in the complex tradition of utopian and dystopian fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. Throughout the Third Edition, the editorial apparatus has been thoroughly revised and updated. An updated Selected Bibliography is also included.

We, John Dewey’s audience of today

Abstract: This article suggests that John Dewey’s Democracy and Education does not describe education in an existing society, but it conveys a utopia, in the sense coined by Mannheim: utopian thought aims at instigating actions towards the transformation of reality, intending to attain a better world in the future. Today’s readers of Dewey (his audience, according to Aristotle’s Rhetoric) are responsible for choosing to act, or not to act, in order to realize his utopia.

Girl Power and Girl Activism in the Fiction of Suzanne Collins, Scott Westerfeld, and Moira Young

Abstract: In young adult dystopian fiction, love triangles and competition represent something larger and systematic in the control of adolescent girls. Many dystopian societies portrayed in recent young adult fiction offer their young female citizens limited choices for everything: boyfriends, clothes, even class status or careers. While social control of femininity is not new information for anyone who works within the realm of feminist, gender, and queer studies, it is only beginning to be discussed in the context of young adult literature and adolescent coming of age stories. Contemporary young adult dystopian texts present dystopias that offer limited choices of normalcy and encourage competitive girlhood as superficial means of portraying normalcy when, in fact, they serve as distractions from the true problems of their societies. contemporary young adult dystopian texts present dystopias that offer limited choices of normalcy and encourage competitive girlhood as superficial means of portraying normalcy when, they serve as distractions from the true problems of their societies.

Towards an Intellectual History of Digitization: Myths, Dystopias, and Discursive Shifts in Museum Computing

Abstract: Recent contributions have highlighted that the advent of digital technologies in the humanities is the object of different and even polarized narratives, which frame the effects of digitization either in utopian or dystopian terms. In this light, technology-centred narratives should be complemented by an intellectual history of technology-related «myths and dystopias», in order to increase our understanding of how digital technologies are presented in the disciplinary and public debates. Whereas this type of analysis has taken its start from library science and the digital humanities, however, it is still in its infancy within the field of museum computing. To this purpose, the article provides an interpretive and critical review of the debate on the automated cataloguing and digitization of museum collections. It highlights a sequence of discursive shifts in time since the 1960s to the present decade are identified and discussed: namely, a phase of «standardization», followed by «the museum of the Information Society» and, most recently, a «post-modernist utopia» which dominates the current debate. Each new paradigm tends at the same time to reverse and «re-mediate» some characteristics of former phases, generating controversies that are likely to proceed until more empirical knowledge is collected about the actual impacts of digital media on museums.

"A Pleasant Place for the World to Hide": Exploring Themes of Utopian Play in Ready Player One

Abstract: Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel Ready Player One offers an imaginary world that is simultaneously utopian and dystopian, because it portrays an immersive game-obsessed world that fuses high-tech virtual reality with 1980s nostalgia. Characters contrast their grim apocalyptic reality with escapism through worldwide gaming in the OASIS, a massively multiplayer VR world allowing players to travel into space, experience high fantasy, attend lavish parties, or simply socialize with friends. Cline’s novel achieved significant acclaim, but few writers have considered the scholarly merits of the book, particularly as an example of the overlapping functions of gaming and utopianism. This article examines Ready Player One alongside Bernard Suits’ philosophical approach to defining games and utopia. Ready Player One explicitly plays with ideas of eutopia and dystopia, games within games, reality and escapist play. As such, it is an excellent environment to examine Suits’ philosophy of games and showcase why gaming is essential to utopian fiction, particularly in the early twenty-first century. For Cline, games are equally necessary for a dytopia for much the same reason—they allow a creative and social “escape hatch” from the grim realities of futuristic decline.

The Cybogre Manifesto: Time, Utopia, and Globality in Ngũgĩ's Wizard of the Crow

Abstract: This article contends that what differentiates Wizard of the Crow from Ngũgĩ’s earlier writings lies in the manner in which his populism has moved from the national to the global scale. Ngũgĩ accomplishes this by figuring dystopia as comic rather than tragic, privileging the social body over the individual in a way that transcends limitations surrounding the nation-state. Focusing on the novel’s incorporation of scientific idioms as well as on themes of temporal fixity, the article points to a restaging of Ngũgĩ’s earlier, more provincial, representations of resistance through the incorporation of utopian dissociative features that make it structurally and politically allegorical and also futuristic without conforming to the obsession with the sovereign individual common to Western anti-utopias. The crux of this movement, I argue, occurs through the figure of the cybogre, a fusion of technology and myth that pits cosmic spiritual elements against the limits of human technical (re)creativity.

Resources for a Journey of Hope: Raymond Williams on Utopia and Science Fiction

Abstract: Raymond Williams had an enduring interest in science fiction, an interest attested to: first, by two articles specifically addressed to the genre, both of which were eventually published in the journal Science Fiction Studies; second, by a wide range of reference in more familiar texts, such as Culture and Society, The Long Revolution, George Orwell and The Country and the City; and third, by his two ‘future novels’, The Volunteers and The Fight for Manod, the first clearly science-fictional in character, the latter less so. This article will summarise this work, and will also explore how some of Williams’s more general key theoretical concepts – especially structure of feeling and selective tradition – can be applied to the genre. Finally, it will argue that the ‘sociological’ turn, by which Williams sought to substitute description and explanation for judgement and canonisation as the central purposes of analysis, represents a more productive approach to science fiction studies than the kind of prescrip...

Utopias and Dystopias as Models of Social Technology

Abstract: This paper presents some proposals for social science advanced by Otto Neurath, focusing on scientific utopianism. Neurath suggests that social scientists should formulate ideals of social arrangements in utopian style, aiming at discussing scientific proposals with a community. Utopias are deemed as models of social science, in the sense proposed by Nancy Cartwright. This view is contrasted with the claim that scientism might lead to dystopian consequences in social planning, drawn from Aldous Huxley’s fiction and from Paul Feyerabend’s philosophy of science. Thus, social science displays a unusual feature: sometimes a model has to be called off, in spite of its perfect functioning, because it brings about unwanted consequences. In the planning of a free democratic society, this ambiguity of utopia and dystopia is highly desirable, for it stimulates essential debates. Social science, therefore, is to be regarded from a plural and fallibilist standpoint.

Indigenous) Place and Time as Formal Strategy

Abstract: Indigenous dystopian fiction presents not only the crisis of the future but the ongoing crisis of the present time, and that which is still resonant from the past. Accordingly, the potential healing of moments or processes of crisis in Indigenous dystopias is never possible without a strategic engagement with narrative itself, and even the formal aspects of the text. Storytelling, and a focus on space, place, and time in both the content and formal aspects of a story are factors in reconciling characters with that which inflicts them: in this sense, the dystopian Indigenous narrative is an engagement with environmental crisis, with the crisis of place and space, and must heal relationships with nature through a process of return to the cultural values inherent in a previous time and place.

Biogenetics, The Nation, and Globalization in Paolo Bacigalupi’s Critical Dystopias

Abstract: This essay explores the Utopian political possibilities of biogenetic seed production through a reading of two critical dystopian works by Paolo Bacigalupi: The Windup Girl and “The Calorie Man.” These texts are set in a dystopian future in which food production is completely controlled by a handful of global corporations who have successfully genetically engineered seeds to be unfertile. While extrapolating tendencies of the present overlap between neoliberal global capital and the development of patented genetically modified (GM) food production, Bacigalupi’s work also reveals fissures between the nation-state and global capitalism in the latter’s quest for unfettered circulation of profits. This essay tracks Bacigalupi’s representation of biogenetics across time and space, exploring how seeds and other genetic material can become a terrain of struggle between nation states and multinational capital and not simply a commodity through which value flows from the nation to global corporations. This essay argues that Bacigalupi’s work educates our desire for an alternative to the current configuration of biogenetic engineering—not in the service of a nostalgic rejection of bioengineering, but instead a future-oriented transformation of the conditions in which bioengineering is used and a movement toward a utopian future.

Doctors in space (ships): biomedical uncertainties and medical authority in imagined futures.

Abstract: There has been considerable interest in images of medicine in popular science fiction and in representations of doctors in television fiction. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to doctors administering space medicine in science fiction. This article redresses this gap. We analyse the evolving figure of ‘the doctor’ in different popular science fiction television series. Building upon debates within Medical Sociology, Cultural Studies and Media Studies we argue that the figure of ‘the doctor’ is discursively deployed to act as the moral compass at the centre of the programme narrative. Our analysis highlights that the qualities, norms and ethics represented by doctors in space (ships) are intertwined with issues of gender equality, speciesism and posthuman ethics. We explore the signifying practices and political articulations that are played out through these cultural imaginaries. For example, the ways in which ‘the simple country doctor’ is deployed to help establish hegemonic formations concerning potentially destabilising technoscientific futures involving alternative sexualities, or military dystopia. Doctors mostly function to provide the ethical point of narrative stability within a world in flux, referencing a nostalgia for the traditional, attentive, humanistic family physician. The science fiction doctor facilitates the personalisation of technological change and thus becomes a useful conduit through which societal fears and anxieties concerning medicine, bioethics and morality in a ‘post 9/11’ world can be expressed and explored.

The Forrests as science fiction

Abstract: This article positions New Zealand author Emily Perkins’ celebrated novel The Forrests (2012) as an example of science fiction, reading it against the grain of critical reception, developed by Patrick Evans especially, that locates Perkins in globalizing trends in New Zealand literature. Instead, this article suggests that The Forrests’ science fictional qualities are connected to very particularly New Zealand and postcolonial concerns, and that Perkins’ development of an alternative future in her fiction serves ethical and political ends. Drawing on the work of Seo-Young Chu, I consider the ways in which this text’s qualities as science fiction relate to its status as a postcolonial novel.

The vertigo of the beast : thinking animals in literature

Abstract: This thesis begins with the claim that the most productive and stimulating manner of addressing the question of the animal is through an engagement with the writings of Jacques Derrida. In particular, it picks up on his comment in The Animal that Therefore I Am that “thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry.” As such, the thesis explores the specific ways in which the resources of literature can be used in order to address what is possibly the most pressing ethical task of modern humanity. One of the central questions of the thesis concerns how what Derrida calls carnophallogocentrism can be confronted by literature. Through readings of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and the poetry and short stories of D.H. Lawrence, I explore how literature is uniquely placed to offer a sense of the radical otherness of nonhuman animals. In perhaps a contradictory manner, I also examine how literary resources can be used to evoke a sense of pity for nonhumans. There are two further important, and connected, areas of enquiry. The first relates to the position of man who is constructed in opposition to nonhuman animals and is given the right to put nonhumans to death. As such, I study how a variety of texts, chiefly J.M. Coetzee’s Foe and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, reveal the fragility of some of the chief notions of humanism and give way to what has been theorised as posthumanism. The second engages with what Derrida calls “eating well.” This is a question which receives its most thorough investigation through a reading of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian Maddaddam trilogy.