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-a rationale for your chosen topic (including reflection on how the taught elements of your programme have helped you develop it)
Literature Review:
-Brief overview
Methods:
-an overview of the methods you plan to use in developing and writing up the project (including reflection on how any methods training you have taken has helped inform these)
-how gather info, lit review
-Methodology – what are u gonna look at?
Timeline:
End of May- Completed Research, Collected quotes, working on literature review and intro
June 15th- Chapter 1 / first section written
End of June- Chapter 2 / second section written
July 15th- Chapter 3 / third section written
End of July- Conclusion, writing completed
1st – 10th of August – Edit
Potential Ethical Challenges:
my perspective, bias & bias in academic lit used – acknowledge and outline my perspective and examine research in lit review
Mode of Representation:
a statement of the intended mode of representation you will use in the final project report
Appendix:
an appendix listing the dates of significant blog posts building to the project plan with direct links, or inline citations and a references – this will be used to make a judgement on whether you have actively engaged with the blog and made meaningful, consistent posts (in other words to assess whether you pass or fail the course; it is not included in the final word count and should include around 10 posts, although it is the quality of the posts and your integration of them into the plan which is most important)
An update on where I am with my project & an informal annotated bibliography
Update:
-A few weeks ago I had a meeting with Simon Western, CEO/Founder of The Eco-Leadership Institute, and we had a discussion about my project. He has a podcast, Edgy Ideas, on which he invites various guests to talk about their expertise and ideas about the world. Some relevant episodes I have listened to so far are: Purpose Upgrade with Paul Skinner, Becoming Digital Savvy with Anni Rowland-Campbell, and Lurking Monsters with Nora Bateson. These were very interesting and although his work centers more on coaching and psychoanalytic perspectives, some ideas discussed could come into play in my project. He is interested in a plethora of theory including Latour and Haraway, who I had planned on including or centering my project around. We therefore discussed these ideas briefly and he gave some suggestions for further reading. He suggested: Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern – https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=latour+modern&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
and an unpublished paper of his own which is extremely relevant and discusses Haraway and technology.
Project:
Cyborgs and Intersectionality in Sci-fi and Speculative Fiction – Narratives of bodies, machines, and nature
– connection / disconnection / re-connection
My research will be an essay looking at contemporary speculative literature and theory surrounding speculative fiction, speculative futures, and technology and the body. It will largely use qualitative analysis and also contain some small sections of my own creative writing. The data will be literature and academic texts. I will undertake a literature review to outline my main texts and their perspectives and potential biases. The aim will be to explore and outline how we can make the world better and counter oppressive systems by envisioning hopeful futures through speculative fiction that contains intersectionality and the blurring of boundaries between nature (the body) and technology. The main research question will be something akin to, how do intersectional cyborgs in speculative fiction create hopeful futures?
It will expand on the ideas in Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ and accompanying texts, including the academic literature which responded and followed as well as fiction focused on those topics.
A preliminary overview of and reflection on the academic literature that I will be drawing on for my project – Informal Annotated Bibliography
-HARAWAY, DONNA J., and CARY WOLFE. Manifestly Haraway. University of Minnesota Press, 2016. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1b7x5f6. Accessed 2 April 2024.
I will particularly focus on the chapter ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ which was originally published in 1985, and its ideas. In ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ Haraway outlines how the idea (and potentially the reality) of the cyborg – a synthesis of human and technology – has the potential to be a tool of feminist emancipation.
-Cutanda, Grian A. The Earth Stories Collection: How To Make Another World Possible with Myths, Legends and Traditional Stories. The Earth Stories Collection, 2019.
Collects and sometimes alters traditional stories from various cultures around the world and adds to them. Discusses counter stories or counter narratives and their importance as well as the importance of oral storytelling traditions.
-DUNNE, ANTHONY, and FIONA RABY. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. The MIT Press, 2013. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qf7j7. Accessed 2 April 2024.
-Latour, Bruno. On the Emergence of an Ecological Class : A Memo : Subject – How to Promote the Emergence of an Ecological Class That’s Self-Aware and Proud / Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz ; Translated by Julie Rose. Edited by Nikolaj Schultz and Julie Rose, Polity Press, 2022, https://contentstore.cla.co.uk/secure/link?id=4e47c45f-629e-ee11-ad36-a04a5e5d2f8d.
-Womack, Ytasha L. Afrofuturism the World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Lawrence Hill Books, 2013, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57718389725e25272beacd64/t/5f998f434c2ae52feda5ca70/1603899211765/Afrofuturism+the+world+of+black+sci-fi+and+fantasy+culture++by+Ytasha+L.+Womack..pdf.
-VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer. The Big Book of Science Fiction: The Ultimate Collection. Vintage Books, 2016.
I was interested in economic narrative because I wanted to look at the way the two elements interact in different ways, particularly how economics and economic systems are depicted and effect a fictional narrative (Jane Austen’s works are a great example of this!) and how people (e.g. politicians) tell or spin certain narratives in real life.
In the course, both in the reading an in the intensive we explored the blending of literature and economics, looking at many different forms of this combination. The reading was largely focused on various economic crises and all of the elements which these entail. I was worried at first as some of it was quite complex economics and numbers which was hard to understand, however the intensive was great and as it was largely in a seminar format anything we were confused about was explained well and we got to have complex, in depth discussions about the material and other related things, exploring the historical, economic, and literature perspectives/ different blends of economic narratives.
We also did group work where we explored one topic and how economic narratives were conveyed. Our group looked at greenwashing and how companies often lie in advertising.
Some notes:
-many different ways to tell a narrative – e.g. visual economic narrative e.g. fashion
-echo from World as Story – brought up again what makes certain narratives contagious/ sticky – very interesting, important
-really good course!
-Made me think of economic systems in fiction – specifically Snow Crash and, much more subtly, What you are looking for is in the library, which I read most recently, amongst other examples such as depictions of economic systems in dystopias (e.g. 1984).
For my essay I wrote about how Jane Austen depicts the economics of the time in her texts, especially in relation to character, how this interacts with other themes such as class and gender, and how important it is to her texts.
Artificial Intelligence and Storytelling Reflection
-In the reading for Artificial Intelligence and Storytelling I learned a lot about creative writing. Although it is just the basics, and largely centered around scripts/ screenplay writing, it was very valuable and good to remind myself of these aspects of storytelling. Into the woods a five-act journey into story by John Yorke was a great read and very good at outlining what elements stories need. This, in turn, informed some of the final edits to the play I wrote ‘It’s All In Your Head’ as I wanted to make sure it was as compelling as I could make it. This course helped my play slightly, both in terms of creative writing story elements and also additions and contemplation about AI ethics (as in the intensive there was a short discussion about the ethics of AI — including its capacity to write/be creative, copyright, jobs, and the issue of training it and who really does that work — which built upon what we explored in Ethical Data Futures).
This programme was not exactly what I expected, especially during the intensive, as we spent a lot of time learning about Language Learning Models and how they work. Although this was valuable knowledge, it wasn’t directly relevant or useful to the assignment and the other work in the programme.
In this programme, I learned that AI is not easy to direct and not good at writing fiction (at least not in the format we used it/ the model we used). I did learn how to give it better prompts, and built slightly on my coding knowledge, as well as play with images in AI along with text.
The best part of the intensives, and of the programme, were when we created our own stories and characters (with the help of the AI), then melded them together in groups to make a bigger story, and then attempted to combine all of these into a class story. We then presented our group’s story to the class with visual aids. This allowed us more creative freedom and challenged us to blend and fit our stories together.
I did however build on my presentation and writing skills in this module, although also learned how difficult AI is to work with to write literature or even to generate ideas, especially when there are a lot of restrictions.
This knowledge and the skills I built on this programme will most likely inform my futures project, especially in the creative writing aspect.
Building Near Futures has been very fruitful so far. We are in groups for a big project and my group is a very good mix of people from different disciplines who are all great workers with lots of ideas and are keen to work on our project. We are looking at sustainable cities and green architecture and design and are potentially looking at creating a future design of EFI centered around green technology, community, and a sustainable approach. This has been very interesting and rewarding so far and we have already learned a lot, looking at various case studies of sustainable and green cities (and smart cities) as well as green design, architecture, and elements (like urban farming) which we might want to include.
The course has largely been centered around this project and I am glad we are doing something so meaningful, that I find so interesting, and that we work together so well. It is also great to bring in some narrative and literature knowledge for some aspects and even some knowledge from my A-level Geography. My passion for art has also come in use, especially as we are looking at architecture and design elements and even have a meeting with the architecture firm for EFI. It has already been extremely eye opening and a real learning process to find out more about EFI, the building, and the limitations that we may face in our design.
The theory has been interesting and certainly relates to creating narratives futures as a whole and may be useful to integrate into the theory of my futures project, specifically the theory on futures projection, the futures cone, and more. Texts such as Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby would certainly come into play – especially as it talks about the envisioning of real futures and how fiction comes into play with technology and design – and possibly other texts on the course like Technology and Sustainable Development : The Promise and Pitfalls of Techno-Solutionism by Henrik Skaug Sætra or even Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities which was suggested by a lecturer. Theory such as discussion about wicked problems and how to approach them may be very relevant to use.
Furthermore, there are many ways that this form of envisioning and designing the future may blend with art and literature as although it focuses on the near future and the real and tangible, this is an important aspect to add to the imaginative speculative fictions of authors such as Ursula e Guin and the artist Solomon Enos. There is also a lot of overlap topic wise, which is no surprise, looking at green and sustainable solutions to climate change and its intertwining issues.
Most of all, I have learnt about how important it is to think in the near future or the short term, as well as the long term, in order to blend speculative fiction into reality, and so that people can’t deem solutions too far away/ into the future and offload responsibility.
Over the Christmas break and throughout semester 2 I worked on a play which I wrote and directed (amongst other organisational things).
In collaboration with the society Theatre Paradok, a few friends and I put on an immersive sound play about AI and mental health called ‘It’s All In Your Head’. We put it on at Whitespace for four performances over three nights.
Here’s a blurb: On a usual dreary morning, Nina suddenly finds herself in a struggle against a mysterious entity. She must find the strength to take control. It’s All In Your Head is a play about the mind, self-discovery, and our relationship with technology. It’s all in your head… or is it?
The play is a kind of mystery and sort of a dark comedy and depicts the struggle between a woman, Nina, and an AI which infiltrates its way into her inner monologue one morning. It was based on / built from an assignment that I did for Text Remix. I wanted the play to be immersive in some way and was inspired by Complicité’s production The Encounter in which they use headphones and a binaural microphone. Paradok are all about experimental theatre and so were keen on this idea. I felt it also suited the narrative as the audience is then immersed in Nina’s inner monologue and starts to hear the AI in their heads as well. We found a sound designer to help us bring this vision to life. We asked the audience to bring along headphones and used the sonobus app in order to stream the sound to them, though it was WiFi reliant so took a lot of trial and error. However, it does seem like it was successful overall!
Putting this play on helped me build many skills such as learning how to produce and organise a production (a very big task) as well as building my writing and editing skills (in this case navigating a script) and learning how to direct. The difference in tone of voice and physicality between the AI and Nina was the most important thing to show and took a lot of tact, especially in the moments when the divide is not so stark (for example when the AI is still hiding). I also arranged props and created a lighting script. We also did a lot of social media and publicity work, here’s the show’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itsallinyourheadplay/
The experience was very time consuming and stressful but extremely rewarding to see my hard work pay off and come to life. It was so amazing to have people attend and enjoy the show!
I think that the experience i gained and lessons learned though this process will inevitably influence my futures project.
I would love to put the play on again someday in an even more polished form. We filmed the show so I hope to edit together a version of it at some point so that more people can experience it in the meantime.
An overview of my first meeting with my project supervisor
I met with my supervisor, Simon Malpas, for the first time and had a really great and very helpful meeting where we discussed where I am at with my project and thought about what my next steps are.
I am glad to have him as my supervisor as his specialty is in literature and has a valuable knowledge of contemporary science fiction. Although he has had a couple of different research interests, including the literature, culture and politics of the Restoration period, he is largely currently focusing on the relationship between science, literature and society from the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century to the present and science fiction.
We had a long discussion about my plans and influences as well as suggestions of texts which I could look into. We also looked briefly at my past blog posts and tried to clarify my project focus. He also suggested I look into the podcast ‘Our Opinions are Correct’ by the novelists (and science writers) Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders
As I expected the main feedback so far is to narrow down my scope and have a really solid idea of what exactly it is that my project is and is doing.
My task until the next meeting is to really solidify a few core texts which will influence my project.
Refine the rationale for and scope and format of your project on the basis of any reading or thinking done over the break.
My current vision for my futures project is to focus on ideas of ‘the cyborg’ and intersectionality in sci-fi literature, particularly focusing on Afro-futurism and Indigenous Futurism. It will look at the ideas of embodiment and resistance, and resist, break down, and surpass binarisms. It will analyse these texts and argue how their radical potential can change the world – the (speculative) futures which we envision and make reality, and therefore having the potential to change real world systems and science.
This will be mostly academic essay, with elements of a speculative, sci-fi narrative woven in throughout which embody the ideas and narratives discussed.
How has your project developed? What were some of the key ideas/texts/resources shared by your peers that moved your project forward? Where have you made changes, where did these decisions arise?
My project has developed a little, I am slowly researching and am more at the widening scope stage at the moment. The different intensives have greatly shaped what I imagine my project will look like, and in talking to my peers I have gained ideas and thought more about it’s structure.
Currently, I am creating a long list of sources and readings, largely helped by the reading from the intensives, especially ‘writing speculative fiction’. Additionally, I have been adding anything I come across which I feel is relevant and have been listening to the podcasts ‘The Digital Human’ and ‘Edgy Ideas’ which are helping me think more about current issues, topics, and problems in the world and ideas about solving them. This has led for me to think about wider research questions and how my work could potentially address them. The two ‘Edgy Ideas’ episodes 62: Becoming digitally savvy with Anni Rowland-Campbell and 65: Purpose upgrade with Paul Skinner have been particularly relevant in terms of issues discussed and thinking holistically. I am interested in delving deeper into these ideas and into the work of the guests, particularly Anni Rowland-Campbell.
Additionally, In talking to my peers about the structure of my project, I have more of an idea of what I want to create. I want my project to be largely research based and centered around the exploration of ideas, however due to the modules ‘world of story’ and ‘writing speculative fiction’, I want to incorporate my own creative work (possibly short pieces of narrative text/a story spread throughout), and embed it in the project to aid and embody the ideas discussed.
I am still looking at the ideas of intersectionality in speculative fiction and science fiction works, and am still exploring texts and art for this. I think the idea of the cyborg and what that means in fiction vs in real life and how they combine is really interesting, and something to keep researching into.
Key Ideas:
Cyborg Feminism
Cyberpunk
Afro-futurism
Indigenous Futurism
Interdisciplinary
Intersectionality
AI
Science Fiction
Speculative Fiction
narrative
art
Solidified Project Idea:
An essay investigating ‘intersectional cyborgism’ through narrative and scattering my own creative work (narrative) throughout as a response and to embody the ideas discussed.
The creating visual narratives module was seriously developmental in terms of influences and ideas for my futures project. Not only did I re-familarise myself with the work of some of my favourite artists, particularly Afrofuturist artists, but I also discovered some new key artists and terminology which may feed into my futures project. For example, we were given an amazing talk by the artist Solomon Enos whose work focuses largely on indigenous futurism and speculative futures. In particular, his art often imagines future worlds and landscapes which provide imaginative solutions to global issues, centering the indigenous perspective and utilises the combination of human and organic technology (the blending of humans and nature). This seems particularly relevant due to my interest in the cyborg, an idea also integrated into his art, and His work has been a key influence for me since, especially in my creating visual narratives project, as they focus on nature and discuss issues such as climate change.
Additionally, a central discussion during the intensive days of this module was the issue of speculative futures and dystopias vs utopias, what these two opposing concepts mean, and how they are applicable to the real world and our issues. These ideas and questions are definitely something that I want to tackle in my futures project. I therefore think that my futures project will focus on cyborgs, dichotomies, and Afrofuturist and indigenous futurist visions of speculative futures.
My final portfolio investigations and art piece for this module investigated these ideas by creating a landscape for both a utopian and dystopian future and melding them together. I found this extremely rewarding and would love to build on these ideas and my investigation of them in my final futures project, including implementing my own creative work. For example, in this final piece, I included a poem I created through a combination of my own writing and using black out poetry. This was also inspired by ergodic literature.
My final piece is the featured image of this post, and is acrylic on paper (A1).
The experience was very time consuming and stressful but extremely rewarding to see my hard work pay off and come to life. It was so amazing to have people attend and enjoy the show!
