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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.
-Alicia Yanez Cossio’s “The IWM 1000” from the 1970s
-The big book of science fiction
-Amazing stories
– Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction (1984), David Hartwell
– Rokheya Shekhawat Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream” (1905) is a potent feminist utopian vision.
-W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Comet” (1920) isn’t just a story about an impending science-fictional catastrophe but also the start of a conversation about race relations and a proto-Afrofuturist tale.
– Yefim Zozulya’s “The Doom of Principal City”(1918)
– A. Merritt’s “The Last Poet and the Robots” (1935)
– Frederik Pohl’s “Day Million” (1966)
– Karel Capek- 1920s robot plays and his gonzo novel War with the Newts from the 1930s
– Katherine MacLean
-Margaret St. Clair
-Carol Emshwiller
– Ursula K. Le Guin – essay “American SF and the Other” (1975)
– Joanna Russ – essay “The Image of Women in Science Fiction” (1970)
– James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Russ, Josephine Saxton, Le Guin.
– The Ultimate Cyberpunk (2002), which contextualized cyberpunk within earlier influences (not always successfully) and also showcased post-cyberpunk works.
– Angelica Gorodischer was publishing such incendiary feminist material as “The Unmistakable Smell of Wood Violets” (1985)
– Misha Nogha, whose Arthur C. Clarke Award finalist Red Spider White Web (1990
– Zipes, Jack. Speaking Out : Storytelling and Creative Drama for Children, Taylor & Francis Group, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ed/detail.action?docID=199667.
Created from ed on 2023-11-08 19:27:53.
-‘Narrative fiction creates possible worlds— but they are worlds extrapolated from the world we know, however much they may soar beyond it. The art of the possible is a perilous art. It must take heed of life as we know it, yet alienate us from it sufficiently to tempt us into thinking of alternatives beyond it. It challenges as it comforts. In the end, it has the power to change our habits of conceiving what is real, what is canonical. It can even undermine the law’s dictates about what constitutes a canonical reality.’ —Jerome Braner, Making Stories
– ‘It would be misleading to argue that every story told is utopian or to assert that there is an “essential” utopian nature to storytelling. There is, however, a utopian tendency of telling that helps explain why it is we feel so compelled to create and disseminate tales and why we are enthralled by particular stories. In his monumental three-volume work The Principle of Hope, the philosopher Ernst Bloch argued that real-life experiences are at the basis of our utopian longings and notions. Because our daily lives are not exactly what we want them to be, we daydream with a certain intentionality and glimpse another world that urges us on and stimulates our creative drives to reach a more ideal state of being. It is our realization of what is missing in our lives that impels us to create works of art that not only reveal insights into our struggles but also shed light on alternatives and possibilities to restructure our mode of living and social relations. It is through art that utopia, designated as no place that we have ever seen or truly experienced, is to be realized as a place truly inhabitable for humans, a real humane place different from the brutal artificial places we inhabit and the earth that we are in the process of destroying with dubious notions of progress. All art, according to Bloch, contains images of hope illuminating ways to create a utopian society that offset our destructive drives.’
– Murray, Janet Horowitz. Hamlet on the Holodeck : the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace / JanetH. Murray. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1998. Print.
-The John Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson, and Benjamin J. Robertson.
– Contemporary Science Fiction course – resource list
– Rob Lathan – Science Fiction Criticism – Anthology
