Thinking With Cli-Fi and Other Science Fiction as Transdisciplinary Praxis

• In Event: Interdisciplinary and Critical Conceptualizations of Climate Change Education and Research

Abstract

This paper focuses on science fiction (including climate fiction and speculative fiction) as a transdisciplinary method for highlighting injustices in the present and imagining different climate and technological futures. I think alongside science fiction texts with themes of climate change and emerging technologies (such as AI) to highlight the necessity for transdisciplinary cross-curricular collaboration across English, STEM, and the arts in 21st century education.
The year 2020 saw Australia’s worst bushfire season on record and declarations of food scarcity for Indigenous people living off the land in Canada. Concomitantly, the COVID-19 pandemic has drawn ongoing attention to ongoing injustice across the education sector, a rise in multi-national for-profit investment in schooling, and the news of AI algorithms causing many students to lose their place at universities in the United Kingdom in 2020. The world mirrors many narratives once dreamed of in science fiction stories and films and highlights the potential of narrative fiction as a pedagogical and social tool for predicting, critiquing, and building a different world in secondary school education.
Considering the material effects of stories in creating worlds aligns with feminist literary scholars (Wynter & McKittrick, 2015) and science and technology scholars (Bahng, 2017) who argue for the power of narrative in shaping experience, critiquing the present, and positing different futures. There is a significant and growing lineage of science fiction written by Black authors, authors of colour, and Indigenous authors including Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, and Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti. Through considering different worlds from our own, science fictions provide the opportunity for critical reflection on aspects of how our world currently is and where we might end up if we continue along certain paths (Whyte, 2018). These critical reflections then offer a chance for further speculative thinking which asks what needs to be done in the present to arrive at an alternative future.
Accordingly, this paper will (1) activate science fiction as a mode of thought to think through real world news; and (2) think with science fiction texts (climate fiction/speculative fiction) as a method to critique the world and posit different futures. Data sources will include literary fiction texts, and contemporary news, and discussion of a cross-curricular project with English and STEM teachers around climate fiction and AI fiction in Australia.
Through exemplifications of science fiction as both a method of reading, and form of text English literary education, the paper will demonstrate how English literary education as an important interdisciplinary site for reimaging social and environmental futures in times of ongoing climate and technological crises globally. Through a focus on Black and Indigenous climate, and science fiction, it will further discuss how although curriculum disenfranchisement in secondary English continues to be raced and gendered, it is often writers marginalized by colonizing practices who are addressing the complexities and nuances of the climate crisis and offering new possibilities for the future.

Author

• Sarah E. Truman, University of Melbourne