Remembering Ursula Le Guin (1929-2018): A secular saint of ‘No Church’ STS?

• In Event: Science and Technology Studies and Science Education: ‘High’ vs. ‘Low’ Church Tensions (A)

Abstract

In the year of Le Guin’s passing, it seems timely to acknowledge and celebrate the unique contributions to public understanding of science and technology she made through SF (science fiction/ fantasy/fabulation). Haraway (2016, p. 5) refers to Le Guin as one of her ‘partners in science studies, anthropology, and storytelling’ (others include Latour and Stengers). Both Haraway and Le Guin have been my partners in exploring science education’s imbrications with popular media cultures for many years (see Gough, 1993).
If forced into a choice between ‘High’ and ‘Low’ Church positions in STS, I would choose the “minoritized, rhizomatic flights away from staunch universalist, dominating understandings of science and phenomena” of the ‘Low Church’. But lines of flight (or deterritorialisation) enable movements away from spaces regulated by dominant systems of signification and I thus prefer to avoid binaries and imagine that the material-semiotic spaces of science and speculation that Le Guin explored (and to which she contributed) constitute a ‘No Church’ position in STS. SF and material worlds are now so entwined that they cannot be understood in isolation. In twenty-first-century technoculture, the objects of scientific inquiry are thoroughly colonised by subjects that once belonged entirely to fiction. This paper will present examples drawn from Le Guin’s fiction and non-fiction writings to demonstrate that speculative fictions and material phenomena do not stand in a relationship of externality to each other and that her work should be understood as constituting a distinctive contribution to the infusion of STS in science education.

Author

• Noel Gough, La Trobe University