An Investigation into the Role of Science & Speculative Fiction for Reframing Modes of Engagement with Urban Environments for Multispecies Collaborati

对科学作用的调查

• 批准号: 2721435
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2721435
• 关键词: Investigation; into; Role; Science; Speculative

Full title: Science Fact, Fiction and Futures: An Investigation into the Role of Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction for Reframing Modes of Engagement with Urban Environments for Multispecies Collaboration. With urban populations forecasted at 70% of the global population by 2050 and to absorb virtually all future population growth (UN, 2019), it's unsurprising that urban spaces are becoming focal points for future efforts to ameliorate anthropogenic climate change. Often narrativized as starkly utopian or dystopian, the urban environment has been taken as a site for manifesting anthropogenic anxieties and triumphs in science and speculative fiction (SSF). This project will explore how SSF from 1950 to present offers modes of departure from dualistic representations of urban environments which consider the potential for alternative perceptions, alert to the presence, role and importance of the nonhuman in urban assemblages.With the realisation of the impossibility of utopian perfectibility in the 1950's, which brought Arthur C Clarke's interplanetary narratives, the second half of the twentieth century saw an increasingly ambivalent narrativization of urban environments. From the hopeful 1960's urban avant-garde movement, to fears of urban atrophy and degeneration, as seen in Doris Lessing's work, up to a cautiously hopeful literary context embodied by Megan Hunter's The End We StartFrom (2017) and Tade Thompson's Rosewater Redemption (2019), cityscapes in SSF have consistently been multispecies environments and cultural discourses in flux.To facilitate this reading of nonhuman/human and material/discursive interpenetration in urban literary representations, I will use New Materialist perspectives, including Stacy Alaimo's theorisation of transcorporeality. Transcorporeality decentres anthropocentric discourses by repositioning the human 'as substantially and perpetually interconnected with the flows of substances and the agencies of environments' (2012, p.478). By exploring these 'flows' in imagined urban environments, where nonhuman others are foregrounded as agential, a more expansive and ethical interaction with our everyday natures may be conceptualised. To avoid dualistic utopianism and Judeo-Christian structures of apocalypse which have been popular fictional tools for motivating meaningful environmental change, I will engage with an ethics of ongoing change as articulated by Donna Haraway's premise of 'staying with the trouble', described as: "learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations or places, time, matter, meanings. (2016, p.1) "Rather than engaging in environmental narratives leading to concretized endings, Haraway suggests we stay with the trouble by examining our present and modes of material/discursive interaction with it, to identify new or existing connections which offer more ontologically and epistemologically harmonious 'worldings'. As genres which construct whole worlds or futures, this research will evaluate how science fiction and near future fiction narratives are positioned to foreground urban spaces which imaginatively challenge anthropocentric frameworks for more ethical and expansive engagement with nonhuman co-collaborators. By identifying narrative patterns and structures for nonhuman/human relations within SSF texts, the project will reflect on current and alternative sustainable modes of inhabiting our multispecies cities for ecologically generative futures.

完整标题：科学事实，小说和未来：对科幻小说和投机小说的作用进行调查，以重新构建多物种合作与城市环境的参与模式。预计到2050年，城市人口将占全球人口的70%，并将吸收几乎所有未来的人口增长（联合国，2019年），因此城市空间正成为未来改善人为气候变化的重点也就不足为奇了。城市环境经常被描述为赤裸裸的乌托邦或反乌托邦，在科学和投机小说（SSF）中被视为表现人类焦虑和胜利的场所。这个项目将探索SSF从1950年到现在如何提供从城市环境的二元表征出发的模式，考虑替代感知的潜力，警惕非人类在城市集合中的存在，角色和重要性。随着20世纪50年代乌托邦完美性的不可能性的实现，这带来了亚瑟C克拉克的星际叙事，20世纪后半叶，人们对城市环境的叙述越来越矛盾。从充满希望的20世纪60年代城市先锋运动，到多丽丝·莱辛作品中对城市萎缩和退化的恐惧，再到梅根·亨特的《我们开始的终点》（2017）和塔德·汤普森的《玫瑰水救赎》（2019）所体现的谨慎乐观的文学背景，SSF中的城市景观一直是多物种的环境和不断变化的文化话语。为了促进阅读非人类/人类和物质/为了探讨都市文学表征中的话语渗透，我将使用新唯物主义的观点，包括斯泰西阿莱莫的超身体理论。超身体性通过重新定位人类“实质上和永久地与物质流和环境机构相互关联”（2012年，第478页）来降低以身体为中心的话语。通过探索这些“流动”在想象的城市环境中，非人类的其他人作为代理人前景，一个更广泛的和道德的互动与我们的日常性质可能被概念化。为了避免二元论的乌托邦和犹太-基督教的启示结构，这些结构一直是激励有意义的环境变化的流行虚构工具，我将参与持续变化的伦理学，正如唐娜·哈拉维的前提“与麻烦同在”所阐述的那样，描述为：“学会真正地活在当下，而不是在可怕的或伊甸园般的过去和启示录般的或救赎般的未来之间充当一个消失的支点，而是作为凡人的生物，在无数未完成的配置或地方，时间，物质，意义中徘徊。(2016 Haraway建议我们不要参与导致具体化结局的环境叙事，而是通过检查我们的现在和与之进行物质/话语互动的模式来与麻烦保持联系，以确定新的或现有的连接，这些连接提供了本体论和认识论上更和谐的“世界”。作为构建整个世界或未来的体裁，本研究将评估科幻小说和不久的未来小说叙事如何定位于前景城市空间，这对以非人类为中心的框架提出了挑战，以实现与非人类合作者的更道德和更广泛的参与。通过识别SSF文本中的非人类/人类关系的叙事模式和结构，该项目将反映居住在我们的多物种城市的生态生成未来的当前和替代可持续模式。