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.

全标题：科学事实、虚构和未来：科幻和投机虚构在重建与城市环境的互动模式以促进多物种合作方面的作用的调查。到2050年，城市人口预计将占全球人口的70%，并吸收几乎所有未来的人口增长(联合国，2019年)，因此城市空间正在成为未来改善人为气候变化努力的焦点也就不足为奇了。城市环境经常被描述为彻头彻尾的乌托邦或反乌托邦，被视为在科学和投机小说(SSF)中展示人为焦虑和胜利的场所。这个项目将探索从1950年到现在的SSF如何提供偏离城市环境的二元论表示的模式，考虑到另一种感知的可能性，警惕非人类在城市集合中的存在、角色和重要性。随着1950年的《S》中乌托邦完美的不可能性的实现，带来了阿瑟·C·克拉克的星际叙事，20世纪下半叶见证了对城市环境越来越矛盾的叙事化。从1960年充满希望的S城市先锋运动，到多丽丝·莱辛作品中看到的对城市萎缩和退化的恐惧，再到梅根·亨特的《我们从尽头开始》(2017)和泰德·汤普森的《玫瑰水的救赎》(2019年)所体现的谨慎希望的文学背景，SSF中的城市景观一直是多种多样的环境和源源不断的文化话语。为了便于阅读城市文学表现中的非人类/人类和物质/散乱的相互渗透，我将使用新唯物主义的视角，包括斯泰西·阿莱莫的跨身体现实理论。超物质现实通过重新定位人类“实质上和永久地与物质的流动和环境的机构相互联系”来倾斜以人类为中心的话语(2012，p.478)。通过在想象中的城市环境中探索这些“流动”，在那里，非人类的其他人被突出显示为代理人，与我们日常自然的更广泛和更道德的互动可能被概念化。为了避免二元论的乌托邦主义和犹太教-基督教的启示录结构，它们一直是激励有意义的环境变化的流行虚构工具，我将参与到一种持续变化的伦理中，正如唐娜·哈拉韦(Donna Haraway)所阐述的那样，他被描述为：“学习真正的存在，不是作为可怕或痛苦的过去与世界末日或救赎的未来之间消失的支点，而是作为凡人生物在无数未完成的配置或地点、时间、物质、意义中缠绕在一起。(2016，p.1)“哈拉韦建议我们通过审视我们的当下和与之相互作用的物质/话语模式，来识别新的或现有的联系，从而提供本体论和认识论上更和谐的‘世界’，而不是参与导致具体化结局的环境叙事。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城市空间的前景，这些城市空间富有想象力地挑战以人类为中心的框架，以便与非人类的合作者进行更道德和更广泛的接触。通过确定SSF文本中非人类/人类关系的叙事模式和结构，该项目将反思当前和替代的可持续居住在我们的多物种城市中的模式，以实现生态生成的未来。