Rewild, repair, restore! Science fictions of life-making in the aftermath

Undergraduate / Graduate

Science fiction has long imagined human relations persisting and transforming on the ruined earth. Indeed, science fiction imaginaries offered horizons for human, and more-than-human, environmental and social restoration long before most cultural forms began to grapple with what we sometimes still call "climate change." This class reads science fiction (mostly American, from the 1960s-2020s), alongside environmental and social theory to begin to ask what it might take to live toward and in conditions of repair, and what repair and restoration seem to mean in our current moment. We will be particularly interested in where and how environmental restoration intersects with conceptions of social repair, collective life-building and liberation. What might repair require in scenes not only of environmental devastation, but of state violence, settler colonialism, racial capitalism and the uneven distribution of dispossession and loss? If restoration is a process and not a destination, what might the daily life under conditions of repair be? What possibilities for transformed collective life and relations might be opened up by processes of repair? What might not be reparable, or when and where might repair need to stop? We'll engage these questions and more by thinking and imagining with environmental theory, theories of settler colonialism and racial capital, feminist theories of reproduction, communization theory and science fiction.