Writing Speculative Fiction
This year, the Digital Humanities Center is bringing back our monthly learning community on Speculative Technologies for Liberatory Worlds to build capacity for what adrienne maree brown calls “radical imagination,” where “all efforts to bend the arc of the future towards justice, is science fictional behavior.” Come build community with students, staff, and faculty and explore imaginative possibilities through hands-on activities, critical play games, and more.
In this second session, we'll be writing speculative fiction, as inspired by Octavia Butler's genre-bending novel Kindred. In essence, all speculative fiction asks “what if” questions that imagine a world distinct from our own— be it in the far future, on an alien planet, or even in the past but with a distortion of reality. These questions create space for us to consider psychic, philosophical, and metaphysical truths or assumptions that we normally pass over without reflection. Like Butler, we'll be interrogating these "What if's" to imagine and create alternative narratives that speak to our pasts, present, and futures. This session will be hosted in collaboration with the Creative Writing Program.
The learning community will be held on the following dates (all Thursdays) from 4:00-5:30 PM: 9/15, 10/13, 11/10, 12/8, 1/26, 2/9, 3/9, 4/13. You don't have to attend every session--drop in when you can!
The Digital Humanities Center is committed to hosting and supporting programming that reflects its core values of inclusivity, sustainability, exploration, and collaboration. For questions, accommodation requests, or issues, email us at digitalhumanities@barnard.edu.