Program

9:00 Registration, Tea & Coffee

9:30 Welcome 

9:45 Keynote: ‘Piercing Geometries’: Horizontal and Vertical Axes in Contemporary Arab Dystopia, Dr Lindsey Moore (University of Lancaster)

10:45 Tea & Coffee Break (15 mins)

11:00 Panel 1: The Body Politic, the Alien, the Posthuman, the Other

Chaired by July Blalack

• Liam Wilby (University of Leeds):  Anthony Joseph’s Autopoietic Fiction: Addressing the Territory and not the Map in The African Origins of UFOs

• Lyu Guangzhao (UCL): Dark Forest or Grand Central: The Self-Other Polarity in Liu Cixin and Arthur C. Clarke’s Science Fiction

• Kerry Mackereth (University of Cambridge): Dis/Assembled: Racialising Technologies and Posthuman East Asian Subjects in Western Science Fiction Film. 

12:00 Lunch (45 mins)

12:45 Panel 2: Decolonial Histories and the Future

Chaired by Dr Tasnim Qutait 

• Annie Webster (SOAS): Ruins of the Future: On The Possibility of Life Amidst the Atlal

• Ella Elbaz (Stanford): Can the Future Speak? The Rise of the Palestinian Futurist Novel and its Folklorist Roots 

• Dr Edna Bonhomme (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science): Defying Colonialism: Speculative (and Liberated) Fiction in Early Twentieth Century Africa

• Pius Vögele (University of Basel): Stargates to Parallel Universes: Yugen Blakrok’s Afrofuturistic Sonic Fictions

14:00 Tea & Coffee Break (15 mins)

14:15 Panel 3: A Wilting Planet, Ecology and Dystopia 

Chaired by Dr Nora Parr

• Chen Ma (SOAS): Waste Tide: Ecoambiguity, Failure, and Emotional Propaganda Effect

• Ouissal Harize (Durham University): The Promised Land in the Imaginary of the Anthropocene: Palestine in The Second War of the Dog and Larissa Sansour’s Trilogy of Science Fiction

• Tabea Wilkes (SOAS): Ecocriticism in Okorafor’s Lagoon; Using Afrofuturism to inform the speculative fiction of environmental policy

• Dr. Emilia Terracciano: (University of Oxford):  Maiz Granada: Weaponising the Future Vegetal World

15:30 Tea & Coffee Break (15 mins) 

15:45 Panel 4: Beyond Earth, Liberated Space or the Final Colonial Frontier?

Chaired by Dr Sinead Murphy

• Dr Jörg Matthias Determann (Virginia Commonwealth University, Qatar): Envisioning Extraterrestrial Life in Muslim Science Fiction

• Nat Muller (Birmingham City University): Fly me to the Moon? Retrofuturism and the Ruins of Modernity in Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s A Space Museum

• Rachel Hill (Goldsmiths): “Bind the stars with the drums. There would be dancing”: Decolonial Imaginaries of Space Exploration

17:00 Author Readings

• Hamja Ahsan, reading from Shy Radicals: The Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert (2017)
• Vanessa Scully, showing and discussing her speculative artist film The Mail Order Bride 4.0 (2018)

17:45 Concluding Remarks