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CFP for Graduate Students: Speculative Futures Event at UC Davis
HATCH, the Mellon-funded Feminist Arts and Science Shop at UC Davis, in collaboration with the UC Davis Ethics Commons, invites UCD graduate students to participate in our symposium, Speculative Futures.
Speculative Futures brings feminist and queer thinkers together to consider how speculative methods can illuminate the relationship between science, technology, finance, and social justice. Featured speakers include: Ruha Benjamin, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University; Aimee Bhang, Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Pomona College; and Lisa Ikemoto, Professor of Law at the University of California Davis School of Law.
Ruha Benjamin writes, “novel fictions that reimagine and rework all that is taken for granted about the current structure of the social world—alternatives to capitalism, racism, and patriarchy—are urgently needed. Fictions, in this sense, are not falsehoods but refashionings through which analysts experiment with different scenarios, trajectories, and reversals, elaborating new values and testing different possibilities for creating more just and equitable societies. Such fictions are not meant to convince others of what is, but to expand our own visions of what is possible.” How do bodily “facts” and “fictions”–racial, gendered, sexual, or otherwise–shape, enable, or frustrate social justice ends?
Topics and Themes are open, but could include:
*trans methodologies and the body
*capitalist extraction and property formation
*indigenous worldviews
*reproductive justice and speculative fiction
*speculative finance, debt, and dystopia
*genetics and race
*disability justice
*gesture, assistance, and technology
*the racial and gender logics of virtual and augmented realities
Please provide a 250-300 word abstract of your proposed topic by Friday, September 14, 2018. We will be in touch with decisions by Monday, September 17. Papers will be due on Friday, October 12, 2018. Send all correspondence to: ucd.hatch@gmail.com.