World-ecological crisis and the resourceful futures of world-SF

The idea that it seems “easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” seems truer than ever. If, as this maxim (typically attributed to Fredric Jameson) suggests, a future of capitalist “business as usual” is incompatible with the long-term prosperity of all life on a damaged planet, how might the imaginative stranglehold that capitalism has upon our ability to imagine the future be broken? To begin answering this question, my thesis examines speculative fiction (SF) through emergent “worlded” and “resourceful” methodologies proposed by the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) and developed by others, which read “world-literature” via Jason W. Moore’s (2015a) “world-ecological” re-conception of capitalism, and the uneven materialities of capitalist resource extractivism. In this sense, my thesis establishes and interrogates what I term world-SF: SF that registers and grapples with the uneven futures of the capitalist world-system and what Moore calls its ongoing world-ecological crisis. SF in “science fictional” guises has typically been associated with the privileged and typically “white” imaginaries of world-systemic cores. Recent years, however, have witnessed a growing outpouring of SF from the systemic peripheries long ignored by such imaginaries. It is to these fictions in particular that I turn. Despite emerging in different times and places within the neoliberal “arc”, the SF modes of North American and Caribbean ‘Afrofuturism’ (Dery 1994), South Africa’s ‘postapartheid speculative’ (Duncan 2018a), and what I call Nigerian post-petro-magic futurism all stage a coming to world-ecological consciousness that grasps the durable aftermaths of capital’s uneven, racialised environment-making. These three clusters of interrelated SF texts reclaim the Black futures foreclosed by decades of neoliberalisation. When read as world-SF, however, they also open newly imaginative terrains from which to cultivate worlded and resourceful forms of thinking and being that can negotiate the uneven futures of world-ecological crisis

How not to return to normal

In a March 2020 article published in Le Monde, Bruno Latour defined the Covid-19 emergency as "the big rehearsal" for the larger disaster to come: one that extends to all forms of life on Earth. The ongoing crisis, in his eyes, becomes both a risk and an opportunity to trial and develop new action plans necessary for the continuation of life. "The pandemic is a portal," wrote author Arundhati Roy a few days later, calling for a more equitable and sustainable post-pandemic future. The pandemic is an opportunity for un-learning and changing direction, particularly in how we approach risk and disaster. The dominant narrative for politicians and the media, however, is one of “returning to normal” as soon as possible, bouncing back, relying on established models of resilience based on the management of economic risk. They are also rehearsing, or modelling, worst- or best-case scenarios. Artists, designers, and institutions are shaping discourses around the growing extinguishment of our resources, but also performing, visualising, simulating and modelling responses to possible risks and imagining resilience differently. Design and art can foster new visions, pilot new modes of communication and knowledge sharing, and drive the interdisciplinary collaborations necessary to address common issues. This panel explores ways in which art and design practices can be mobilized to transform current approaches to risk and disaster in imaginative, sustainable and equitable ways. The papers selected for this session reflect a need to reassess, reframe, and reimagine the roles of museums, art and design, and thus contribute to a space for critical reflection to inform action, strategy, and practices. It is important to remember that our fields are far from immune from being complicit in the creation and reinforcement of the kinds of inequalities and injustices that have been made even more unmistakably clear in the last year: as Sasha Costanza-Shock, author of the book Design Justice, has pointed out, designers are ‘often unwittingly reproducing the existing structure of [...] who's going to benefit the most and who's going to be harmed the most by the tools or the objects or the systems or the buildings or spaces that we're designing.’ The urge to respond in an emergency, whether it's a design challenge in the context of COVID 19 or exhibition on climate change, requires space for critical thinking, inclusive conversation and production. This necessity comes across on the three papers brought together for this panel, and in the opening presentation by Emily Candela and Francesca Cavallo

Life Was Doing Something New: The Making of the American Metropolis, 1870-1920

This dissertation seeks to shed new light on the moment in American history when the U.S. became an urban nation. To that end, it marshals a diverse range of thinkers - including Henry Adams, Frederick Douglass, Daniel Burnham, Edith Wharton, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jacob Riis, William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, and Jane Addams - all of whom investigated the processes which shaped the cities in this era. The central conflict that emerges is the tension between rational planning and unpredictable evolutionary forces. Many of those who wrote about American cities in the Gilded and Progressive Ages chose to emphasize one isolated extreme - either the controllable nature of cities or the chaotic manner of their growth - while others sought to synthesize them. In each of the three major American cities that I have chosen to survey - Washington, D.C.; New York; and Chicago - this tension exists: the interplay between the unregulated flows of economic, political, and social capital and the various attempts to impose order on them. Expanding upon such historicist work as Walter Benn Michaels's The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism and Jennifer Fleissner's Women, Compulsion, Modernity, Life Was Doing Something New provides an interdisciplinary account of the birth of the American city, one that reveals the hitherto unrecognized ways realism and naturalism participated in larger debates about the new, industrial America and the forces shaping it.Doctor of Philosoph