Marginalized Bodies of Imagined Futurescapes : Ableism and Heteronormativity in Science Fiction

This article aims to contribute to an understanding of marginalized bodies in science fiction narratives by analyzing how physical disability and homosexuality/bisexuality have been depicted in popular science fiction film and television. Specifically, it analyzes what types of futures are evoked through the exclusion or inclusion of disability and homo/bisexuality. To investigate these futurescapes, in for example Star Trek and The Handmaid’s Tale, the paper uses film analysis guided by the theoretical approach of crip/queer temporality mainly in dialogue with disability/crip scholar Alison Kafer. Although narratives about the future in popular fiction occasionally imagines futures in which disability and homo/bisexuality exist the vast majority do not. This article argues that exclusion of characters with disabilities and homo/bisexual characters in imagined futures of science fiction perpetuate heteronormative and ableist normativity. It is important that fictional narratives of imagined futures do not limit portrayals to heterosexual and able-bodied people but, instead, take into account the ableist and heteronormative imaginaries that these narratives, and in extension contemporary society, are embedded in. Moreover, it is argued that in relation to notions of progression and social inclusion in imagined futurescapes portrayals of homo/bisexuality and disability has been used as narrative devices to emphasis “good” or “bad” futures. Furthermore, homo/bisexuality has increasingly been incorporated as a sign of social inclusion and progression while disability, partly due to the perseverance of a medical understanding of disability, instead is used as a sign of a failed future. However, the symbolic value ascribed to these bodies in stories are based on contemporary views and can thus change accordingly. To change the way the future is envisioned requires challenging how different types of bodies, desires, and notions of normativity are thought about. Sometimes imaginary futures can aid in rethinking and revaluating these taken-for-granted notions of normativity

Marginalized Bodies of Imagined Futurescapes : Ableism and Heteronormativity in Science Fiction

This article aims to contribute to an understanding of marginalized bodies in science fiction narratives by analyzing how physical disability and homosexuality/bisexuality have been depicted in popular science fiction film and television. Specifically, it analyzes what types of futures are evoked through the exclusion or inclusion of disability and homo/bisexuality. To investigate these futurescapes, in for example Star Trek and The Handmaid’s Tale, the paper uses film analysis guided by the theoretical approach of crip/queer temporality mainly in dialogue with disability/crip scholar Alison Kafer. Although narratives about the future in popular fiction occasionally imagines futures in which disability and homo/bisexuality exist the vast majority do not. This article argues that exclusion of characters with disabilities and homo/bisexual characters in imagined futures of science fiction perpetuate heteronormative and ableist normativity. It is important that fictional narratives of imagined futures do not limit portrayals to heterosexual and able-bodied people but, instead, take into account the ableist and heteronormative imaginaries that these narratives, and in extension contemporary society, are embedded in. Moreover, it is argued that in relation to notions of progression and social inclusion in imagined futurescapes portrayals of homo/bisexuality and disability has been used as narrative devices to emphasis “good” or “bad” futures. Furthermore, homo/bisexuality has increasingly been incorporated as a sign of social inclusion and progression while disability, partly due to the perseverance of a medical understanding of disability, instead is used as a sign of a failed future. However, the symbolic value ascribed to these bodies in stories are based on contemporary views and can thus change accordingly. To change the way the future is envisioned requires challenging how different types of bodies, desires, and notions of normativity are thought about. Sometimes imaginary futures can aid in rethinking and revaluating these taken-for-granted notions of normativity

New spaces for nature: The re-territorialisation of biodiversity conservation under neoliberalism in the UK

Biodiversity conservation is a fundamentally spatial practice. For more than a century, conservation's leading strategy has been the establishment of protected areas. Governance by the state has been central to conservation's claim to territory. In the UK, the established approach to biodiversity conservation concentrated on spatial strategies of territorialisation to secure particular outcomes in relatively small pieces of land, set aside as protected areas. However, this strategy has begun to change, and conservation's expanding territorial claims have been expressed through new models of large-scale conservation. A series of projects developed by non-governmental conservation organisations seek to extend conservation management over larger areas of land. In this paper we consider these developments as a form of re-territorialisation, a reframing and extension of conservation's spatial claims. We describe how conservation's ambitions have been reformed and extended and discuss evidence on the growth of large-scale biodiversity conservation projects in the UK. We then consider the implications of these changes in the light of the neoliberalisation of conservation.This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tran.12050/abstract

Beyond landscape designation: innovative funding, delivery and governance and the UK protected area system

In Europe, as in other developed regions of the world, statutory protected areas are islands of conservation endeavour within a wider landscape of intensive farming, towns, industry and transport links. They have generally failed to halt biodiversity decline within their boundaries, let alone in the wider landscape. Wider understanding of ecological processes has led to an awareness that protected areas need to be ‘more, bigger, better and joined’ and part of a wider landscape of integrated rural management. This implies the need for innovative funding and delivery mechanisms and for new forms of rural governance involving partnership working and community engagement. In the UK the move to integrated landscape-scale conservation has been led by the third sector. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds ‘Futurescapes’ and the Wildlife Trusts ‘Living Landscapes’ are examples of a ‘reterritorialisation’ of conservation by non-governmental voluntary organisations. Recently these approaches have been supplemented by the government’s Nature Improvement Area programme. In parallel, the Heritage Lottery Fund’s Landscape Partnership programme contributes significantly to landscape-scale working across the public/private interface, linking heritage and people inside and outside protected areas. A strength of the Landscape Partnership approach is that it is ‘bottom up’ and in some ways opportunistic. The key criterion for funding – and success – is not the ‘quality’ of the landscape but, rather, the degree of engagement, commitment and initiative of local residents and businesses, NGOs and statutory bodies, working in partnership to deliver conservation of the natural and cultural heritage, emphasising public access, education, training and community involvement. These schemes have their contradictions – not least that they fit a neo-liberal agenda in which non-market activities (many previously seen as the responsibility of the state) are relegated to the ‘third sector’, dependent ultimately on voluntary input. However within the existing economic and political structures of the European Union they represent individually imaginative and in aggregate vital adjuncts to areas protected by formal (statutory) designation

Europe's Multiple Futures: Four Futurescapes for Europe's Geopolitical Positioning in 2030

This report provides distinct storylines envisioning Europe's potential futures up to 2030. Contrary to traditional binary evaluations, these four scenarios avoid direct labeling as "good" or "bad." They delve into crucial drivers, from labor market integration to global affairs such as Russia-Ukraine conflict and Europe-China relations. Addressing the urgent need for "futures literacy" among policymakers and experts, this initiative by DGAP experts offers interpretative frameworks for upcoming challenges. Rather than predicting specifics, the scenarios prompt reconsideration of narratives and introduce counter-intuitive thinking modes for addressing global shifts and foreign policy challenges

Futurescapes of Planning Law: Some Preliminary Thoughts on a Timely Encounter

The concept of the future has been studied in many different disciplines but has not received the same detailed attention in legal scholarship. This is especially curious in a field like planning law, which has a strong and obvious future-orientation. My aim here is to make a case for treating planning law more seriously as an important site of future-making, and to encourage more systematic thinking about the role of law in determining how the future is engaged in the present. One way of achieving this is by introducing a ‘futurescapes’ perspective to legal analysis, to capture the different temporal features of law that shape how the future comes to be understood, legitimated and acted upon. Forging those links helps to address the future not as a backdrop to law but as a key means through which law operates. The discussion illustrates the kinds of questions that might usefully be asked about how law never simply represents the future but actively produces the futures it then seeks to govern

Modern ‘live’ football: moving from the panoptican gaze to the performative, virtual and carnivalesque

Drawing on Redhead's discussion of Baudrillard as a theorist of hyperreality, the paper considers the different ways in which the mediatized ‘live’ football spectacle is often modelled on the ‘live’ however eventually usurps the ‘live’ forms position in the cultural economy, thus beginning to replicate the mediatized ‘live’. The blurring of the ‘live’ and ‘real’ through an accelerated mediatization of football allows the formation of an imagined community mobilized by the working class whilst mediated through the sanitization, selling of ‘events’ and the middle classing of football, through the re-encoding of sporting spaces and strategic decision-making about broadcasting. A culture of pub supporting then allows potential for working-class supporters to remove themselves from the panoptican gazing systems of late modern hyperreal football stadia and into carnivalesque performative spaces, which in many cases are hyperreal and simulated themselves

Futurescapes of urban regeneration: ten years of design for the unfolding urban legacy of London’s Olympic Games, 2008–2018

Much of the literature on the urban legacy of the 2012 Olympics Games emerging in recent years has emphasized the form that development has taken and the ways in which this aligns (or not) with specific promises made in terms of regeneration before the Games. Though plenty of discussion of planning procedure has occurred in this context, less emphasis has been placed on how the process, rather than the products, of urban change has been envisioned through legacy planning and urban design, and the significance of this for regeneration. Given that London’s much-heralded ‘regeneration legacy’ was, from the early days of the Olympic bid, portrayed as a long-term process aimed at addressing historical issues of socioeconomic disparity in East London, and that planning and urban design would play key roles in anticipating it, this contribution to the literature is timely. The paper focuses on the period from 2008 to 2018, beginning with the launch of the what was called the Legacy Masterplan Framework. Drawing on empirical analysis of documents describing the main stages of legacy planning and design between these years, it then examines how regeneration as a ‘futurescape’ encompassing numerous aspects of timing and temporality has been anticipated, planned and evolved