For love of people, culture and society: expert commentary

The commentary is on a set of poems about the teaching of social sciences and sensitive topics. It takes the poems as pedagogical case studies, pointing out what can be learning from them

Sztuka włóczęgi: podróże w czasie i przestrzeni z Mary Kingsley, Rose Macaulay, Ursulą Le Guin, Naomi Mitchison i Octavią Butler

In “The Art of Rambling: Journeys Through Space and Time”, Sarah LeFanu will look at the travels and travel-writings of, predominantly, Mary Kingsley and Rose Macaulay, and will boldly suggest some connections with the science fictional spacewomen and time-travellers of the second wave of feminism. She will talk about five travelling women whose lives span over one hundred years, and look at some of the connections between them in their lives and in their writing. By focusing on the experience of the five authors in a larger socio-cultural and literary context, LeFanu will trace the implications of writing and travelling vis-à-vis the intersectionality of one’s personal commitments and motivations, with the aim to discovering how these are inflected by questions of gender and gender bias, consequently bearing upon the shape of modern discourses of women travel and travel writing. While each of the women travelled in different modes and to different places, for every one of them the imaginative worlds of their childhoods inspired them to engage with the world outside, an engagement that was not just personal but was also profoundly political.W niniejszym tekście Sarah LeFanu analizuje podróże i podróżopisarstwo przede wszystkim Mary Kingsley i Rose Macaulay, ukazując oryginalne powiązania między wymienionymi autorkami a podróżniczkami w czasie i przestrzeni kosmicznej znanymi z literatury science fiction drugiej fali feminizmu. LeFanu przygląda się również trzem innym podróżniczkom, poszukując wspólnego mianownika dla ich doświadczeń i pisarstwa w szerszym socjokulturowym kontekście. Autorka bada implikacje między podróżą a relacją z niej w kontekście intersekcjonalności i różnych jej odmian, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem kwestii płci i uprzedzeń wynikających ze stereotypowego postrzegania i przedstawiania ról płciowych, także w dyskursach kobiecego podróżopisarstwa. Mimo że każda ze wspominanych przez LeFanu autorek podróżowała w inny sposób i do rożnych miejsc – to dla każdej z nich impulsem do kontaktów ze światem zewnętrznym były dziecięce krainy wyobraźni. Relacje te nie miały charakteru tylko osobistego, ale wyrażały się także w zaangażowaniu politycznym

For love of people, culture and society: expert commentary

The commentary is on a set of poems about the teaching of social sciences and sensitive topics. It takes the poems as pedagogical case studies, pointing out what can be learning from them

Reading sleep through science fiction : the parable of beggars and choosers

This article examines the iconic 'Beggars' trilogy by feminist science fiction writer, Nancy Kress. These novels, produced in the early to mid-1990s, take as their 'thought experiment' two points of rupture and contemporary cultural contestation: the advent of human genetic engineering and sleep, or, more specifically, the prospect of a sleepless society. I shall begin by situating my analysis of the Kress trilogy in this nexus of fields. I shall consider the interest of Kress's works for the sociology of sleep as well as for a cultural analysis of science. In this context, and drawing in part on the work of Haran, I will suggest the particular value of science fiction as not only a site for, but also a source of, narrativized social theory. I shall introduce the notion of popular episteme as an analytic concept that aims to link the discursive to the social - that is, to theorize the relationship of textuality to materiality. I shall refer also to the psychoanalytic concept of 'phantasy' as a point of convergence for both structures of feeling and structures of knowledge. I shall then introduce the Kress works, focusing particularly on the first novel Beggars in Spain, locating it in a period in which feminist science fiction saw a marked renaissance, and in which speculative theorizations of genetics formed a distinct subgenre. The analysis will then focus on three core themes emergent in the novels that, I shall argue, have profound contemporaneous resonance. These are the questions of: embodied capital; the political economy of what I will term fast time; and paranoia and the human condition