Confab '24

Whooo Aaare Youuu?

FIU's Science & Fiction Lab Presents:

Second Annual Confab

Vandana

Ken

Usman

Mathematics / music

Ken

Usman

Vandana

"Division by Zero"

"Nightflight"

"Fantaisie Impromptu No. 4 in C#min, Op. 66"

"Story of Your Life"

"Head Static"

"Shanequa's Blues--or Another Shotgun Lullaby"

From genre to mode to cultural form

"How might sf help us conceptualize and respond to a world that has begun to resemble sf, in ways both marvelous and malign?" "...the genre is a tool for thinking about and intervening in the world." "...a vision of the world made otherwise and the possibilities that might flow from such change." "Istvan Csiscery-Ronay Jr. argues that we should understand sf as a mode rather than a genre, a way of experiencing the world that has become normalized in recent decades."

From genre to mode to cultural form

"My preferance is to understand science fiction as a cultural form that offers an "everyday" language for thinking about and responding to daily life in [the] twenty-first century." For Fredric Jameson, "The genre's function is not to predict the future [...] but 'to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present.' [...] what sf figurations of the future demonstrate is [...] the difficulty--perhaps impossibility-- of envisioning the radically other..." "Seeing what we take for granted--the "alien" perspective that puts things in a new light-- is central to sf's rhetorical capacity."

From genre to mode to cultural form

"...the more we expect the future to differ from the present, the more sf becomes a dominant cultural form." Sf is "a toolkit for thinking through urgent issues in social life today." "...fictional texts become a shorthand, drawn upon by both journalists and scientists, as they seek to connect the feelings people have about a fictional text to a research agenda..." "Science fiction has moved from being a niche genre at the beginning of the twentieth century to a widely shared cultural vernacular for describing the twenty-first. In many ways, sf is no longer a specialized genre, but now the dominant way to analyze a world in which our technology changes faster than we do."

Browse Catalog

Parts of speech

Select a hexagon to explore

Genomics, the Microbiome, and Posthumanism

Robots, AI, and Transhumanism

Mathematics / Music

Alternate Spacetime

Religion and Faith

Spirituality and Divinity

Initially transhumanism and posthumanism were used somewhat interchangeably, but more recently a differentiation has taken hold: transhumanism describes discourses interested in transcending the limitations of human embodiment [...] posthumanism describes a range of approaches interested in decentering the human in our knowledge systems and questioning the historical privilege of the human.

--Sherryl vint

Posthumanism describes a range of approaches interested in decentering the human in our knowledge systems and questioning the historical privilege of the human.

Transhumanism describes discourses interested in transcending the limitations of human embodiment .

"The Lifecycle of Software Objects" "Seventy-Two Letters" "Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny" "Exhalation" "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" "Liking What You See: A Documentary"

Ted

"Understand" "Seventy-Two Letters" "The Great Silence"

Carlos

"The Aphotic Ghost" "The International Studbook of the Giant Panda" "The Macrobe Conservation Project" "American Moat" "Bone of My Bone"

"Homeostasis" "Fantaisie Impromptu No. 4 in C#min, Op. 66"

Sheree

"The Dragon Can't Dance"

"River Clap Your Hands" "Stars Come Down" "Head Static" "Who Needs the Stars If the Full Moon Loves You?"

Alternate spacetime

Ted

Carlos

Sheree

"Tower of Babylon"

"The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate"

"Entanglements"

"Nightflight"

"310 Lucy"

"Story of Your Life"

"Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom"

"The Magical Properties of Unicorn Ivory"

"Madame and the Map: A Journey in Five Movements"

"Teddy Bump"

Religion and faith

Spirituality and divinity

Ted

"The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate"

"Hell is the Absence of God" "Tower of Babylon" "Omphalos"

Carlos

"Fantaisie Impromptu No. 4 in C#min, Op. 66"

"The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria"

Sheree

"Ancestries" "Child's Play" "Origins of Southern Spirit Music"

"Shanequa's Blues--or Another Shotgun Lullaby"