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FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam

Science Fictionality

Alternative title: Science Fictionalitet

Awarded: NOK 8.0 mill.

This project takes science fiction (SF) as the starting point for an enquiry into the cultural pre-requisites underlying societal imaginaries of possible change. The appeal of SF is that it enables us to speculate on, imagine, and anticipate possible futures: future societies, future technologies, and future knowledge. Yet perhaps because this link between SF and the future is taken for granted, we are less conscious of how these imagined futures affect how we live and act in the present. In a world where the relationship between humans and nature is increasingly viewed as antagonistic, due to concerns about global warming, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss and so on, the future continually appears as a closed horizon in popular culture, where we have passed the point of no return and our actions in the present have no larger purpose, and change seems impossible. The societal challenge is to find pathways to possible presents: in other words, use the cultural imaginary of multiple possible futures to be able to see, live and act in an open-ended, multiplicity of presents. By means of studying a global corpus of climate fiction, from the Global North, Anglophone Literature, as well as the Global South, the project seeks to find these pathways. This is the aim of Science Fictionality. In the first phase of the project, we have created a knowledge graph, published one journal special issue and several articles, and made several popular presentations, organized several workshops and co-organized a public exhibition.

Using science fiction (SF) and its new subgenre of climate fiction (cli-fi), this project develops a theoretical model of how possible futures in SF emerge and interact prior to their distribution in real world practices. This model, called "science fictionality," examines the kinds of futures SF presents to us, especially how things are seen to change and evolve in future times. It also provides inputs on the impact such presentation may have on the present. The theoretical model grows out of one direct challenge: how may we use SF to envisage the development of human futures, including its technologies and societal arrangements, not antagonistic to planetary and environmental futures? This question is broken down into three sub-questions- 1. What possible futures have been imagined in SF and cli-fi, and what are the scientific and cultural bases for these imaginaries? 2. What are the planetary, scientific, and socio-cultural limits factored into these future imaginaries and into their distribution into plausible, probable, and preferred futures? 3. What consequences does the creation of multiple futures as fictional experiments have for how we may think past the apocalyptic mode inspired by the dystopian gloom of climate change to embrace a positive adaptive mode? In other words, how can one use the multiplicity of futures that SF presents to us to understand, and even perhaps effect, societal change? To answer these questions, the project is organized in five work packages(WP1-3), developing the model in WP1, developing a digital visulation tool in WP2, examining cli-fi from comparative global perspectives in WP3 and WP4, and integrating project findings in national and international contexts (WP5).

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FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam