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CFP AAG 2017
Critical Worldbuilding: Toward a Geographical Engagement with Speculative Fiction
Session Organizers: Jeffrey Martin (University of California, Berkeley) and Gretchen Sneegas (University of Georgia)
“Worldbuilding” - the construction of imaginary worlds - has long been a staple of speculative and visionary fiction. Today, the creation of alternate science fiction and fantasy universes - often with their own maps, histories, ecologies, cultures, and social structures - increasingly contributes to popular culture and big business. From novels to movies to games, from alternate versions of the “real world” (Marvel’s many properties, True Blood, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle) to the more alien and bizarre (the many settings of Dungeons and Dragons, James Cameron’s Avatar, China Miéville’s Bas-Lag), these worlds represent an important and under-considered object of study and intervention for critical geographers.
While speculative fiction has long been examined as a lens through which to view the world - as it was, is, or could be - we contend that geography and critical social science have been under-involved in the creation, analysis, and struggles over fictional worlds. Worldbuilding is a fundamentally geographical exercise and an unavoidably political act (even if not recognized as such) - ideas, concerns, and controversies in the “real world” are embedded and reproduced through fictional worlds, and the production and consumption of these worlds informs and is informed by contemporary debates.
In this call for papers, we ask: How might critical social science and geographical tools help us understand and engage with speculative fiction? How might critical geography inform the creation of “better” fictional worlds, and to what end(s)? What can fictional worlds tell us about our “real” world? How might speculative fiction contribute to geographical and social science theory and method, in a similar manner to the history of dialogue between science fiction and technological practice?
We seek a selection of papers and other contributions (see below) representing the breadth of the geographic discipline, across such themes and sub-disciplines as earth sciences, political economy, discursive representation, race, gender, technology, ecology, social relations, ideological reproductions, cartography, and more. Possible topics include, but are in no way limited to:
Critical race theory and the construction of the other/alien;
Landscape as character, the co-production of social and physical landscapes;
The durability of environmental determinism and other debunked narratives in fiction;
Colonialism and the frontier, progress narratives and modernization;
Cartography and the representation of fictional/speculative worlds;
Political economy’s presence and absence across worlds, and the naturalization of capitalism;
“Blindspots”/erasures in historical fiction, “reading back” modern norms;
Tropes, “resonance”, and challenging “realism” in speculative fiction (see esp. gender, sexism);
Nature and environmentalism;
Present and near-future u/dystopias
**We also welcome submissions representing less “traditional” forms of analytical scholarly work. Such submissions may include short works of fiction, graphic novels/comics, poetry, video shorts, maps, and other forms of representation showcasing our own worldbuilding geographic expression.**
Bringing together a diverse group of theoretical orientations, we hope this session will contribute critical insights to ongoing discussions on the interrelation between art and politics, the “real world” and the many worlds of our imaginations.
Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words by 5 p.m., October 15 to: Jeff Martin (j.vance.martin [at] berkeley [dot] edu) and Gretchen Sneegas (gsneegas [at] uga [dot] edu).
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Jeff Vance Martin
PhD Candidate and Doctoral Researcher