Schedule

LINK TO ENTIRE SYLLABUS IN PDF  

LINK TO LOGBOOK FORMAT IN PDF  

LINK TO LEARNING ANALYSIS DESCRIPTION IN PDF  

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Remember: you don’t have to know what you don’t know. You do have to read, to make sense of what you can and guess at a lot you can just barely grasp. Talking about the edge of where you get parts and don’t get other parts is the very spot for intellectual play: just enough frustration to know you are really learning something new, and just enough guessing to know how interesting you and your brain are at figuring things out! 

Weekly Schedule 

Thursday 24 January – Welcome to sharings & worldings!
• STORY: Liu (2011), "Paper Menagerie,” Fantasy & Science Fiction (Mar/April). (On website, link.)
We begin with a story that swept all the awards: Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy. How does this story fit into your ideas of SF? Does it violate any of your assumptions about SF? If so, which ones? Is it a feminist story? How can you tell? We begin our class with ecologies of cultural production, among them transmedia storytellings, and transdisciplinary feminisms! Jump on! We are off!

Tuesday 29 January – beginning with media ecologies…
• read as much as you can of Johnson's book: what assumptions are violated here? Bring in a list!
• boxes of SF: pick 5 and tell us why; send KK email listing which ones
Layers of Worlds, layers of writings, layers of companionships: entering sf as speculative fiction, speculative feminisms, feminist fabulations, as well as science fictions or knowledge fictions offers many openings to worlding! We will go through boxes of books and stuff, trading stories and more.  (And notice that I think the Wikipedia is very useful for popular culture, among other things. And I do believe in citation as well!) 

Thursday, 31 January – The Future is NOW! anticipation work…. 
• finish up Johnson.
• Kirby (2010) The Future is Now: Diegetic Prototypes and the Role of Popular Films in Generating Real-world Technological Development. Social Studies of Science 40: 41-70. (On website, link to PDF: Print out the essay and bring it with you to class.)
More on media ecologies as a form of anticipation work among complex systems: Johnson p. 157: "That model is a complex. layered one. The forces driving the Sleeper Curve straddle three different realms of experience: the economic, the technological, and the neurological."

Tuesday, 5 February – blond curls in a line of native porters: Belgian Congo 1921
• read Phillips: ch 1-13
You should begin the biography of James Tiptree Jr by Phillips and start thinking about colonialisms, feminisms, and their twentieth century histories as offered through the life of Alice Sheldon. Colonialisms and feminisms are entwined with science fiction throughout the twentieth century and the materials we read today are both a reaction to this and a continuation of it in complicated ways. James Tiptree as a figure helps us understand this. And it is a fascinating biography just in itself! So just keep reading if you find yourself caught up in the story! 

Thursday, 7 February – marked by an image in childhood: cultural productions
• Hopkinson’s section II: future Earth
• Butler: “Bloodchild” & afterword
The Hopkinson collection is a set of stories that attempt to critique, alter, shift, or replace the colonialisms of SF. What patterns, connections or interactions do you see between the biography of Tiptree and these stories? For example, think of people real and fictional as they are marked by their childhoods, inside and around colonialisms, and of all the points of view and kinds of time they struggle to engage, and how all these enfold across transmedia and spacetimeworlds.... "He dances, suddenly inspired, exuberant. Later he will understand what his father is doing, the rules he is breaking, the risks he is taking, and the price he will pay on a deserted road, when the siren goes off and the lights flash and they are pulled over...." (Terminal Avenue, p 69)

Tuesday, 12 February – learning to see
• go on to Philips 14-20

Thursday, 14 February – the deep end…
• add then Hopkinson: section I: the body -- put the bio & stories together

Tuesday, 19 February – the women that men don’t see 
• Tiptree (1973), The Women Men Don’t See. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; also in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. (On website, link to PDF.)

Thursday, 21 February – positive obsessions 
• Butler: essay, Positive; stories: Evening&, Kin&, Speech&
• Complexity handouts

Tuesday, 26 February – double consciousness & play
• King K. (2012) A Naturalcultural Collection of Affections: Transdisciplinary Stories of Transmedia Ecologies Learning. Scholar and Feminist Online; special issue on Feminist Media Theory: Iterations of Social Difference 10. (Link on website.)

Thursday, 28 February – Complexities – GO TO CONFERENCE TODAY & TOMORROW!
• There is no class time today, in order to free up a bit of time for conference attendance which is required! You should be at the Complexity Conference as much as possible: whenever you are not working for wages or in another class!
• read ahead, think about femcriticon!

Tuesday, 5 March – Cyborging Complexity 
• Merrick 6 & 7 (goes with Conference)
• getting going on femcriticon!

Thursday, 7 March – Crossing over….
• Butler: essay, Furor; stories: Crossover&, Amnesty&, Martha&
• getting going on femcriticon!

Tuesday, 12 March – chez women 
• Phillips 20-31
• getting going on femcriticon!

Thursday, 14 March – extraterrestrial relativisms 
• ESSAY: Helmreich (2012) Extraterrestrial Relativism. Anthropological Quarterly, Special Collection: Extreme: Humans at Home in the Cosmos 85: 1125–1140. (On website, link to PDF.)
• STORIES: Hopkinson: Part IV
• getting going on femcriticon!

Tuesday, 19 March – SPRING BREAK
Thursday, 21 March – SPRING BREAK

Tuesday, 26 March – FemCritiCon
Thursday, 28 March – FemCritiCon

Tuesday, 2 April – Marked and Unmarked: female man
• read at least 1 /2 of The Female Man

Thursday, 4 April – (fe)MALE 
• finish up The Female Man

Tuesday, 9 April – women invade sf 
• Merrick ch1 & 2

Thursday, 11 April – KATIE AT UVA – When it Changed 
• read a Bateson metalogue (link online) & When it Changed (link online) & if not already, Merrick 3
Katie will be out of town at a Bateson event and you all will run the class yourselves!
• start planning for Whileaway!

Tuesday, 16 April – Worlding: design fictions
• class web link to Bleecker's work and NearFuture Laboratory.
• Explore “worlding” on the web.
• read stuff on King Pinterest boards: Complexity Tales and SF Feminisms (links on website).
• getting going on Whileaway!

Thursday, 18 April – trans knowledges
• Merrick 8: Beyond Gender?
• Kier (2010) Interdependent Ecological Transsex. Women and Performance 20: 299-319. (On website, link to PDF.) and/or Hayward (forthcoming), Transxenoestrogenesis. manuscript for Transgender Studies Quarterly 1:1.
• work on Whileaway!

Tuesday, 23 April – a real secret life 
• finish Phillips 32-40
• setting up for Whileaway!

Thursday, 25 April – ripe and rare: post colonial 
• Finish Hopkinson: sections III & V, and Final Thoughts
• ready for Whileaway!
• How to do the Learning Analysis

Tuesday, 30 April – WHILEAWAY
Thursday, 2 May – WHILEAWAY

Tuesday, 7 May – secret feminist cabal 
• finish up Merrick: 3,4,5 & Preface

Thursday, 9 May – LAST DAY – LEARNING ANALYSIS DUE!