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The Future is Unwritten
The following two seminars look at the imagined future. With insights drawn from sociology and environmental studies, these two faculty will explore science fiction as a window into our future, and the choices that people are currently making that could create those futures. Living together on the third floor of Drayer Hall, students in this learning community will have opportunities for both in- and out-of-class engagement with these ideas and issues.
Assisting the faculty to support these programs is a Learning Community Coordinator who also lives in Drayer Hall: Leslie Ward '12, a Sociology major.
Alternate Realities of Dystopian Futures
This course examines the science fiction genre as a way of understanding alternate futures that explore a number of issues in contemporary society and reveal the ways that we make sense of our current world in our everyday lives. How do these dystopian visions reflect our current anxieties about issues such as our dependence on technology, experiments with genetic engineering, widespread environmental devastation, poverty, reproductive rights, racism and sexism? What do these alternate realities and potential futures reveal about human nature, the ways we build our societies and how we structure our relationships within them? This seminar will analyze various media forms including novels, short stories and films, and ground them in the particular historical, political and economic context in which they were written. We will be taking “science fiction” seriously as a way to explore “serious” matters in contemporary culture.
Professor: Helene Lee, Sociology
Time: 11:30 MF
Environmental Ethics and the End of the World
A great deal of literature, and particularly science fiction, concerns itself with the end of the world. This catastrophe may be the result of a nuclear war, or an environmental disaster, but it is almost always brought on humanity by its own actions. From nuclear terrorism, to the spectre of global warming, to the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012, we are still buffeted today by warnings about the apocalypse. In this seminar, we will consider what lessons we can learn from the previously imagined ends of the world. Is the apocalypse a result of technological change, or the inevitable product of human nature? Who is lost when the world ends, and who is saved? We will consider specific examples of political apocalypse (nuclear war), environmental apocalypse (global warming; Malthusian catastrophe), as well as the slow decline of society into a dystopia.
Most importantly, at its root, the apocalyptic story is a cautionary tale, and we will consider the consequences of these lessons for our own actions. For example, both global climate change and nuclear war can be seen as the result of the cumulative choices (environmental or political) of entire societies. With these examples in mind, in what ways do our personal choices really affect other people in the world? To what extent are we responsible for these effects of our choices on others? How can we act together to build an ethical culture -- one, hopefully, that will avoid an apocalypse?
Professor: Greg Howard, Environmental Studies
Time: 11:30 MF