alien/not?

NOTICE: Femcriticon is in about a month! Time to begin planning! class buddies help each other come up with ideas and edit each other's work; and you can pick a partner for collaboration if you like too! 

LOTTERY TODAY! WILL YOU DO A POSTER OR A PAPER FOR THIS FIRST CON? IT WILL BE DECIDED BY LOTTERY TODAY! 

The theme is "Media Ecologies." Our class' expertise is in "Design Fiction." 
Explore what these mean as you consider what to do. 
=Johnson is your best resource for our approach to media ecologies, so be sure you are caught up with having read the whole book. Merrick is also all about media ecologies with a feminist SF focus.
=When you think of design fiction, think of all the ways we have been approaching and thinking and talking about our readings, and the interactions among the extraterrestrial relativities of multiple ways of exploring "sf." Look at the website carefully, as well as Helmreich's essay. Both are your best resource for understanding the multiple realities of designing fictions. Fictions = makings.
=How does the NearFuture Laboratory share thinking? How would you do this same kind of analysis yourself? (Some clues are in the Media tab of the website too.)


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The essays for this week are longer and quite challenging: try reading them like poetry. Or like software documentation.... In a back and forth bits of reading, wondering, connecting with this week's stories, and with everything we have read and talked about up to now....

Tuesday, 19 February – encountering natures as alien/not 

• ESSAY: Hustak & Myers (2012) Involutionary Momentum: Affective Ecologies and the Sciences of Plant/Insect Encounters. differences 23/3: 74-118. [has been emailed; also PDF]

• THIS WEEK’S STORIES: Hopkinson: Part IV: Encounters with the Alien 

Thursday, 21 February – XenEstrogen 

• ESSAY: Hayward (forthcoming), Transxenoestrogenesis. manuscript for Transgender Studies Quarterly 1:1. [email only. check your mailbox.] 

• THIS WEEK’S STORIES: Hopkinson: Part IV: Encounters with the Alien 

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