Schedule

LINK TO SYLLABUS IN PDF

LINK TO LOGBOOK FORMAT IN PDF 

LINK TO LEARNING ANALYSIS DESCRIPTION IN PDF  

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Reading can be tricky in this class! You might try reading ahead regularly in order to begin work on the assignments at the right time. We have portions assigned on particular days to discuss, but often this is properly a REREADING, as you sometimes you should have read that a first time already. Notice that some days you have a choice of several readings to focus upon, say, 3 chapters out of 5 in a section of one book. This is to give us all the chance to hear about readings we may not have time to do ourselves by that point. That means you need to be able to tell others about the readings, making note taking and preparation even more important. However, by the end of class you should have read the entirety of each of our books.

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 – SFs of all kinds!
• STORY: Liu (2011), "Paper Menagerie,” Fantasy & Science Fiction (Mar/April). (On website, link.)
• ESSAY: Le Guin (1988), “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” In Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. Grove. (On website, link to pdf.)
We begin with a story that swept all the awards: Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy; and an essay from a well known feminist SF writer on how to write a feminist story. 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? What would LeGuin say? what do YOU think? Remember to click pics! What did you learn from these links? What did you think of the SF histories graphic monster? And notice that I think the Wikipedia is very useful for popular culture, among other things. And I do believe in citation as well!

Tuesday, 29 January – stories and authors and acacia seeds….
• STORY: LeGuin (1974), “The Author of the Acacia Seeds, and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics.” In The Compass Rose. Harper. (On website, link.)
• ESSAY: Haraway (forthcoming), “Sowing Worlds.” (manuscript version sent by email.)
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 begin our class with meanings about storytellings, and transdisciplinary feminisms! Jump on! We are off! 

Thursday, 31 January – Worlds, worlds, and more worlds! ecologies, systems, infrastructures, webs
• website links on right hand panel: Pick something to print out and bring to share:
=Design Fiction: link to Bleecker's work and NearFuture Laboratory.
=Explore Second Life vids on YouTube (ck links too).
=Find out what KZero is, and what this graph means.
=Read Katie's story about getting into Second Life.
=Check out the RealityAugmented Blog
=Click links on Object-Oriented Ontologies, both of them. What is this anyway?

Tuesday, 5 February: MEET AT WOODS! – Everything Bad is Good for You
• Johnson, Part One: Games, Television, Internet, Film
• Johnson vocabulary & tools for cognition (handed out)
• find & read something “sf” connected to these ideas from either Butler or Hopkinson; be ready to discuss what you picked and why
• boxes of SF: pick 5 and tell us why; send KK email listing which ones
Today we will meet at Woods Hall to comb through sfs, boxes of books and stuff, friends of the class, con creativities, and share experiences, hopes, assumptions, and passions!

Thursday, 7 February – double consciousness & play
• Johnson, Part Two: cognitive complexity and attentions good & bad
• find & read another story connected to these ideas from either Butler or Hopkinson; be ready to discuss what you picked and why

Tuesday, 12 February – trans knowledges 
• MAKE APT TO TALK TO KK: off hrs W20 4-6; W27 2:30-5
• ESSAY: Kier (2010) Interdependent Ecological Transsex. Women and Performance 20: 299-319. (On website, link to PDF.)
• THIS WEEK’S STORIES: Butler: Bloodchild&, Evening&, Martha&

Thursday, 14 February – exterrestrial 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.)
• THIS WEEK’S STORIES: Butler: Bloodchild&, Evening&, Martha&

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.
• THIS WEEK’S STORIES: Hopkinson: Part IV

Thursday, 21 February – XenEstrogen 
• ESSAY: Hayward (forthcoming), Transxenoestrogenesis. manuscript for Transgender Studies Quarterly 1:1.
• THIS WEEK’S STORIES: Hopkinson: Part IV

Tuesday, 26 February – Enfolding systems & complexity sciences
• LOGBOOK 1 DUE
• complexity handouts
• make sure you are caught up on everything we have read so far

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 – What is a normal life anyway? 
• read 1/3 of Phillips: 1-15
• getting going on femcriticon!

Thursday, 7 March – Whose bodies are these? 
• STORIES: Hopkinson: Part I
• getting going on femcriticon!

Tuesday, 12 March – Cyborg Complexity 
• read 1/3 Merrick: Pref, Ack, 6, 7, 8
• getting going on femcriticon!

Thursday, 14 March – Positive Obsessions! 
• Butler stories and essays: Postive & Furor + Kin & Speech
• 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 – Who sees which kinds of stories and why?
• read Merrick 1, 2 (& 3 if you can)

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 with the help of Irene our TA! 

Tuesday, 16 April – First Contacts 
• read 1/3 Phillips: 16-29

Thursday, 18 April – Crossing over always 
• finish up Butler: Amnesty & Crossover

Tuesday, 23 April – the plan is… ? 
• finish up Phillips: 30-40

Thursday, 25 April – re-imagining the colonial 
• finish up Hopkinson: II, V, Final Thoughts

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

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

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