Sarah gave a talk and contributed to a discussion on a panel on applied science fiction at the the Royal Anthropological Institute’s conference on Anthropology, AI and the Future of Human Society. She spoke about storylistening and why science fiction matters for public reasoning about artificial intelligence.
Tag: Academic Conference
Sarah presented a paper at an academic conference on the uses of literature, drawing on material from Storylistening and from her forthcoming article, ‘Functional Criticism’, which builds on (but departs in significant ways from) existing work in postcritique. The paper established conflicting views of the value (or not) of literature and literary criticism in the history of the discipline, before presenting Storylistening‘s four functions of stories as integral to teaching literature informed by a functional critical perspective. The goals of such teaching include developing narrative literacy, encouraging interdisciplinarity, and teaching skills in deploying a variety of literary critical methods (including less common ones, such as sociological). The paper argued for the classroom encounter with texts to be one premised upon an open-mindedness essential for the generation of new knowledge. The presentation slides are available below.
In April, Sarah presented material on decolonising the future, climate change, and N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy from Chapter 4 of Storylistening at an academic conference: the annual meeting of the British Society for Literature and Science. Her talk was part of a panel on Literature, Science and Policy, with presentations also given by Professor Genevieve Liveley, on narratology and cyber security policy, and by Lt Col David Calder, on science fiction’s critical utility in a military context. You can listen to the presentation here:
Claire and Sarah were pleased to trial some early work on stories as anticipatory models in the context of AI at an international symposium at Örebro University on Anticipation and Anticipatory Systems: Humans Meet AI.