scholarly journals Speculative Fiction, Sociology, and Surveillance Studies: Towards a Methodology of the Surveillance Imaginary

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 414-424
Author(s):  
Jade Hinchliffe
Keyword(s):  
Speculative Fiction ◽  
First Century ◽  
Major Theme ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Surveillance Studies ◽  
Dystopian Fiction ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
Utopian Fiction ◽  
Global North ◽  
Twenty First Century

Utopian theorists often speak about the merits of reading utopian fiction in order to reimagine and rebuild a better world, but dystopian fiction is often overlooked. This is, in my view, misguided because dystopian fiction, like utopian fiction, diagnoses issues with the present, inspires activism and resistance, and, in the twenty-first century, often presents ideas of how to effect positive change through collective activism. As speculative literary genres concerned with world-building, utopian and dystopian fiction have inherent sociological concerns. These texts can therefore be utilised by sociologists and other researchers beyond the arts and humanities. Speculative fiction is important to the field of surveillance studies not only because surveillance is a major theme in these literary texts but also because their formal properties provide us with the language, imagery, and feelings associated with being under surveillance. Twenty-first-century utopian and dystopian fiction has not been thoroughly examined by surveillance scholars. Analysis of utopian and dystopian fiction in this field has also focused on texts set in, and written by authors from, the global north. Considering the plethora of dystopian novels in and beyond the global north published in recent years that discuss surveillance, the neglect of the study of these texts to date is an oversight.

scholarly journals The poverty of numbers: reflections on the legitimacy of global development indicators

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 485-497 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morag Goodwin
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
First Century ◽  
Global Development ◽  
Development Indicators ◽  
Development Institutions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Global North ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Many

AbstractIt is no surprise that development institutions and actors have taken to indicators with such enthusiasm. Where indicators are both a form of knowledge production and simultaneously a technology of governance, they are a form of soft powers that allow such actors to set the standards for what it is to be developed in the twenty-first century. Such measures of civilisation have been dominant throughout a history of Global North–South encounters: measurement was central to the many forms of colonial control, from map-making to craniometry, to the global ‘discovery’ of poverty in the 1940s. This paper seeks to place development indicators in this colonial context by focusing on the issue of comparability or the global claim that underpins global development indicators.

scholarly journals Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sherryl Vint
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Biological Function ◽  
Value Of Life ◽  
Speculative Fiction ◽  
First Century ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
New Politics ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Ecological Relations

Drawing on a rich array of twenty-first-century speculative fiction, this book demonstrates how the commodification of life through biotechnology has far-reaching implications for how we think of personhood, agency, and value. Sherryl Vint argues that neoliberalism is reinventing life under biocapital. She offers new biopolitical figurations that can help theoretically grasp and politically respond to a distinctive twenty-first-century biopolitics. This book theorizes how biotechnology intervenes in the very processes of biological function, reshaping life itself to serve economic ends. Linking fictional texts with material examples, Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction shows how these practices are linked to new modes of exploitative economic relations that cannot be redressed by human rights. It concludes with a posthumanist reframing of the value of life that grounds itself elsewhere than in capitalist logics, a vision that, in a Covid age, might become fundamental to a new politics of ecological relations.

Dystopian Impulses, Feminist Negativity, and the Fascism of the Baby’s Face

Old Futures ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 57-87
Author(s):  
Alexis Lothian
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Queer Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Dystopian Fiction ◽  
The Future ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Second World

Building on the insights of the previous chapter, the second chapter of part 1 turns to feminist dystopian fiction written by antifascist British women between the First and Second World Wars. Man’s World (1926) by Charlotte Haldane and Swastika Night (1937) by Katharine Burdekin use divergent strategies to route modernity’s futures through reproductive bodies, troubling oppositions twenty-first-century critical theory tends to naturalize: between heteronormativity and its others, queer and straight time, futurity and negativity, deviant and normative pleasures. Both novels revolve around the production of futurelessness—not just an undesirable world for some, but the notion that the future could end altogether. This negative speculation resonates with the queer project of articulating a politics that might not rely on reproduction: a futureless politics. At the same time, both Haldane and Burdekin insist that same-sex desire can all too easily appear as one of the various interlocking forces that set in place politically horrifying futures. This convergence of reproductive oppression with homoerotic nationalism calls forth concerns and conflicts in queer studies over the ways in which nonheterosexual bodies, communities, and politics have participated in the perpetuation of racial and colonial violence.

“There Were No Longer Any Laws”: Voices of Authority, Complicity, and Resistance in Totalitarian Dystopias and Holocaust Imaginings

Pólemos ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Boge
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Law And Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Dystopian Fiction ◽  
Twenty First Century

AbstractThis article analyses five landmarks in totalitarian and dystopian fiction from a law-and-literature perspective, thus comparing works published between the 1920s and the first decade of the twenty-first century that fictionalize diametrically opposed ideologies of countries such as Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and the United States of America: Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize winning work

scholarly journals Resource Discovery for the Twenty-First Century Library: Case Studies and Perspectives on the Role of IT in User Engagement and Empowerment

2021 ◽  
Vol 109 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Haugh
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Resource Discovery ◽  
Speculative Fiction ◽  
First Century ◽  
User Engagement ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Role Of It

Resource Discovery for the Twenty-First Century Library: Case Studies and Perspectives on the Role of IT in User Engagement and Empowerment offers an engaging overview of the discovery landscape through case studies, vendor perspectives, and speculative fiction.

Closure in dystopia: Projecting memories of the end of crises in speculative fiction

2021 ◽  
pp. 175069802110543
Author(s):  
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz
Keyword(s):  
Speculative Fiction ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Dystopian Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
China Dream

In this piece, I approach the relationship between the paradigm of imbricated crises pertaining to the second decade of the twenty-first century and its contemporaneous dystopian literature. I focus particularly on how dystopian literature forges a sense of closure that attempts to give meaning through the construction of imaginary memories of how crises came and went, or came and stayed. Dystopian tales provide the troubled reader of its time with a sense of narrative continuation and a substitute for closure. For my analysis, I draw on a corpus of literary works from around the world, which includes The Queue, by Basma Abdel Aziz; Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel; The Emissary, by Tawada Yōko; Severance: A Novel, by Ling Ma; China Dream, by Ma Jian; Ansibles, Profilers and Other Machines of Wonder, by Andrea Chapela; and The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Unlearning the Arab Muslim Hyphen

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-17
Author(s):  
Ibtisam M. Abujad
Keyword(s):  
American Studies ◽  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Arab American ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Arab Muslim ◽  
Global North ◽  
Twenty First Century

Hyphenated identities continue to be prominent in twenty-first century scholarship meant to uncover and confront assimilative structures of power in the Global North. However, the “Arab-Muslim” hyphen, in particular, continues to be used as a convention without a proper examination of its assimilative and racial dimensions. This commentary confronts the power dynamics at play in the use of the hyphen and calls for a more equitable understanding of Muslimness as it intersects and diverges from American Arabness. Ultimately, this commentary seeks to build from the already vigorous resistance to xenophobia and ethnocentricity in Muslim Studies, Arab American Studies, and other branches of Ethnic Studies by calling attention to the ways in which the hyphen counteracts the scholarly imperative of equity at the center of these frameworks of inquiry.

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