Virtual Seminar Series on Nonhuman Animals in SF: Dr. Liza Bauer and Dr. Iuliia Ibragimova

*Resheduled* Virtual seminar with Dr. Liza B. Bauer and Dr. Iuliia Ibragimova on Animals in SF

This free virtual seminar will take place on Wednesday 19 February 2025, from 3–4:30 PM Irish Standard Time/GMT. This seminar is part of a series that runs in the academic year 2024-2025, organised by the Animal Studies Research Network UCD, as part of its Environmental Humanities strand.

Dr. Liza B. Bauer will join us to provides insights on the affordances of science and speculative fiction (sf) texts in negotiating ideas on not/eating other animals. Listeners will gain an overview on the narrative forms and strategies sf authors apply while reimagining human-animal relationships within the fictional bounds of their storyworlds. One of these strategies concerns their invention of postanimal figures – animal figures modified by means of diverse technologies. A postanimalist lens to reading these figures is designed as an animal-sensitive, analytical tool which may complement Donna Haraway’s cyborg figures (1985) and her anti-category of companion species (2003, 2007). On the one hand, postanimal figures may challenge “meat animal” categorizations and gain additional capabilities following their modification. On the other, figures like headless chickens with multiple drumsticks demonstrate that technological progress outside of literature rarely serves the interest of living animals. Illustrative examples from classic and more recently published texts suggest that sf aesthetics may alienate readers from “livestock” figures, whereas they familiarize them with science-fictional, liberated versions of their farmed animal companions.

Dr. Iuliia Ibragimova will speak about how in science fiction narratives, humans can travel through space inside a body of a spacefaring animal, and this brings about a type of proximity impossible for real life. However impossible, it draws attention and challenges to the existing paradigms and patterns of relations, questioning anthropocentric premises as a way of existing together in a more-than-human world. Travelling in the spacefaring animal’s body invites an intimacy between the human and the nonhuman animal, making the human both privy to the innermost workings of the animal body and dependent on them in the inhospitable environment of outer space. This intimacy lays bare the abject in the nonhuman animal body, and the way the abject is treated narratively/visually is indicative of the relations the human and the nonhuman animal form in the text. This talk focuses on the bodies of spacefaring animals in TV series Farscape (1999-2003), Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette’s short story “Boojum” (2008), and Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti novella series (2015-2019), highlighting the ways of depicting the abject in spacefaring animals’ bodies, and their correlation with the relations formed between humans and spacefaring animals. Employing Julia Kristeva's conceptualisation of the abject, Bruno Latour and Stacy Alaimo's new materialism and posthumanist philosophers Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti as a combined theoretical framework, this talk investigates the promise that the analysed works harbour for the relations between the human and the nonhuman animal.

About the speakers:

Dr. Liza B. Bauer is the Interim Scientific Manager of the Panel on Planetary Thinking, a think tank at Justus Liebig University in Giessen, and is currently working on the question of how to answer to more-than-human agencies in political terms. She also co-directs the interdisciplinary research section "Human-Animal Studies" at the university’s graduate centre for social sciences, business, economics, and law. Her doctoral thesis, which deals with the representation of so-called livestock animals in literature and their cultural and ethical functions has been published in August, 2024, under the title Livestock and Literature: Reimagining Postanimal Companion Species by Palgrave Macmillan. Alongside several cultural and literary articles, she co-authored a chapter on the fictional representation of animals that have been enabled to speak human language through biotechnology, which appeared in the collected volume Animals in Science Fiction (Castle and Champion 2024). Moreover, she published a short monograph onthe representation of animals in the poetry of William Blake in 2019.

Dr. Iuliia Ibragimova obtained her PhD at Dublin City University in 2024 on a thesis about the sentient spaceship trope in popular culture. She has two conference papers published in SFRA Review and a peer-reviewed article in Fantastika Journal 6(1), all considering SF works through the posthumanist lens. She has contributed to Animals and Science Fiction (2024), edited by Nora Castle and Giulia Champion. She is an awardee of the David G. Hartwell Emerging Scholar Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (2022). She obtained an MA degree in Literature from University College Dublin in 2019, and a Specialist degree in Interpreting and Translation, majoring in English and German, from Astrakhan State University in 2009.

The Animal Studies Research Network at UCD is organised by Deborah Schrijvers and Poulomi Choudhury.

Thanks to @OMK via Unsplash