Virtual seminar with Dr. Liza B. Bauer and Dr. Iuliia Ibragimova on Animals in Sci-Fi

This free virtual seminar will take place on Wednesday 18 December 2024, from 3–4:30 PM Irish Standard Time. 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.

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.

Iuliia Ibragimova will speak about the way science fiction offers a challenge to the anthropocentric paradigm by estranging the relations between the human and the nonhuman and exposing the existing patterns of oppression and exploitation. Analysing Farscape, a speculative TV series which critiques the colonial patterns of the relations of the human to the nonhuman world, Ibragimova will employ new materialism and posthumanism as critical lenses. New materialism provides for the analysis of the nonhuman agency and entanglement of different ontologies in the interspecies collective that Moya and her passengers develop with each other. The challenge to the anthropocentric patterns is based on the posthumanist questioning of the anthropocentric patterns. The works by Stacy Alaimo and Bruno Latour are used to consider the relations between different species in the collective of different species and their mutual trans-corporeal influences. Ibragimova's argument relies on Donna Haraway’s concept of kin and companion species to look at the challenge to anthropocentrism provided by the close connection arising out of the experience of living together in an interspecies collective.

About the speakers:

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.

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