An Investigation into the Role of Science & Speculative Fiction for Reframing Modes of Engagement with Urban Environments for Multispecies Collaborati

Full title: Science Fact, Fiction and Futures: An Investigation into the Role of Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction for Reframing Modes of Engagement with Urban Environments for Multispecies Collaboration.

With urban populations forecasted at 70% of the global population by 2050 and to absorb virtually all future population growth (UN, 2019), it's unsurprising that urban spaces are becoming focal points for future efforts to ameliorate anthropogenic climate change. Often narrativized as starkly utopian or dystopian, the urban environment has been taken as a site for manifesting anthropogenic anxieties and triumphs in science and speculative fiction (SSF).

This project will explore how SSF from 1950 to present offers modes of departure from dualistic representations of urban environments which consider the potential for alternative perceptions, alert to the presence, role and importance of the nonhuman in urban assemblages.

With the realisation of the impossibility of utopian perfectibility in the 1950's, which brought Arthur C Clarke's interplanetary narratives, the second half of the twentieth century saw an increasingly ambivalent narrativization of urban environments. From the hopeful 1960's urban avant-garde movement, to fears of urban atrophy and degeneration, as seen in Doris Lessing's work, up to a cautiously hopeful literary context embodied by Megan Hunter's The End We Start

From (2017) and Tade Thompson's Rosewater Redemption (2019), cityscapes in SSF have consistently been multispecies environments and cultural discourses in flux.

To facilitate this reading of nonhuman/human and material/discursive interpenetration in urban literary representations, I will use New Materialist perspectives, including Stacy Alaimo's theorisation of transcorporeality. Transcorporeality decentres anthropocentric discourses by repositioning the human 'as substantially and perpetually interconnected with the flows of substances and the agencies of environments' (2012, p.478).

By exploring these 'flows' in imagined urban environments, where nonhuman others are foregrounded as agential, a more expansive and ethical interaction with our everyday natures may be conceptualised.

To avoid dualistic utopianism and Judeo-Christian structures of apocalypse which have been popular fictional tools for motivating meaningful environmental change, I will engage with an ethics of ongoing change as articulated by Donna Haraway's premise of 'staying with the trouble', described as: "learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations or places, time, matter, meanings. (2016, p.1) "

Rather than engaging in environmental narratives leading to concretized endings, Haraway suggests we stay with the trouble by examining our present and modes of material/discursive interaction with it, to identify new or existing connections which offer more ontologically and epistemologically harmonious 'worldings'.

As genres which construct whole worlds or futures, this research will evaluate how science fiction and near future fiction narratives are positioned to foreground urban spaces which imaginatively challenge anthropocentric frameworks for more ethical and expansive engagement with nonhuman co-collaborators. By identifying narrative patterns and structures for nonhuman/human relations within SSF texts, the project will reflect on current and alternative sustainable modes of inhabiting our multispecies cities for ecologically generative futures.