Search Results (30)

The Apple TV+ series Severance (2022–present) offers a dystopian portrayal of workplace life that intensifies real-world dynamics of control, boundary management, and identity regulation. This paper analyzes Severance as a speculative case study in organizational theory, treating the show’s fictional world as a site for conceptual reflection. Drawing on critical management studies and labor process theory, we examine how mechanisms of control, the regulation of work–life boundaries, and the fragmentation of autonomy and subjectivity are depicted in extreme form. We argue that fiction—particularly speculative satire—can serve as a tool of theoretical production, not merely illustration. Rather than restating familiar critiques, Severance allows us to see workplace norms with renewed clarity, surfacing the moral and psychological consequences of surveillance, coercion, and instrumentalized consent. A methodological note outlines our interpretive approach to narrative fiction, and a discussion of implications situates the analysis within broader debates about organizational ethics, resilience, and critique. Full article

This paper explores the evolving relationship between Digital Twins (DT) and the Metaverse, two foundational yet often conflated digital paradigms in digital architecture. While DTs function as mirrored models of real-world systems—integrating IoT, BIM, and real-time analytics to support decision-making—Metaverses are typically fictional, immersive, multi-user environments shaped by social, cultural, and speculative narratives. Through several research projects, the team investigate the divergence between DTs and Metaverses through the lens of their purpose, data structure, immersion, and interactivity, while highlighting areas of convergence driven by emerging technologies in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Extended Reality (XR).This study aims to investigate the convergence of DTs and the Metaverse in digital architecture, examining how emerging technologies—such as AI, XR, and Large Language Models (LLMs)—are blurring their traditional boundaries. By analyzing their divergent purposes, data structures, and interactivity modes, as well as hybrid applications (e.g., data-integrated virtual environments and AI-driven collaboration), this study seeks to define the opportunities and challenges of this integration for architectural design, decision-making, and immersive user experiences. Our research spans multiple projects utilizing XR and AI to develop DT and the Metaverse. The team assess the capabilities of AI in DT environments, such as reality capture and smart building management. Concurrently, the team evaluates metaverse platforms for online collaboration and architectural education, focusing on features facilitating multi-user engagement. The paper presents evaluations of various virtual environment development pipelines, comparing traditional BIM+IoT workflows with novel approaches such as Gaussian Splatting and generative AI for content creation. The team further explores the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) in both domains, such as virtual agents or LLM-powered Non-Player-Controlled Characters (NPC), enabling autonomous interaction and enhancing user engagement within spatial environments. Finally, the paper argues that DTs and Metaverse’s once-distinct boundaries are becoming increasingly porous. Hybrid digital spaces—such as virtual buildings with data-integrated twins and immersive, social metaverses—demonstrate this convergence. As digital environments mature, architects are uniquely positioned to shape these dual-purpose ecosystems, leveraging AI, XR, and spatial computing to fuse data-driven models with immersive and user-centered experiences. Full article

This article proposes a new approach to the nature of a core set within fantasy fiction that regards it as a speculative literature of the exploration of subjectivity, one which at its limit conjectures fresh possibilities for the subjective world. To motivate acceptance of this proposed approach, I begin by surveying the existing state of debate in the critical field. I notice the emergence of widening agreement on the idea that fantasy is a literature of the impossible. I then develop the logical implications of this widening agreement in the critical field, arguing that it entails a representational definition of fantasy literature, which implies a modal approach to the core set that defines this literary order. I suggest that the marvellous mode, the kind of writing which represents the impossible, is a broad class that includes other speculative literatures, and that what differentiates these is the referential world within which the impossible happens. The aim here is to break up monolithic conceptions of the impossible, while pointing to a motivation for developing an understanding of the specificity of a core set of fantasy texts that proceeds by way of contrasts. After explaining why I am extremely skeptical about the definition of science fiction as a “literature of the possible”, I probe descriptions of the difference between fantasy and sci-fi. I propose that whereas some science fiction is a literature of conjectural objectivity, guided by the “cognitive novum”, a significant group of fantasy texts is a literature of speculative subjectivity, guided by an “affective novum”. Full article

Kristen Sandrock (2020) connects John Lanchester’s 2019 Brexit novel The Wall with what she refers to as ‘British border epistemologies’; that is, a radical process of re-bordering due to global warming and its impact on human mobility. The literary phenomenon that is now referred to as ‘BrexLit’ bears witness to the way in which borders and the fear to the other seem to impinge on contemporary British fiction. BrexLit is framed by an increasing global interest in exploring interdisciplinary bordering practices. Primarily, BrexLit manifests through realist and/or speculative long fiction, although there are numerous short stories and poetry that deal with this seismic political event. This article proposes to focus on different samples of speculative long fiction born from Brexit before highlighting Lanchester’s The Wall. Posthuman studies offer a convenient theoretical framework with which to approach this specific text where the British border, refugees and the fear of the other are the drivers of the plot. Thus, this contribution will explore alien configurations of refugees in contemporary British speculative fiction and the way in which these texts question Brexit rhetoric in an eye-opening and thought-provoking way, assisting readers to understand the context and consequences of such a profound political event. Full article

This article will critically appraise the extent to which new developments in the fields of reproductive technology are shown to impact female bodily autonomy and reproductive choice in Eva Hoffman’s novel The Secret. The Secret pushes its readers towards the more pressing and urgent questions arising from ongoing developments within the field of NRT and human cloning in a neoliberal climate. The novel cautions that, ultimately, the individual right to reproductive choice is never completely free; an awareness of external influences and a consideration of possible repercussions is integral to responsible decision-making in the context of NRT and cloning. However, the novel moves towards a possible reconceptualization of NRTs as part of the evolutionary progress of humankind. In returning to the body and biopolitical figurations, this article sees the novel’s protagonist, Iris, and her emergent cyborg identity as a manifestation of Haraway’s monstrous cyborg replete with possibility. Full article

In the field of elderly care, robot caregivers are garnering increased attention. This article discusses the robotisation of care from a dual perspective. The first part presents an overview of recent scholarship on the use of robots in eldercare, focusing mostly on scientific evidence about the responses of older adults and caregivers. The second part turns to narrative evidence, providing a close reading of Andromeda Romano-Lax’s Plum Rains (2018), a speculative novel set in Japan in 2029, which explores the implications—ethical, affective, social—of communities of care that include non-human agents. My argument is twofold: (1) although science and fiction operate according to different models of knowledge production, considering narrative insights alongside scientific ones can enlarge our understanding of the complexities of robotic care; (2) hitherto overlooked in literary studies, Plum Rains deserves attention for its nuanced representation of a hybrid model of care, which does not discard robotic assistance on the basis of humanist arguments, nor does it endorse techno-solutionism, reminding readers that the fantasy of robots that care is fuelled by the reality of devalued human care work. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed individual and institutional anxieties about the apocalypse. Pastors and activists alike turned to the depiction of the apocalypse in popular media to describe the urgency of decisive action. Implicitly, these depictions offer a curious method for engaging and imagining children. Assata Shakur writes compelling poetry in her autobiography about her hopes for the world. In one poem, entitled For My Daughter Kakuya, I argue that Shakur engages in Afrofuturist speculative fiction as she envisions a future world for her daughter. This paper explores how writers living through these times themselves imagine Black children at the end of the world. What would happen if we took seriously the notion that the “end of the world” is always at hand for Black people? This article explores the stomach-turning warning that Jesus offers in Mark 13:14–19 regarding those who are “pregnant and nursing in those days”. Using a reproductive justice lens, this paper explores the eternal challenge of imagining and stewarding a future in which Black children are safe and thriving. It also explores the limits and possibilities of partnering with radical Black faith traditions to this end. Full article

In her 2022 video installation, Blast Furnace No. 2, artist Su Yu Hsin explores the history of the German factory, Henrichshütte Ironworks. Namely, the artist focuses on Henrichshütte’s former blast furnace, which was bought by a Chinese steel mill in September 1989 and moved to China, where it operated until 2015. Now a state-owned museum, this former factory, located in Hattingen, Germany, is a snapshot of the past—a memorial of sorts for the region’s bygone industrial prosperity. The history and intercontinental movement of this blast furnace inspires Su’s affinities towards spaces located in-between shifting temporalities, identities, and changing environmental conditions within Hattingen and beyond. Su weaves archival materials, documentary film, and interview excerpts into a speculative narrative that connects the years 1989, 2022, and 2050. Blurring reality and imagination, the video follows the fictionalized trail of Lin, a Chinese translator who accompanied the dismantling of the blast furnace over thirty years ago. According to the narrative, Lin left behind an unfinished science fiction novel, which takes place in 2022. In Lin’s novel, the protagonist develops a utopian machine in the form of a blast furnace. With this apparatus, she sends herself into space with the goal of finding an alternative energy source to replace coal. Blast Furnace No. 2 constellates temporal spaces of socio-political and environmental nostalgia, predicated upon both remembered and imagined understandings of the past, present, and future. The work emphasizes contradictory gaps in between socially driven ideological systems and their afterlives, determined to memorialize what most would just as soon forget. Full article

Orson Scott Card’s Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus is an interesting work of fiction that belongs to the genre of Alternate History, which is a subgenre of speculative fiction. The novel poses the question of: “what would have happened to the world if the Indigenous American tribes had been stronger and had made coalitions with each other, instead of being conquered and defeated by European forces?” This paper reads the selected novel from the Ecofeminist point of view, exploring various issues that are relevant to the theory of Ecofeminism. The analysis conducted in this paper tackles the roles women perform when trying to save their world; the connections between women and nature, and how patriarchal cultures treat both of them; the role technology plays in the times of natural disasters and how it can make the world a better place for women; whether or not technology is a tool in the hands of the White savior; and the empowerment of the Indigenous Americans or lack thereof. Full article

Identity formation, questions of identity, shifting identities, perceived deviant identities, and reactions (social, political, cultural, individual) to them are the stuff of Bildungsroman as well as more “experimental” subgenres of long-form fiction. For minority/minoritized subjects and authors, questions of identity take on a different pallor: their work is expected to engage with questions of identity according to either or both how their subject position confronts marginalization and otherness, and how their subject position conditions every experience they have in the world, both inside and outside community. This inquiry investigates how contemporary transgender minor literature constructs dis/identity through authenticity. Imogen Binnie speculates in her 2013 novel Nevada on the concept of “Really, Truly Trans”, a cipher for identity policing and presumptions of sex–gender authenticity, based on cisnormative characteristics and, occasionally, inter-community phobias and proscriptions. More recently, Torrey Peters challenges measures of trans authenticity through both her titular detransitioner and his former partner in Detransition, Baby. Trans minor literature is an ideal testing ground for phobic public presumptions around “authentic” sex–gender and anti-identitarian strategies of those who are forced to confront purity tests and exclusion or suppression on grounds of authenticity, and each novel presses at phobic majoritarian dictates of authenticity and its presupposed value. Full article

In Tropic of Orange (1997), Karen Tei Yamashita uses literary imagination to challenge the settler-colonial discourse on space and time in the Americas. The influence of Latin American magical realism on Yamashita is most pronounced in the orange, a nonhuman object imbued with human agency. The orange magically initiates cross-border movements of people that disrupt the binaries of local/global, East/West, and North/South, challenging the unequal distribution of freedom of movement across the globe. In this paper, I engage with Wai-Chee Dimock’s concept of “deep time” to discuss the temporality of such border crossings. I propose that the cyclicality symbolized by the orange provides an alternative to linear settler-colonial management of spacetime. Full article

Margaret Atwood’s science/speculative dystopian MaddAddam trilogy—Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013)—opens up questions about how genre-mixing indexes and probes interrelated notions of authenticity. This focus is prompted by the simple question of why Atwood, having established worldwide renown for realist novels of socio-historical authenticity, switched to blending realism with science/speculative fiction. Through analyzing how the trilogy departs from realism, while never truly embracing SF, the paper argues that while the realist novel may offer the strongest representations of authentic psychological states, larger questions of epistemic authority and the state of our world demand a literature that authenticates knowledge. The MaddAddam trilogy challenges the notion that realism’s social, existential and moral concerns are more authentic when supported with a scientific explanatory logic. Authenticity is thus found in a negotiation between Truth and whether to trust in the locations (social and geographical, literary and literal) of knowledge. Full article

In 2021, the unexpurgated second novel of American author Richard Wright was at last unearthed from the depths of the archive. In a vivid demonstration of the affective capacity of written sound, The Man Who Lived Underground tells the story of a man who finds an unlikely refuge from imminent death in the sewer beneath the city streets. This article listens closely to Wright’s portrayal of architectural acoustics and sonic distortion within the text, attending to sensory and metaphorical dimensions of urban and social stratification. Drawing on Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s co-conceived “fantasy in the hold”, I push back against the overwhelmingly dystopian readings of Wrights subterranean as a scene of racialized subjection. Their “undercommons” allows me to reframe the undercity as a site of refusal and a source of collective empowerment. Returning to Wright himself, I connect the subterranean metaphor to deeper biographical themes of intellectual exile and his eventual expatriation to Europe. In a gesture redolent of the undercommons, he followed his character in locating a quality of freedom underground. I read this autonomous inversion of the Middle Passage—the lateral motion of the middle crossing—as comparable to the vertical mobility that frames the events and stakes of the story. Full article

Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson are two canonical writers participating in a ‘literary slipstream’ through their ventures into science fiction, creating crossover texts that confuse the boundaries between the literary and the popular. This interface is exemplified through the awards received by these writers, which help to bring literary credibility and integrity to the genre. Atwood’s first speculative novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), went on to win the Arthur C. Clarke Award and was nominated for a Nebula award and the Booker Prize, whilst her MaddAddam trilogy (2003–2015) was followed by the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society in 2015. Winterson was awarded an OBE for her services to literature in the same year that she published The Stone Gods (2006), whilst her most recent novel Frankisstein (2019) was longlisted for the Booker Prize. This article explores the extent to which distinctions between the popular and the literary are reliant upon notions of inferiority and superiority, and the problematics of a desire to frame genre fiction according to perceived notions of literary value. Full article

When approached through the theoretical lenses of canonical literature and the reductionist Western science of settler colonialism, climate crisis discourse grapples with a conception of apocalypse wherein catastrophe and hopelessness engender eco-anxiety and a sense of environmental nihilism. Drawing from the works of Jessica Hernandez, Sherri Mitchell, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and others, “What Would the Mushrooms Say?”, both as a class and concept, envisions a healing-centered, interdisciplinary approach to climate discourse in learning spaces, one that centers the theoretical and practical applications of an Indigenous science and mythology to flip the dominant narratives we tell about the dystopic dead ends of climate change, extinctions, anthropocentric hierarchies, and other events predictive of end times. Instead of only reckoning with white settler colonialism’s false promises of technocratic off-planet societies, students interact with a multiplicity of apocalypses and possibilities found in Indigenous cosmologies, mythologies, epistemologies, and speculative fiction of Indigenous, Indigequeer, queer writers of color, and the natural world. Posited as an exemplar text, Amanda Strong’s animated short film Biidaaban is discussed in terms of its instructional potential and depiction of Indigenous ways of relating, as kin, to human and nonhuman alike when speculating about futurity. “What Would the Mushrooms Say?” calls for slowing down and embracing the natural world as a teacher from whom we learn and speculate alongside. It suggests as a lifelong practice ways of relating to our planet and engaging with the climate discourse that interrupt a legacy of white settler colonialist eco-theorizing and action determined to dominate and subdue the natural world. In conclusion, this project documents the emergence of students’ shifting perspectives and their explorations of newfound possibilities within learning spaces where constructive hope rather than despair dominates climate discourse. Full article