Indigenous Futurisms: Troubling Utopia with Conrad Scott
A two-day online event
12 & 14 July 2023 @ 4 PM BST (UTC+1)
Indigenous Futurisms (a term coined by Grace Dillon) suggest the imperative and opportunity of forward, generative, and healing cultural movements as conceived by writers, other artistic creators, and knowledge keepers speculating about more positive outcomes despite what are currently troubling urban 
and rural issues that extend from the local to the regional and even global. For this two-part session, Conrad Scott will examine how some of these imaginings about the future are disturbing and even dystopian, unpacking such factors as environmental entanglements, changes to place, and the disappearance of home, among other factors, in a reading of contemporary work in this area.
and rural issues that extend from the local to the regional and even global. For this two-part session, Conrad Scott will examine how some of these imaginings about the future are disturbing and even dystopian, unpacking such factors as environmental entanglements, changes to place, and the disappearance of home, among other factors, in a reading of contemporary work in this area.Conrad Scott holds a PhD from the University of Alberta (English and Film Studies) and an MA from the University of Victoria (English). He is an Assistant Lecturer with the University of Alberta, and also an instructor for the University of Athabasca’s “The Ecological Imagination” course. He currently serves as the Co-President for the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC) and the Science Fiction Research Association’s (SFRA) Country Rep for Canada. He researches contemporary sf and environmental literature, with current projects focused on plant and animal futures, as well as the spatial turn. His academic writing has appeared in Transmotion, Extrapolation, Paradoxa, The Anthropocene and the Undead, Environmental Philosophy, The Goose, UnderCurrents, Science Fiction Studies, The SFRA Review, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, and Canadian Literature, with forthcoming chapters in The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms (2023) and Animals and SF (Palgrave 2023). He is also a co-editor for the forthcoming Entangled Futurities (Routledge Environmental Humanities Book Series 2024), the proofreader for the forthcoming English-translated Anthology of Turkish Science Fiction Stories (Transnational Press London 2023), and the author of the poetry collection Waterline Immersion (Frontenac House 2019).
Troubling Utopia: New Horizons in Research and Practice is a series of events and encounters to nurture and support the sharing and development of new research and thinking in utopian studies. Our goal is to initiate a sea-change in the academic field by shining a light on some of the unexamined inequalities, hierarchies and cultural assumptions which have underpinned past scholarly research, even as the core object of investigation for utopian studies has been how modes of being and living can be radically improved. We foreground approaches that centre queer perspectives, decolonial methodologies, and otherwise insurgent utopian thinking and practice.
Organized by Adam Stock, Heather Alberro, Manuel Sousa Oliveira, Athira Unni, and Rhiannon Firth
Funded by York St John University (School QR [Quality-related Research] Funding – 2022/23)