Science, Technology and Fiction(al) Studies is an empirico-speculative discipline that aims to create models to:
(1) identify and understand the behaviour of operative fictions within sociotechnical emergence, stabilisation and disruption, and (2) mobilise fiction to explore technoscientific possibilities not only to open new arrangements but also to analyse and challenge current ones.
This emerging research discipline explores and engages with the ways in which technoscientific promises ∞ fictions ∞ imaginaries ∞ speculations are weaponised functionalised in the reproduction, resistance and interruption of certain orderings of our world.
It does so by observing and exciting these domains in (a) chronopolitical production (of the past, the present and the future) and (b) the overlaps between knowledge, meaning, money and matter.
STFS is useful to enquire into phenomena with a large degree of futurity such as:
— The space industry, understood as a conglomerate of public funding, scientific institutions, private interest, military targets and geopolitical agendas.
— The aesthetic, epistemic and institutional mutations undertaken by post-anthropocentric practices coping with the climate emergency.
— Non-Western and non-capitalist formulations of automated technologies.
— Western anxieties related to the disruption of labour markets and the obsolescence of human skills.
— Corporate and DIY upgrades of the human body and cognition.