The Speculative Environmental Futures Collective (SEFC) is an interdisciplinary, cross-divisional formation funded by a Mellon Grant. Centered in the Ethnic Studies and Literature Departments at UCSD, it focuses on collaboration and research, conversations, and student participation in the field of Speculative Environmental Futures Studies. By convening faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates from the Ethnic Studies and Literature Departments, as well as across campus and the UC system, SEFC supports research, study, discussions, workshops, and events at the intersections of Environmental Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Speculative Literary and Cultural Studies. Through events, research, and collaborations, SEFC explores how imagining more just environmental futures crucially depends on scholars, activists, and community partners using speculative literary and cultural forms to envision and create change. Through our events, research, and collaborations, SEFC explores how imagining more just environmental futures crucially depends on scholars, activists, and community partners using speculative literary and cultural forms to envision and create change.
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The “speculative” is an important framework for us because it pushes beyond the limits of genre categories such as science fiction, which tend to draw tighter boundaries and sometimes exclude contributions by people of color and Indigenous people by applying overly narrow definitions and historical understandings of what counts as science. In doing this work, we are also inspired by a large body of scholarship on speculative environmental literatures, cultures, and movements, some of which has come out of our own UCSD formation. We intend to focus on speculative forms that create affiliations and networks of care in the face of violent forms of speculation that intensify environmental inequalities faced by communities of color and Indigenous peoples. The speculative is a useful category precisely because it is less defined by boundary-making around the term “science,” stretching to encompass related modes such as fantasy and horror, forms of knowledge in excess of white Western science, and the rich ongoing and historical work created by women, Indigenous people, and people of color. Collaborating across campuses and communities, we wish to deepen over a three-year period the work we have already begun to seed significant undergraduate, graduate, and faculty research in collaboration with campus partners and communities in Environmental Humanities that intersects with Literature, Ethnic Studies, and Indigenous Studies to imagine and help build more just environmental and ecological futures.