UC Riverside To Launch Science Fiction and Techno-Culture Studies

University of California, Riverside

The University of California, Riverside will launch a Science Fiction and Techno-culture Studies (SFTS) program this fall.

“We are delighted to announce the debut of the new Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies (SFTS) program,” said Cullenberg, adding that the program will explore links between science fiction studies, science and technology studies, and technoculture studies.

It is a logical extension of humanities research at UCR, given the presence of the renowned Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy, the largest publicly accessible collection of science fiction, fantasy, horror and utopian literature in the world, said Stephen Cullenberg, dean of the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS).

“Like other science and technology studies programs around the country and the world, this program will examine the histories and cultures of science, technology and medicine to understand the role that culture plays in the production of science and how changes in science and technology have shaped culture,” the dean said. Alluding to the SFTS mission statement, he noted that the UCR program “also uniquely emphasizes the role of popular culture and the genre of science fiction in particular in mediating public understandings of science, serving as an imaginative testing ground for technological innovation, and articulating hopes and anxieties regarding technocultural change.”

The SFTS program initially will offer a designated emphasis at the Ph.D. level, with an undergraduate minor to be added soon.

Over the past several decades, science fiction has moved from being a somewhat marginal genre to a major form of commentary on our increasingly technological world, said Rob Latham, professor of English and a senior editor of the journal Science Fiction Studies.

“UCR’s new SFTS program will give our students the tools to grapple not only with significant works of popular literature, film, and other media but also with the ethical and sociological implications of the technological landscape they inhabit, which science fiction is uniquely suited to address,” he explained. “It’s only appropriate that UCR should be the venue for this program, given the preeminence of the library’s Eaton Science Fiction Collection as the world’s largest archive of materials in the field.”

“The program moves beyond the study of science fiction as a literary genre, “situating it within a longer cultural history of technological and scientific development in which the genre has played a central but often unacknowledged role,” said Sherryl Vint, professor of English and convener of the Cultures of Science Working Group, sponsored by the UC Humanities Research Institute. This multi-campus group of UC faculty promotes collaboration between those who study the social and economic implications of contemporary science and those who study their representations in cultural forms.

Conflations of science and the science fiction imagination define moments of intense technological change, such as the Space Race or the Human Genome Mapping Project,” she added. “Recently, industry has begun to pay attention to how this science fiction imaginary can marshal resources – material and intellectual – for technological innovation. Our program will build links between the cultural study of science in other disciplines such as sociology and history, enabling our students to understand and intervene in these ongoing exchanges among research, policy and popular culture.”