Schedule & sign-up info for ‘The stars look very different today’: Migration and Exile in Science Fiction Conference

‘The stars look very different today’: Migration and Exile in Science Fiction Conference

12th June 2021

To mark Refugee Week and World Refugee Day, the Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy and New Routes Old Roots: Art, Migration & Exile at Anglia Ruskin will hold a colloquium on depictions of exile and migration in science fiction. Some writers imagine future humans displaced by new versions of familiar threats such as war, persecution, and environmental disaster. Others create new sources of danger – and new places of refuge – beyond the confines of Earth.

Conference Schedule

9.20 Welcome: Dr Jeannette Baxter, Associate Professor Anglia Ruskin University

9.30 Keynote paper: Dr Helen Marshall, University of Queensland: “Storytelling, Worldbuilding Problems, and How Science Fiction Can Save the World”
Dr Marshall is a Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing. Her debut novel The Migration was released in 2019 and was one of The Guardian’s top science fiction books of the year. It was shortlisted for two British Fantasy Awards as well as the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic.

10.20 – 11.40 Panel One  

Thomas Andrews, Postgraduate Researcher, Anglia Ruskin University: “Heptapods and Hosts – Language as a Resource in Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” and China Mieville’s Embassytown”

Graham Minenor-Matheson, Södertörn University: “Refugees in Space: Migration in the Work of Kim Stanley Robinson”

Casella Brookins, Independent Scholar: “Blue-Skyers and the Dark: Refugees, Scarcity, and Plenitude in C.J. Cherryh’s Science Fiction”

11.40-12.00 Break 

12.00 – 13.20 Panel Two

Dr Craig Ian Mann, Sheffield Hallam University: “From Somewhere Else: Alien Refugees in Science Fiction Cinema of the 1980s”

Eyal Soffer, Postgraduate Researcher, Anglia Ruskin University: “Freefolk Or Wildlings? The Black Brothers’ Reaction To The Northerners Forced Migration In George R. R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire”

Professor Sarah Brown, Anglia Ruskin University: ‘Shakespeare in Exile: Reimagining the past in William Sanders’ ‘The Undiscovered’

Please email sarah.brown@aru.ac.uk if you would like to attend. There is no charge for this event.

Event Organisers:  sarah.brown@aru.ac.uk (CSFF) & Jeannette.Baxter@aru.ac.uk (CSFF, NROR)

Please follow us on twitter: @csffanglia  @RootsNew

This event is kindly supported by the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge