Science Fiction in the Present: Military Technology and Contemporary Culture
10.15-5.30pm 26th May 2011 - Research Beehive
Workshop timetable now available
This workshop will explore the relations of military research and techno-science with broader patterns and tendencies in contemporary culture. It will be concerned, in particular, with how speculative and science-fiction traditions in novels, films, video games and other media cross-fertilise with military futures research and development. Participants will discuss the long history of interaction between cultural and military spheres and will address how predictions and fears of future social, ecological, technological and political threats are constructed, explored, exploited and propagated. The temporal extent of such future imaginaries stretches from the near-immediate (anticipatory surveillance of people's bodies and behaviours in city streets) to the longer range predictions of societal, technological or urban doom, climate change apocalypse, urban meltdown and ecological collapse, which characterise both science fiction and military futurism.
In addition, the workshop will address a range of more specific issues that emerge at the interface between military activities and diverse areas of cultural production. These will include the role of military agencies in producing their own popular cultural outputs (especially video games and films); the deepening links between entertainment industries and the military complex; the growth of robotic weaponry and its fictional precursors; the militarisation and weaponisation of natural and weather systems; and the proliferation of conspiratorial cultures invoking high-tech military power as a precursor to theological or political revolution.
Featuring the following speakers (click on the name to read abstracts):
Noel Sharkey (University of Sheffield)
Noel Sharkey is Professor of AI and Robotics and Professor of Public Engagement at the University of Sheffield. He has published well over a hundred academic articles and books as well writing for national newspaper and magazines. In addition to editing several journal special issues on modern robotics, Noel has been Editor-in-Chief of the journal Connection Science for 22 years and an editor of both Robotics and Autonomous Systems and Artificial Intelligence Review. His core research interest is now in the ethical application of robotics and AI in areas such as the military, child care, elder care, policing, surveillance, medicine/surgery, education and criminal/terrorist activity.
Stephen Graham (Newcastle University)
Stephen Graham is Professor of Cities and Society at the Global Urban Research Unit in Newcastle University's School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. Professor Graham has a background in Geography, Planning and the sociology of technology. His research addresses the links between cities, mobility, technology, politics, security, surveillance and war. Writing and lecturing across many countries and a variety of disciplines, Professor Graham has been Visiting Professor at MIT and NYU, amongst other institutions. Alone and collaboratively, he has undertaken a wide range of research projects for the United Nations, British Academy and the Economic and Social Research Council, amongst others. Professor Graham has authored and co-authored a wide range of academic articles as well as a variety of influential books. These include Telecommunications and the City, Splintering Urbanism (both with Simon Marvin), The Cybercities Reader and Cities, War and Terrorism. His most recent books are Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructures Fail, and Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. Professor Graham is now developing major research projects on the politics of urban security and the politics of urban verticality.
Mark Dorrian (Newcastle University)
Mark Dorrian is Professor of Architecture Research at Newcastle University and Co-Director of the art, architecture and urbanism atelier Metis. His books include (with Adrian Hawker) Metis: Urban Cartographies (2002), (with Gillian Rose) Deterritorialisations: Revisioning Landscapes and Politics (2003), (with Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill and Murray Fraser) Critical Architecture (2007), Warszawa: Projects for the Post-Socialist City (2009), and (forthcoming, with Frédéric Pousin) Vues Aériennes: Seize Études Pour Une Histoire Culturelle (2011 [to be pubished in English as The Aerial View: Episodes for a Cultural History by IB Tauris in 2012]). He is presently working on the history of the aerial view, and is a member of the advisory board of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, where he is organizing a research theme on ‘Atmospheres and Atmospherics’: www.iash.ed.ac.uk/themes.atmospheres.html In addition, he is currently collaborating with the post-colonial scholar and environmental artist Paul Carter on a project concerning liquidity and flux and as part of this is organizing a NIReS-supported symposium on conceptualising turbulence, which will take place at Culture Lab, Newcastle University on Thursday 23 June 2011.
David Cunningham (University of Westminster)
David Cunningham is Deputy Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster, and an editor of the journal Radical Philosophy. He has published widely on modernism, aesthetics, architecture and urban theory, and is co-editor of the books Adorno and Literature and Photography and Literature in the Twentieth Century, as well as of a special issue of the Journal of Architecture on the post-war avant-garde. He is currently working on a book on abstraction and the concept of the metropolis.
Matt Carr (Independent Scholar)
Matthew Carr is an author and freelance journalist whose work has appeared in The Observer, The Guardian, The New York Times, History Today, Geographical magazine, Race & Class and on BBC Radio. He is the author of three published books, My Father's House (Penguin Books 1997), Unknown Soldiers: How Terrorism Transformed the Modern World (Profile Books 2006/New Press 2009), republished as The Infernal Machine: An Alternative History of Terrorism (Hurst & Co 2011), and Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain (New Press 2009/Hurst 2010).
He has made frequent appearances on British and American radio and also given seminars and lectures at various British universities on terrorism-related issues.
John Beck (Newcastle University)
John Beck teaches modern literature at Newcastle University. His most recent book is Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature (2009)
RESPONDENT:
Iain Boal (Birkbeck/Retort)
Iain Boal is a social historian, resident in California since 1985. He is associated with Retort, a group of writers, artisans and artists based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is affiliated with the Geography Department and the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley, the Community Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz, and Visiting Fellow at Birkbeck. He is co-author of Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War and Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information. His new book The Green Machine is a history of the bicycle.
Attendance is free, places can be reserved by emailing anne.fry@ncl.ac.uk