Name: Octavia Butler Today: Disability Justice, Environmental Justice, and the Arts of Thinking Ahead
Start: 2025-04-25T12:00:00-07:00
End: 2025-04-25

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Talks by--and conversation--with Sami Schalk (Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison, and author of Black Disability Politics and also Bodyminds Reimagined: Disability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction) and Shelley Streeby (Professor of Ethnic Studies and Literature, UCSD and author of Imaging the Future of Climate Change: World-Making Through Science Fiction and Activism, and the forthcoming Speculative Feminist Ecologies: World-Making and the Archive in Science Fiction) with moderator and respondent andré carrington (Department of English, UCR and author of Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction and Editor of The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories). Co-oganized by HHDJ faculty affiliates andré carrington and Carla Mazzio, and co-sponsored by the HHDJ Lab, Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science, the Department of English, and the Center for Ideas and Society. To register in advance, please click here.
- SAMI SCHALK, "Learning from Octavia Butler: Visionary Fiction, Disability Justice and 'Predicting; the Future." Description: Understanding Octavia Butler as a disabled Black woman writer who used research and lived experience to write prescient work, this talk will explore how we can learn from Butler’s writing process in addition to her fiction itself. As an illustrative example, this talk will also provide an overview of a course on visionary and speculative fiction which requires students to do their own research-based predictions for fictional futures.
- SHELLEY STREEBY, "Octavia E. Butler’s Ecological and Environmental Worldmaking: Dune, Disaster, Bag." Drawing on Butler’s papers at the Huntington Library, I situate struggles over environments and ecologies as central to Butler’s memory-work and worldmaking throughout her life. The word environment had multiple meanings for Butler, including the worldmaking involved in creating science fiction and fantasy’s secondary worlds; the earthly environments that formed and inspired her; learning environments such as libraries, schools, and workshops; environmental racism and environmental movements; and environmental and ecological speculation on respecting relations and responsibilities to the more-than-human world as opposed to short-term thinking and policy-making intensifying extraction and environmental destruction. I reconsider three environmental and ecological keywords in the light of Butler’s memory-work and speculation: "Dune," "Disaster," and "Bag."