[English-undergrad] Fwd: [Englishfaculty] This Friday!: Sami Schalk & Shelley Streeby on "Octavia Butler Today: Disability Justice, Environmental Justice, and the Arts of Thinking Ahead" (please pre-register for this virtual event)

[James Tobias]

Dear English majors, 

See below for an exciting event this Friday via Zoom; advance registration is required.

Info below!

jt


> Begin forwarded message:
> 
> From: Carla Mazzio via Englishfaculty <englishfaculty at lists.ucr.edu>
> Subject: [Englishfaculty] This Friday!: Sami Schalk & Shelley Streeby on "Octavia Butler Today: Disability Justice, Environmental Justice, and the Arts of Thinking Ahead" (please pre-register for this virtual event)
> Date: April 21, 2025 at 2:31:10 PM PDT
> To: English Faculty <englishfaculty at lists.ucr.edu>, "gsa-english at lists.ucr.edu Grad List" <gsa-english at lists.ucr.edu>
> Reply-To: Carla Mazzio <carlam at ucr.edu>
> 
> Dear English Department colleagues,
> 
> A gentle reminder about an exciting virtual event this Friday (4/25) at noon: short talks by Sami Schalk and Shelley Streeby followed by a response and conversation moderated by andré carrington. For full details, see below (or if you are reading this from a phone, https://hhdj.ucr.edu/news-events), and to register in advance please click here <https://ucr.zoom.us/meeting/register/zwqf_wNSSk2OlNIJAKTPHA>. 
> 
> Friday, April 25th,  noon-1:30 PM (virtual): Apocalyptic Entanglements 2.0, "Octavia Butler Today: Disability Justice, Environmental Justice, and the Arts of Thinking Ahead," featuring  Sami Schalk  <https://samischalk.com/> (Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison, and author of Black Disability Politics <https://www.dukeupress.edu/black-disability-politics> and Bodyminds Reimagined: Disability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction <https://www.dukeupress.edu/bodyminds-reimagined>) and Shelley Streeby <https://shelleystreeby.com/about> (Professor of Ethnic Studies and Literature, UCSD and author of Imaging the Future of Climate Change: World-Making Through Science Fiction and Activism, <https://www.ucpress.edu/books/imagining-the-future-of-climate-change/paper> and the forthcoming Speculative Feminist Ecologies: World-Making and the Archive in Science Fiction) with moderator and respondent andré carrington <https://profiles.ucr.edu/app/home/profile/andrc> (Department of English, UCR and author of Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction  <https://www.amazon.com/Speculative-Blackness-Andr%C3%A9-Carrington/dp/0816678960>and Editor of The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories <https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/770209/the-black-fantastic-by-andre-m-carrington-editor/>).  This event is co-sponsored by the Health Humanities and Disability Justice Lab, Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science, the Department of English, and the Center for Ideas and Society, and organized andré carrington and Carla Mazzio (English). To register in advance, please click here <https://ucr.zoom.us/meeting/register/zwqf_wNSSk2OlNIJAKTPHA>.
> 
> 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."  
> 
> This is the second in a series entitled "Apocalyptic Entanglements" designed to address pressing and intersecting issues of academic study and social justice in the wake of the LA fires (organized by UCR faculty Dylan Rodriguez, Fariba Zarinebaf, and Carla Mazzio) . 
> 
> We hope to see many of you there! 
> 
> andré and Carla
> 
> Carla Mazzio <https://profiles.ucr.edu/app/home/profile/carlam>
> Associate Professor, Department of English
> Co-Director, Medical and Health Humanities Minor  <https://english.ucr.edu/mhhs>
> Co-Director, Health Humanities and Disability Justice (HHDJ) Lab  <https://hhdj.ucr.edu/>
> University of California, Riverside 
> 
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> Englishfaculty at lists.ucr.edu
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—
James Tobias, Ph.D.
Professor
Chair, Department of English
University of California
Riverside CA 92521
jtobias at ucr.edu

https://ucr.zoom.us/j/95465985946?pwd=Z1A4Yk1UZDhBTjY5UkJ5R1VQTWUvQT09

"We at UCR would like to respectfully acknowledge and recognize our responsibility to the original and current caretakers of this land, water, and air: the Cahuilla, Tongva, Luiseño, and Serrano peoples and all of their ancestors and descendants, past, present, and future. Today this meeting place is home to many Indigenous peoples from all over the world, including UCR faculty, students, and staff, and we are grateful to have the opportunity to live and work on these homelands."








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