Scrapbooking the Wasteland—A Posthumanist Terror Management Theory Toolkit

In this workshop we will be making a scrapbook together, using this creative work as an opportunity to talk, reflect, and think critically together about our practice (and the world). The workshop is open to people of all backgrounds and with all levels of making experience. Come as you are!

"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters." (Antonio Gramsci)

As we navigate the wasteland of brutal yet naturalised inequalities, defined by various theorists as either the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene, ours is a fragmented collective memory in process. Old rites and rituals fail here: over the pandemic, even mourning has been posthumanised (Nina Lykke). Chrononormativity (Elizabeth Freeman), too, falls apart: from queer asynchronies to crip time, we need more sophisticated tools to map out the destruction. To make sense of the multiple knots in the outdated narrative of linear progression in history upheld by the humanist tradition, we must carefully pull at all the different tangled threads. From ecological grief to alienated labour, we must confront the remains of extraction practised on a scale that not only shapes future possibility but even calls it into question, threatening to chew up and spit out all forms of being-in-the-world that stand in the way of necrocapitalism (Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee).

What we propose is scrapbooking as a co-expressive re-worlding emergent strategy. If we are to live in a monster culture (Jeffrey Jerome Cohen), we cannot hope to keep the monsters at bay but must make space for weird multispecies assemblages in a xenofeminist framework.

The five areas of concern for our workshop are the mix of extractive practices that (re)produce wastelands and the four acute stress responses: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. We will attempt to reconfigure the relationship between our own situated embodiments and technological developments from a more-than-human ethical perspective, acknowledging the affect behind our response and confronting the biases that hold us back.

Participants are warmly encouraged to bring along materials to include in the collective scrapbook, as well as to creatively engage with the ones provided by the organisers.

Part of the 'Creative Posthumanism' project. Room details will be sent to participants in advance of the session. A note on accessibility, COVID-19 and the lifting of safety measures: for those who are vulnerable or shielding, we want to reassure you that you are welcome at this workshop. Facilitators will be masked and will ask others to do the same. We will also provide masks as needed. The venue itself is a lovely, bright, and well ventilated space with plenty of room for distancing. This venue is accessible—see details on AccessAble.co.uk.

Workshop Facilitators

Angela YT Chan (@angelaytchan she/her)is an independent researcher, curator and artist. Her work reconfigures power in relation to the inequity of climate change, through self-archiving, rethinking geographies and speculative fiction. Her recent research-art commissions span climate framings, water scarcity and conflict, and has held residencies with Arts Catalyst, FACT/Jerwood Arts’ Digital Fellowship and Sonic Acts’ environmental research residency. Since 2014, Angela has produced curatorial projects and workshops as Worm: art + ecology, collaborating with artists, activists and youth groups. She co-founded the London Chinese Science Fiction Group and co-directs the London Science Fiction Research Community. Angela is also a research consultant, having worked in international climate and cultural policy and on climate and sustainability projects for major cultural institutions. angelaytchan.com

Cristina Diamant (@MsCrisDiamant, she/her) is a PhD candidate at Babeș-Bolyai University and a former visiting scholar at the Centre for Gender, Sexuality and Writing at the University of Kent. She is a co-director of the London Science Fiction Research Community and a national executive officer of the Independent Workers Union, as well as a member of the Ekphrasis Centre for Transdisciplinary Research and an advisor for the Metacritic Centre for Advanced Literary Studies. Her research interests include death studies, media studies, pop culture, and posthuman studies, especially in the context of investigating various representations of otherness. A former assistant editor of the Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, she is currently a member of its editorial board, as well as editor of the cultural magazine Echinox at her home university and a member of the editorial committee for Forward, the all-Ireland publication of the Connolly Youth Movement.

The Creative Posthumanism Team

Dr Megen de Bruin-Molé (@MegenJM, she/her) is a Lecturer in Digital Media Practice with the University of Southampton. Her book Gothic Remixed (Bloomsbury 2020) examines remix culture through the lens of monster studies, and her co-edited collection Embodying Contagion (UWP/Open Access 2021) explores how fantastical metaphors of contagion have infiltrated the way news media, policymakers and the general public view the real world and the people within it. Megen is also an editor of the Genealogy of the Posthuman, an Open Access initiative curated by the Critical Posthumanism Network. Read more about her work on her blog: frankenfiction.com.

H Frances Hallam (@cephalopodlit, they/them) is an AHRC Techne-funded PhD candidate at the University of Surrey. Their project explores ocean ecologies in contemporary Science Fiction. They explore how these texts figure decolonial, queer and ecocritical storytelling for environmental justice in the Atlantic, addressing coral bleaching, deep-sea oil mining and the seabed ecologies of the Middle Passage. Too, they explore the way sea creature embodiments are used as an expression of queer, multispecies futurity.