Hannah Reeves is a PhD candidate in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, supervised by
Margarita Palacios and Ben Gidley. Her research is based at Crossbones Graveyard,
Southwark, exploring the site’s more-than-human connective tissue as a place from which to enter into ethical relation with the dead who we cannot identify by name.
Ama Josephine B. Johnstone is a researcher and pleasure activist whose work navigates speculative explorations of erotics, art, ecology and Blackness. Ama is a PhD candidate inPsychosocial Studies with Dr Gail Lewis at Birkbeck. Her research takes a queer, decolonial approach to challenging climate colonialism, with a particular focus on inherently environmentalist pleasure practices in Ghana and across the Black diaspora.
This in-conversation explores “SF” as a process-based writing praxis, engaging queer
methodologies through an intersectional lens in order to think about difference and allyship within academic research. Donna Haraway speaks of SF as ‘science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far [...] SF is a method of tracing, of following a thread in the dark, in a dangerous true tale of adventure, where who livesand who dies and how might become clearer for the cultivating of multispecies justice.’ (Haraway, 2016: 2-3) Reeves and Johnstone discuss the capacious analyses SF has enabled within their research, as well as the potential limitations and exclusions of this methodological approach. They ask how far can SF take us when thinking across intersectional difference, andare there ethical ways of engaging Black feminist methods, such as Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, in a multitude of socio-political and interdisciplinary contexts?
Margarita Palacios and Ben Gidley. Her research is based at Crossbones Graveyard,
Southwark, exploring the site’s more-than-human connective tissue as a place from which to enter into ethical relation with the dead who we cannot identify by name.
Ama Josephine B. Johnstone is a researcher and pleasure activist whose work navigates speculative explorations of erotics, art, ecology and Blackness. Ama is a PhD candidate inPsychosocial Studies with Dr Gail Lewis at Birkbeck. Her research takes a queer, decolonial approach to challenging climate colonialism, with a particular focus on inherently environmentalist pleasure practices in Ghana and across the Black diaspora.
Abstract
This in-conversation explores “SF” as a process-based writing praxis, engaging queer
methodologies through an intersectional lens in order to think about difference and allyship within academic research. Donna Haraway speaks of SF as ‘science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far [...] SF is a method of tracing, of following a thread in the dark, in a dangerous true tale of adventure, where who livesand who dies and how might become clearer for the cultivating of multispecies justice.’ (Haraway, 2016: 2-3) Reeves and Johnstone discuss the capacious analyses SF has enabled within their research, as well as the potential limitations and exclusions of this methodological approach. They ask how far can SF take us when thinking across intersectional difference, andare there ethical ways of engaging Black feminist methods, such as Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, in a multitude of socio-political and interdisciplinary contexts?