S1 E6: Science Fiction and SF in Education and Childhood Studies Ft. Dr. Iveta Silova
Hello, this is Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw. Welcome to Rethinking Childhoods. This is episode #6 and today I am having a conversation with my colleague Dr. Iveta Silova about SF: science fiction, speculative fabulation, so far… within the context of education and childhood studies.
Iveta Silova is professor and director of the Center for the Advanced Studies in Global Education at Teachers College at Arizona State University. Her research reveals the multiple meanings and processes of post-socialist education transformations through numerous articles and books, including her latest book published in 2018 titled Childhood and Schooling in (Post)Socialist Societies: Memories of Everyday Life. By contesting a common expectation that post-socialist societies would inevitably converge towards Western norms, Iveta’s work conceptually reframes post-socialism as open, plural, and inevitably uncertain. More recently, Iveta has engaged in research that looks at how our current modernist education paradigm is implicated in the climate crisis by prioritizing Western education models that focus on economic growth, technocratic determinism, human exceptionalism and liberal individualism over environmental concerns. She draws on ecofeminist and memory studies research to explore alternatives beyond the Western education paradigm that could contribute to the collective effort to fundamentally reimagine education.
VPK: Hello Iveta and welcome to Rethinking Childhoods.
IS: Thank you, Veronica, for inviting me to speak about the science fiction and speculative fabulation today.
VPK: It’s a great pleasure to have you with us today. I wonder if we can begin by thinking about why science fiction in childhood studies? Why do you think that there is a space in childhood studies and in education to integrate and to think with science fiction? What might science fiction do, or what might speculative fabulation do in education and childhood studies?
IS: What a great question to start with, Veronica! And I must admit first, for the record, that I have not really thought with science fiction or speculative fabulation (or SF, more broadly) myself until very recently. And once I did, I think, it made the world of childhood studies and, actually in general, my academic work so much more exciting and also more meaningful, and maybe even more powerful. I actually found myself being able to say things that I thought before, but never dared to say out loud or write about. And so to me the SF, as a mechanism, opened the space to a whole new world and also gave me the courage to bring into the education discussions [and] things that I did not dare to say or bring up before because of all of the different rules that the academia and the scientific research established historically and we, especially as junior academics, have to follow to fit in and to move through this academia machine that produces who we are. And so maybe now at a later stage in my life, when I do have my tenure and full professorship, I allowed myself to play with SF and found it absolutely liberating and perhaps regretting that I have not done it before.
But let me just talk a little bit about why it’s important… So many reasons for why we would use SF in education, but I think one of them is because our realities seem to be so much more narrowing and, in a way, controlling how we think about education. our imagination and freedoms are also narrowing, I think, as a result of this kind of neoliberal reality within which we are operating; and that kind of forces us to think about education in particular ways. And I think science fiction, and speculative fabulation, and other SF genres, help us to think outside of this reality and almost in defiance, against some of the historical continuities, and give us maybe also the ability to reclaim the power to articulate new possibilities. In particular I was reading recently an interview with Isabelle Stengers and she refereed there to Ursula K. Le Guin and the acceptance speech that she gave for the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014, and in that acceptance speech she actually said that she shared the reward with all of the writers who’ve been excluded from literature for so long: her fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the Imagination. And she added:
Hard times are coming when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society in its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagined real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom, poets, visionaries, realist of a larger reality.
In a way, I think, she also really nicely captures the limits of the world that has been constructed for us and it really urges people to poetically imagine the possibilities.
And, of course, I’m also really inspired by the work of Donna Haraway, who in turn has been inspired so much by Ursula K. Le Guin and others. She talks about the SF stories as possibilities for recomposing lives together and making new sorts of kin in hard times. So she sees SF as a prepositional speculative worlding, basically using speculative fabulation, science fiction to make new worlds, ongoing worlds. And I think we, as educators, should be part of this process because these new worlds have to be created now and I think many of these new worlds already exist in the imaginations of children. And then they have become confined as children go through mainstream schooling, in a way.
Maybe really quickly I’ll also touch on the whole designation of “SF” because so far I already have used many different terms for it, and I think again Donna Haraway has been really great in trying to maybe bring all of the different forms of SF under this larger umbrella that she called SF, and so she includes there the story-telling and fact-telling; she includes under the SF category science fiction, also science fact as part of the constellation; she also includes the speculative fabulation that, again, can help us transform some of the moral dilemmas into new possibilities. She includes there speculative feminism that, again, gives us this destabilizing power to the sense that we may have the possibility for things to be otherwise and not just follow what’s already there. And I really like the also “so far” in the SF; and this is the cry that things did not need to be what they are, but also the cry for an adventurous empiricism that reclaims facts as free from their claim of authority, that kind of reminding us that things could be otherwise. And where else can we experiment with such alternative thoughts then in education? So, I think to me, this is a perfect place to experiment with new ideas.
And I guess maybe just one more point. Isabelle Stengers is the one that writes very directly about science fiction as a thought experiment. And she actually links it to also the processes used in science, as a way of thinking a hypothesis through consequences that escape observation in the normal world. She really says that this is actually quite a normal process: we should be pushing ourselves to constantly think alternatives to the hypothesis. And to think outside of the box. Also, as one of the mechanisms to help do this, she suggests how would be really helpful for us to ask question “..and if?”. If we think about the field of education or childhood studies, so it’s taking some of the taken-for-granted assumptions in the field of education and childhood studies, and really interrogating them with this question “and if”: How could things be differently? So I think that’s a really helpful, very practical mechanisms to start experimenting with SF.
VPK: Thank you for that Iveta. There is a lot of potential in the “and if”, the “what if” in education. And in facy, I think that those are questions that are urgently needed in education and in childhood studies. I want to pick up on something that you said when you were referring to your own work. You noted that engaging with science fiction, or speculative fabulation, has allowed you to say things that you couldn’t say before. Can you talk about what are some of the ideas that you are now working with? What are the ideas that you are now putting out there in education and early childhood education that connect directly to science fiction or speculative fabulation?
IS: Absolutely. So it’s two different things actually here that I wanted to highlight. One is things that SF allowed me to say that I did not dare to say before, but second, also is related to it, is maybe bringing together literatures that before I never really dare to bring together in my academic work either. So I think it’s both of these things, and probably they go hand in hand together and also they reinforce each other. But I’ll start with the second one: the literature, because I think maybe that’s also what pushed me to try to experiment with SF a little bit more in my own work. I don’t know about you, but I know many other people including me like to read several books at the same time, so I always have four or five books that I’m reading at the same time…
VPK: True!
IS: …and some of them academic and some of them are just books that I read for pleasure. And I had a couple of, in the last five years, a couple of moments, several moments when I would read the books and suddenly the ideas from the different books begin to converge. At one point I don’t know anymore whether something that I was reading was in a science fiction book, r in an academic book, or in some other book. And there was this one moment when I was reading books that have to do with feminism in different temporalities that really confused me, And it was an eerie feeling to realize they are all converging. And I could mention these books. One was Naomi Alderman’s The Power, the other book was Annalee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline (these are two science-fiction book), and then at the same time I was also reading a literary text by Marina Warner, and it was Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds, where she explores different cultures and the transformation of self through myths and tales, and then I also was reading at the same time Florinda Donner’s Being-in-Dreaming which is an autobiography of an anthropologist who became a witch, and I was reading this really awesome collection of Frieda Forman and Caoran Sowton Taking our time: Feminist perspectives on temporality, which is an edited volume. And it was just absolutely fascinating because all of these different books spoke to each other very-very directly and they all talked about alternative world-making in different ways, whether alternative ways of knowing and being, or alternative gender dynamics, or alternative perspectives on temporality. So at one point, when I read about the alternative modes of time consciousness, for example entering time outside of time, or the potential to tap into different energy sources, whether spiritual, or magical or electric, was it in the edited academic volume? or which of the autobiographies? or which science-fiction book? It was absolutely unbelievable, and really exciting, too! It made me also think that maybe there are different ways of writing what we are researching. Maybe we can also write in a way that makes our work more, not only accessible to others, but that excites and animates others in more powerful ways than more scientific, quantitative or academic writing that we do. So that’s just the very short example of different sources of literature intersecting and making me excited.
But maybe a couple of words, another example of some of the things that I did not really dare to write before and I am writing now. And then another example of the things that I always wanted to write about but never dared to write about in my academic literature. And I’ll give you a short example that dates back to my early graduate studies, when I went to do my master’s degree. I came from Latvia to the United States to do a master’s degree in comparative and international education, and I always wanted to explore this very strong move in the Latvian culture, in the 1990s in particular, to “go back” to some of the pre-modern cultural values and practices. And in the Latvian context that could be termed as pagan, or nature-based spiritualities. Which actually were really strong also during the Soviet times and practiced on daily basis, but really intensified when the Soviet Union collapsed. To me it was this really interesting moment when, on one hand, everybody talked about joining the European Union and becoming “more than”, but at the same time, there were all these other flows happening at the local level and in communities that really animated this connection to the land in very different ways. I went to do my graduate studies thinking that I will be able to explore these nature-based spiritualities and how they are being animated, including in these spaces of education, but as soon as I landed in the US university, and I was at Columbia University, I was immediately absorbed by completely different discourses about education. And it was all about, you know, neoliberal globalization and the best practices and how they affect various local education spaces. So as much as I had hoped to explore something very different, I was immediately absorbed into this larger narrative of neoliberal globalization and how that affects education. It was not until fairly recently that I was able to finally figure out how to bring these other worlds into my own writing. Basically I think what it meant was realizations that everything that I was writing for so long was written from a very particular lens that allows you only to see one type of education, reality; and everything outside of that lens basically is absolutely invisible, including these “pagan” education practices or nature-based spiritualities. So for me, the speculative fabulation was a way to open up my own practice to make these other worlds more visible, but also include them in my own writing. I have done some work around this in relation to Latvian education in particular, but also in some of the other spaces.
I should also mention the work that we have done together for the UNESCO background report on the education futures. We wrote together a background report called Learning to become with the world: education for future survival and that is definitely a very concrete and beautiful example of speculative fabulation on two different levels. On one level because it speaks from the perspective of 2050 and really pushes us to think what we should do, what changes we should introduce or encourage in education now in order to survive by 2050; but also it’s speculative in a way that it presents as real alternatives education concepts and ideas that are not necessarily a part of mainstream education policy or practice right now. For example, we take this the idea of humanism in education. Humanism is so centrally ingrained in education systems worldwide and it’s very difficult to imagine education without it. So in this background paper we try to displace it, or dissenter it, and then open this space for some of the other alternatives, where maybe some of the elements of this humanist education remain, for example, to promote justice, but they extend in much broader ways to an ecological perspective, to include ecological justice rather than human rights or human justice only. So that’s just another example of the some of this very practical work that we have done in speculative fabulation.
VPK: Thank you for mentioning that paper, Iveta. We will include a link to the paper on the website . Just to end, I’ll ask you a last question and I wonder if you can recommend one or two key SF texts that you would recommend to childhood and education scholars to read and to think with, if they have not yet engaged in thinking with science fiction texts. What would you recommend and tell us why those or the one?
IS: I’ll mention two, just because you gave me this opportunity. And one maybe is for listeners who are maybe not necessarily the science fiction fans immediately, but are really more interested in academic literature, or who are really unsure whether they could use science fiction, or scientific fabulation in the academic work. For them, I would recommend Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, just because it’s a really great example where you have the whole book academically written about the environmental presents and futures that we’re currently experiencing, but it ends with a speculative fabulation chapter, and so to me that was a very powerful example, when I first came across, as if you can combine both in really meaningful ways. She ends her book on the speculative fabulation because a lot of the established academic discourses do not really give you the language to imagine radically different alternatives. So Donna Haraway writes Camille Stories to imagine a different way of living together with a more-than-human world and reproducing on Earth in ways that are more responsible.
And for maybe science fiction fans, I’ll recommend N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth Trilogy, an only because we have not really directly touched on climate fiction, though indirectly, maybe, spoke about some of these ideas, but this trilogy, The Broken Earth Trilogy, very directly talks to the climate crisis. The first book, it’s called The Fifth Season, so it’s a time on Earth when it’s no longer four seasons, but now there is also a fifth season which is a very long season that may last for years on end, and it’s very desolate time because there is no sun because of all of the other disruptions that are happening and is very difficult to survive. Also because there are really interesting stories and imaginings about children’s lives, and especially about children who are born with special abilities to sense the energies of the Earth; and how these children are socialized, and how their lives are controlled not to interfere too much with these special senses that they have. It definitely has very direct links to early childhood socialization and education institutions, and it really directly ties the conversation to the climate crisis that we have, and really emphasizes the urgency to address the climate crisis, but also think about alternatives to what we have right now. An in that process, participate in the world-making that is different from the current reality, and that hopefully gives us some space and the possibility to survive.
VPK: Thank you Iveta for the interview and for those recommendations!
You have been listening to Rethinking Childhoods: A Conversation with Iveta Silova on Science Fiction and SF. If you want to learn more about Iveta’s work, you can check out her most recent book, Childhood and Schooling in (Post)Socialist Societies: Memories of Everyday Life. You can also follow Iveta on Twitter @IvetaSilova
I also encourage you to check out the website for the Common Worlds Research Collective to read the paper that Iveta mentioned during the interview; the paper that outlines the premises and the collective speculative visions for future survival. That is the UNESCO’s Futures of Education background paper and is titled “Learning to become with the world: education for future survival“
As always, notes from this episode are available in the website.
Again, I am Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw. You can follow me on Twitter at @vpacinik. You’re also welcome to post a review of the episode. Thank you so much.
I have recorded this episode on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak and Attawandaron peoples, where I’m grateful to live and work.
This has been Rethinking Childhoods.
Featuring an Interview with: Dr. Iveta Silova
Created By: Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw
Edited and Produced By: Jacob Ketchabaw