Science Fiction and the Cultural Politics of Education

Increasingly, contemporary education exhibits characteristics that have often been associated with science fiction. The acceleration of technological change and ecological crisis, and the intensification of fascist, authoritarian, and xenophobic identifications, haunt both the present and possible futures. Despite these emergent tendencies, educational discourse retains its marketized assumptions, instrumental economism, and techno-optimism. The pursuit of educational futures that are informed by a cultural politics of utopian imagination faces major obstacles to intervene in time to map alternative trajectories and build new worlds. Bringing together diverse perspectives, theoretical approaches, and texts, the book asks what science fiction can bring to cultural politics in education, and how the cultural politics of science fiction can transform educational futures. It also questions whether science fiction can guide educational projects that aim to foster visions of what Fredric Jameson called 'unimaginable futures' and if critical studies of science fiction can guide scholars, teachers, and cultural workers to think about the purpose and potential of education in the current moment. This imaginative volume demonstrates how thinking with science fiction affords educators a speculative energy made artificially scarce by precarious conditions, reactionary ideologies, and hegemonic practicality. This book was originally published as a special issue of Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies.

Graham B. Slater is Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, USA. He is author of Horizons of the Future: Science Fiction, Utopian Imagination, and the Politics of Education (2024) and co-editor of Educational Commons in Theory and Practice: Global Pedagogy and Politics (2017).

Introduction: Science Fiction and the Cultural Politics of Education 1. Educational Futures and Social Justice 2. "What is the Truth?": On Teaching Paradoxes, Race, Family, and the Self with Octavia Butler's Kindred 3. Hospicing the Broken Earth: World-Building Stories as Worlding Stories 4. Speculative Critical Pedagogy: From Cultural to Ontological Politics 5. After the End of Schools: Cultivating Abolitionist Visions for a World Without Carceral Education 6. Dreaming of an Otherworldly Elsewhere: A Black Girlhood Speculative Approach to Teacher Education 7. Where No (Disabled) Person Has Gone Before: A Content Analysis of Star Trek through the Portrayal of Chrisopher Pike 8. Reproductive Futurity: Policy, Pop-Culture, and Praxis