Global Science Fiction

Catalog description

This innovative, team-taught course introduces students to Science Fiction as a global mode of storytelling that reflects and reimagines human experiences across diverse cultural, historical, and political contexts. Through comparative case studies from The Americas, Asia, and Europe, students will explore how different societies use speculative fiction to question colonial legacies, technological transformations, conceptions of human body and intelligence, environmental crises, and visions of the future. By examining science fiction through literature, film, comics, and media, the course situates the genre within its local and transnational frameworks—highlighting how histories of empire, migration, and modernization shape global imaginaries of progress, identity, and survival. Students will engage with key debates in cultural and literary studies while developing tools to interpret science fiction as a critical lens on real-world challenges, from artificial intelligence and climate change to inequality and posthuman ethics. Through active, collaborative learning, students will develop contextual thinking skills by analyzing how each work emerges from and responds to its specific cultural moment. By the end of the course, students will be able to identify how global science fiction both mirrors and critiques contemporary societies, and how their own ways of imagining the future are shaped by context. Course taught in English. No prior knowledge of science fiction required.