Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

“Latin America Writes Back 2.0: Political and Environmental Crisis in Science Fiction” commemorates and extends UF’s landmark 2005 symposium “Latin America Writes Back.” That symposium identified UF as an early pioneer in the growing field of Latin American SF studies and featured talks by author/scholar Edmundo Paz Soldán and scholar J. Andrew Brown. This new workshop brings back those key participants of the 2005 event and adds other scholars and writers who are helping to shape the future of SF in the Caribbean, the Andean region, the Southern Cone, and in Mexico, and Brazil.

The workshop will include readings, lectures, and roundtables to advance interdisciplinary dialogue and to further elevate UF’s profile in international SF studies. The workshop’s focus on political crisis and climate change and their effects on contested identities of race, class, gender, and indigeneity in Latin America, is well-timed, given the alarming evidence of worsening environmental crisis and resulting political and cultural unrest throughout the region. In this context, SF studies and the environmental humanities, the animating methods of the workshop, are well-positioned to confront the challenges of changing climate and – writing back – to envisage paths to a more sustainable, resilient, and just world.

For more information and a complete symposium program, see https://imagining-climate.clas.ufl.edu . This in-person event is free and open to the public. No advance registration is required.