Precarious futures: cultural studies in pandemic times

ABSTRACT

This article introduces the special issue of Continuum on ‘Precarious Futures: Cultural Studies in Pandemic Times’. The issue arises out of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference ‘Cultural Transformation’ held in December 2019, in Meanjin (Brisbane), on the land of the Jagera and Turrbal peoples. The articles in this special issue originate from this conference, and have thus been written and revised in the unusually difficult circumstances caused by the emergence of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Taking up (and indeed living) the theme of ‘precarious futures’, the authors of these papers canvass topics related to this issue, including: environmental transformations caused by climate change and species extinction; global food security; modes of protest in climate crisis and pandemic crisis; affective politics; colonialism; drone technologies; science fiction realities; futurist biologies; resurrection science and art; feminist hauntology; feminist futures and academic precarity; and current approaches in medical humanities to emerging health issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Precarity
• temporality
• transformation
• COVID-19

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Stephens

Elizabeth Stephens is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. She is the author of three monographs: Normality: A Critical Genealogy (University of Chicago Press 2017), co-authored with Peter Cryle; Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1700 to the Present (Liverpool University Press 2011), and Queer Writing: Homoeroticism in Jean Genet’s Fiction (Palgrave 2009). Her Future Fellowship examines practices of experimentation as a site of collaboration between the arts and sciences, from the nineteenth-century scientific laboratory to contemporary experimental art.

Karin Sellberg

Karin Sellberg is a lecturer in Humanities at the University of Queensland. She specializes in late twentieth and early twenty-first century feminist fiction, medical history, and theories of gender, sexuality and embodiment. She has published extensively on points of convergence between fiction, medical humanities and new materialist feminist theory. Her many publications include two edited collections, Corporeality and Culture: Bodies in Movement (London: Ashgate, 2015) and Gender & Time (New York: Cengage Macmillan, 2018) and four journal special issues, ‘Somatechnics of Movement’ (Somatechnics, 4:1, 2014), ‘Bodily Fluids’ (InterAlia: A Journal of Queer Studies, 9, 2015), ‘Quantum Possibilities: The Work of Karen Barad’ (Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, 30, 2016), ‘The Somatechnics of Life and Death’ (Australian Feminist Studies, 32:87, 2019).

Paige Donaghy

Paige Donaghy is a PhD candidate in history at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her doctoral research examines the intellectual and cultural history of the false conceptions, formless lumps of flesh that women conceived and gestated, within European scientific communities and societies across the period 1600–1800. Donaghy’s other research interests include the history and philosophy of modern pregnancy and pregnancy loss, early modern women’s sexuality, and feminist and queer historiography. Her recent publications include an article on early modern women’s masturbation in the Journal of the History of Sexuality.