Imagining the Future


How do we imagine the political structures, landscapes, challenges, and bodies of the future? This interdisciplinary course traces the visual, literary, and political implications of the way the future has been imagined through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Exciting and revealing, visions of the future reflect both dreams and biases, and express desire for global collaboration, fears of nuclear or environmental disaster, and cultural and political aspirations and limits. Starting from science fictional dreams of the future in literature and film, this course interrogates concepts of utopian and dystopian futurity, collective action, danger and heroism, community, nationalism, and globalization.