This is a report of the ‘Vision and Support Session’, an open discussion held last week, on 30 July, within the Science Fiction Research Association conference, “Trans People are (in) the Future: Queer and Trans Futurity in Science Fiction” (University of Rochester, New York), a conference which lasted until yesterday, August 3rd. The organizer of the panel was Chris Pak (Swansea University, UK) and the participants were Ida Yoshinaga (Georgia Institute of Technology), Isiah Lavender III (University of Syracuse), David Higgins (Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Worldwide) and myself (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona).
I was the accidental originator of the panel, having asked Chris Pak (the current SFRA Vice-President) in one of our international delegates meetings what we could do as a professional association to protect all our members from the unwanted attention of the US authorities. Chris decided to set up the session to start the ball rolling and gather ideas. Please, note that the main concern we addressed is the implementation of anti-DEI policies, but that the name itself of the session does not include this term to prevent any attempt at censorship.
I opened the panel with a statement that I’m not going to reproduce here in full, but whose main ideas are the following. First, the US Government is trying to implement anti-DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) policies beyond the US borders, for instance by withdrawing funds from cultural exchange activities and trying to control their content. Second, the impact of anti-DEI policies affects scholars worldwide, as we publish in US journals and with US publishing houses that might start rejecting our work, very often focused on identity issues. International collaboration is, then, at risk. What I proposed to curb this situation is that we, SFRA members (and the members of any other professional academic association) inform each other about any grievances through social networks (I recommend BlueSky), in conferences, through an observatory that the SFRA web could run, and using the SFRA Review to write opinion pieces, and to discuss, review and recommend works that are openly pro-democracy and anti-fascist.
I’ll add that self-censorship is our main enemy and this is why it’s important that we express our opinions, despite having the certainty that any online media is subjected to Government surveillance (yes, BlueSky included). The other main enemy is, in my view, denial. My impression is that many US citizens are still denying that US democracy has already been severely compromised and no longer deserves that name because of the many grievous, illegal cases that are becoming common and are being normalized. This denial has its roots in the impression that fascism cannot rise in the USA as it has risen in many other countries, including my native Spain under Franco. This is why it’s crucial to be aware of what has happened in these other countries, as the historical pattern is, basically, the same one.
David Higgins defended groundedness, and grounded practices in teaching and research, warning that the far right movements, with their perverse reading of civil rights law, have appropriated abstractions that used to be defended by the left (for me, ‘freedom’ is the main one). He also warned that even though community action is paramount, we need to consider carefully the use of street action, which might fuel the violent response of the far right in and out of Government. David recommended reformulating the use of language to give cover to our activities (as the title of our panel did), including in scholarly meetings hybrid online options that open up dialogue without the need for travel and the risks this might entail now, and working on mentorship that leads to better connections between individuals and better techniques of solidarity. David, in short, counselled that we proceed tactfully and, I would add, through better networking.
David Higgins also suggested that SFRA members expand the paradigm of research as we know it, making it less dependent on the traditional university framework. As an example of this trend, I mentioned the work my co-editor Mariano Martín and myself do with the journal Hélice, which is not associated to any university and that Mariano, an independent scholar, funds himself at a very low cost (the hosting of our website). Later, in the Q&A segment, there was a call to widen our horizons and start publishing with other academic presses, beyond the omnipresent ones.
Isiah Lavender III started his intervention by presenting himself as a scholar who has benefitted in his thirty years as a student of English from policies aimed at undoing inequality. He stressed his African-American identity, a point I would like to stress as well because two other members of the panel, Chris and Ida, are of Asian descent and spoke as scholars directly under attack (so did I as a woman, though white). Isiah brought a humorous note into the debate by borrowing the slogan of the popular show Survivor, “outwit, outplay, outlast,” as the motto that could help us navigate the new deep, dark waters. For him, we are already in survival mode, which is why re-reading texts such as Dick’s The Man in the High Castle or Butler’s The Parable of the Sower is important. These and other dystopian novels are now not just more or less valuable texts, but instructive handbooks for the present and the near future.
Ida Yoshinaga described the current situation as the beginning of a wave that, as she fears, might last for her whole lifetime. She endorsed David Higgins’s proposal that we produce more grounded research, with more critical evaluation and less theory, and that we choose carefully our subjects (also for teaching), thinking of the current situation. Ida introduced a topic that resonated deeply with the audience: how do we define an archive and preserve knowledge when the labels we may attach to this archive are being erased? She also noted that the crisis of leadership is leading to weaknesses in organization, which is why we need to make an effort to circulate information. As Ida defended, care, kinship, connection and empathy are on our side, and these are values that we must integrate into collective leadership.
The contributions from the members of the audience started with a comment on the matter raised by Ida regarding archives. A participant commented that many libraries are now using malicious compliance to protect the public’s access to sources that must be preserved at all costs. Cataloguing, for instance, needs to bypass the newspeak now being imposed by the far right, with an alternative newspeak, though in my view (and thinking of the famous list of forbidden terms that cannot be used in applications for federal funding), I don’t quite see how categories such as gender, race, LGTBIQ+ and so on can receive an alternative, less ‘blatant’ denomination. This participant also mentioned the importance of word of mouth within the communities of readers, which, as I see it, should be already more active, forming perhaps private book clubs.
Another participant, a trans British person, suggested copying from the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (1981-2000) the habit of documenting action, with a view to, for instance, making documentaries. This is a strategy that, I will add, also helped very much AIDS activism (see for instance David French’s book and documentary How to Survive a Plague). This conference participant also shared their worries that travelling to the USA from the UK could be problematic, being a trans person, and the new fear that on returning home they might be accused of collaborating with terrorism for supporting a now heavily chased pro-Palestinian organization. I’ll add that our focus on the USA is perhaps making us miss the recent undemocratic legislation passed in the UK by Starmer’s Labour Government. Sonja Fritzsche joined the conversation, asking, as I did, to consider other historical periods (such as Germany in the 1930s) and to avoid self-censorship. Another participant suggested that the SFRA website could host a podcast, with international participation for, as Isiah Lavender noted “what we’re not saying is even scarier.”
A member of the audience shared her “deep sense of shame” after having suppressed from her syllabus a segment on Palestine, following suggestions that this could be ‘complicated’ to teach. From the floor, Prof. Douglas Kilgore sent a potent warning about the need to defend key human values as intellectuals and citizens, for, I quote his words, “this is a war.” He warned how compliance may quickly lead to complicity, often indulged in just to protect tenure. “How much risk,” he asked, “are we willing to undergo?” Ida Yoshinaga argued, against Prof. Kilgore’s comment, that not just tenure is at stake but a whole way of doing academic work. As I work in Europe, I’m often confused about what exactly is at stake, and this is the reply I got to my question: tenure and loss of jobs, yes, but also the defunding of teaching and research programmes into extinction, censorship, and, to cap all this, the arrest and deportation of students and teachers. All this is already happening. This is how dire the situation is.
In view of the panorama, it is perhaps too much to ask that the SFRA solves the huge problem of how to protect its members so that they can teach and do research as freely as until 2024. I believe that we need a solidarity network of all academic associations at an international level, with a common chart of rights, and common action aims. We, the SFRA members, have a very good knowledge of dystopia but perhaps what we need now is to study how it is destroyed and how utopia can be built. We are now witnessing the cancellation of the media and the public figures that oppose the current US regime, which in a way was to be expected. If powerful companies are bowing down and critics of the regime are forced to step down, what can a handful of academics do? Well, let’s think hard about it and act: it’s urgent.