Multispecies Futuring: Biocultural Diversity in Latin American and Caribbean Future Fictions

The alarming rate of species loss shows the importance of healthy biodiversity to sustain future life on the planet.

Future fictions – science fiction, speculative fiction and climate fiction − can bring attention to biodiversity loss and to multispecies communities as forms of relating to other species.

Relations to other species are important at a time when weakened wildlife links to pandemic, biotechnology creates robot pollinators to fight loss of biological ones, and indigenous movements affirm their cosmology to protect biocultural diversity.

Multispecies Futuring analyses future-making practices involving multispecies worlds in Latin American and Caribbean future fictions from the end of the twentieth century, when biodiversity loss entered global environmental discourses, to works inspired in the present COVID 19 zoonotic pandemic.

By combining feminist posthumanism, literary studies, and environmental humanities in a transdisciplinary framework, this project investigates relations of these future fictions with the biodiversity crisis to contribute new critical vocabulary to sustainability scholarship. It decenters the field from its predominant human focus.

It reshapes Western imagination by including diverging environmental futures enriching the field. Working with future fictions, it offers complex and nuanced understandings of ways of relating to the planet. This 36-month project takes place at SRC, Stockholm University and materia, Stanford University.