Futures, Imagined: Disability, Eugenics, and Science Fiction Event

Ruadhán J. Flynn
Diversität, Chancengerechtigkeit und Inklusion

Egalitarian visions of the future typically portray harmoniously diverse societies, where divisions along racist, economic, and religious lines have been overcome. Such futures are(typically) also curiously free of disabled people. It remains a widespread assumption that a better future will be one in which disability(understood as an error or failure in individual bodies) has been eliminated.
Yet this assumption aligns with eugenics; itself an exercise in science fictionwhich aimed to manifest a vision of a purer, stronger, white supremacist future by eliminating supposed-inferior and defective strands of the human species. Doeseugenics still limit our individual and collective imagination? And if “all [social]organizing is science fiction” (Imarisha, 2015), how are our movements for social justicein the here and now affected by thedistant futures we imagine?

Speaker: Ruadhán J. Flynn, MRes, BA
Bio:
Ruadhán (pro: Roo-awn) is currently prae-doc on the FWF project “The Limits of Imagination” (University of Innsbruck), PhD candidate in the Vienna Doctoral School of Philosophy (University of Vienna), and guest researcher at the Messerli Research Institute (Vienna). His research is centered on theories and practices of dehumanization, with a current focus on cognitive disability as a category of social oppression. His doctoral thesis combinescritical disability studies, feminist epistemology, and research on imagination and empathy.