Pre-event panel: Looking to the Stars — Science Fiction, Long-term Governance and Experiences of Wholeness

Literature and the arts have the power to shape our view of the world, the past and the future. Science fiction as a genre is especially apt for this purpose and has been used both to look ahead and inspire as well as being a looking glass into our own time, raising words of caution and opposition. Novels by Jules Verne told stories about adventures and exploration, George Orwell and Ray Bradbury used science fiction as alarm bells for authoritarian societal developments, and today Isaac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics are more relevant than ever.

Join us in this pre-event panel discussion with researchers and authors to explore the potential of science fiction literature to push boundaries and broaden perspectives.

We meet at Fyrisbiografen at 13:30 on 17 November, as part of and ahead of Uppsala Ministry for the Future main event later that evening.

Please register no later than 14 November. And as Fyrisbiografen has a limited number of seats, please make sure to unregister if you find that you can no longer make it.

And don't forget to also register for the evening event if you plan to attend.

Panelists

Manjana Milkoreit

Manjana Milkoreit is an Associate Professor at the Oslo Business School, Oslo Metropolitan University, who integrates scholarship on global environmental governance and cognitive theory to study actor motivations, beliefs and agency, institutional and policy design and effectiveness related to climate change. Her current research focusses on the role of future thinking (imagination) in global sustainability governance, and how societies can govern long-term climate risks in an age of uncertainty and potential tipping points. It focuses on the capacities that enable decision-makers to understand possible futures and act on them today.

Malin Norrby

Malin Norrby is a PhD candidate in theology at Södertörn University. Her doctoral project aims to provide a historically and biographically grounded analysis of Soviet-Jewish thinker Grigorii Pomerants’ philosophy of dialogue and religion. Departing from Andrey Tarkovsky’s film Solaris from 1972 and Pomerants’ interpretation of the same, Malin Norrby explores how science fiction can serve as a medium for articulating questions regarding religion, the human inner life, and the limits of rational knowledge.

Wiebren Boonstra

Wiebren Boonstra is a professor in natural resources and sustainable development at the Department of Earth Sciences at Uppsala University. He is interested in sustainability transformations and studies how machine technology and AI perpetuate growth. He also investigates technologies that centre on the work of living beings, such as hand tools and animal traction, and their potential to disrupt the belief that technological innovation can decouple human society from metabolic and biophysical exchange.

Uppsala Ministry for the Future is brought to you by the Department of Business Studies at Uppsala University, and Uppsala University Future Institutes, UUniFI Goal Conflicts, in partnership with Världsklass Uppsala and Oxford Ministry for the Future, University of Oxford.