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Module 4 – Crafting new worlds

Hi everyone! 

Thank you so much for your thoughtful comments in the last section. You raised some really good points about the uneven distribution of resources from environmental cleanup to military funding. I wanted to start with Science Under the Scope, because I think it unveils the reality in how our environments (not just natural, think social systems too) shape our reality. It’s much more palatable to believe that science is neutral and that large institutions (academia, government, large corporations) have our best interest in mind, but we see the reality now.

Your classmate Annah raised a very important point about how people might be “drawn to these industries that typically more privileged groups benefit from (ex: consumer electronics, pharmaceutical services)… as a way of getting a share of the pie, especially if we do not have the same privileges of the wealthier groups heavily profiting off our labor…” and also how we “follow the wealthy out of necessity and generational values.”

What if we decided to make a different pie entirely? A pie that was abundant and not deficient? Capitalism and whiteness will always be extractive and create unbalanced hierarchies; that is their function. Is there a way for people to experience abundance outside of these systems? What if we put our energies into crafting that type of world? There are people already working towards a world outside these rotting constructs. We can look to Black women and femmes who have been sharing with us Afrofuturistic dreams forever.

In Octavia Butler’s science fiction, there is room for disable Black femmes, they are often the heroines. This isn’t a literature course, but I highly recommend reading any of Butler’s post-apocalyptic work where the systems that were in place failed and it’s up to the true innovators to create something new. 

Okay maybe that was a bit of a tangent from our text, but it’s all connected. I had a friend come over for dinner a few weeks ago, they’re a designer, and they challenged me to think about how much my life is impacted by other people’s decisions. They said “look at your phone, Steve Jobs and his team designed that, would you have done it differently?” Olivia McKayla Ross is doing some very cool work as a “cyber doula” – I didn’t get into the course, but I love this question she poses (ig link) “what if software was made by people who love us?”

For this week, let’s finish up Science Under the Scope sections nine, ten, and eleven. And please respond to any two of the questions I posed to you in this module (lol I posed a lot). I want to hear from you! 

Next week we’ll change gears a bit and look at some writing in the field of engineering so that we can practice the form.

Thanks everyone!

Course Info

Professor: Andréa Stella (she/her/hers)

Email: astella@ccny.cuny.edu

Zoom: 4208050203

Slack:engl21007spring22.slack.com/