The Wellcome Trust-funded Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities project is pleased to announce its concluding conference. Science fiction is a fertile ground for the imagining of biomedical advances: technologies such as cloning, prosthetics, and rejuvenation are frequently encountered in science-fiction storytelling. Science fiction also offers alternative ideals of health and wellbeing, and imagines new forms of disease and suffering.
In this conference we will explore issues of health, illness, and medicine in science-fiction narratives within a variety of media (written word, graphic novel, videogame, theatre, dance, film and television, etc.). We are also particularly interested in exploring the biomedical ‘technoscientific imaginary’: the culturally-embedded imagining of futures enabled by technoscientific innovation: how far does the biomedical technoscientific imaginary permeate the everyday and expert worlds of modern medicine and healthcare?
Our keynote speakers are Dr Luna Dolezal, Prof Patrick Parrinder (University of Reading), and Prof Daniel Pick (University of Birkbeck).