Join us on Wednesday, April 29th, 5pm-7pm, at the Great Hall in I-House for a conversation on Science Fiction and Radical Imagination! Bring your curiosity to our panel discussion on how science fiction celebrates the exchange of knowledge, tells us about building a better future amidst displacement, and puts emphasis on radical imagination, as a movement to regenerate indigenous epistemology. 

Meet Our Speakers!

Dr. Amanda Batarseh (she/her)

Amanda Batarseh is an Assistant Professor of Literature whose teaching and research focuses on Palestinian and Arabic literature, Arab American and Arab diaspora literature, Indigenous studies, Mediterranean studies and comparative literature. Her forthcoming book manuscript, Rooted Movements: The Radical Poetics of Palestinian Space, examines how Palestinian literature both challenges the violent production of colonial space and generates place beyond colonial confines. Her research has been supported by the UC Humanities Research Institute, Hellman Fellowship, Faculty Career Development Program and the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.

Dr. Erin Suzuki (she/her)

Erin Suzuki is an Associate Professor in the Literature department. Her research and teaching focuses on the intersections of Asian American and Pacific Islander literature and cultural production. She is currently working on a book project that explores how representations of sea monsters in transpacific speculative fictions speak to environmental concerns stemming from militarism and settler colonialism.

Dr. Kathryn Walkiewicz (she/they)

Kathryn Walkiewicz (enrolled citizen, Cherokee Nation/ᏣᎳᎩᎯ ᎠᏰᎵ) is an Associate Professor of Literature and faculty director of the Indigenous Futures Institute (IFI) at UCSD. Walkiewicz is the author of Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) and co-edited the anthology The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing after Removal with Geary Hobson and Janet Mc Adam (University of Oklahoma, 2010). Their research interests include early Native American literatures, Indigenous print culture, Black-Indigenous studies, speculative fiction, comics, and horror.