Last updated 5. March 2025 | Alternative Lehre

Winter semester 2019/ 2020 – Lena Panten and Liane Schlumberger

The starting point of the seminar was the question of how the telling of
new stories can change our perspectives on the future and thus make
other futures possible. This question had previously arisen in
connection with a seminar on Donna Haraway and our resulting
conversations.
The Cyborgs and Friends group met every two weeks to discuss
stories that could be categorized in the “feminist science
fiction” genre. During these meetings we have read
short stories and excerpts from novels, watched short films and a
documentary. Depending on the topic of the meeting, we
moved more or less far away from Donna Haraway
in our conversations, but we always returned to her starting point of “Storytelling
for Earthly Survival “¹. Some points that particularly
occupied us were the question of reproduction, the lines of development
of feminist discourse, which we were able to trace within the texts
we read, and the question of how it is possible to create a positive image of the
future and still remain true to the problems of the present
.
We were particularly pleased that the participants were able to contribute their
perspectives and readings from different academic and non-academic
fields.

¹“Donna Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival” (Director: Fabrizio Terranova, 2016, 83 minutes) is the title of the documentary film that we showed as part of the Cyborg and Friends seminar.