This Winter: ES 440/540

This winter term (Winter 2025), NMCC invites you to consider enrolling in Dr. Abigail Lee’s course ES 440/540: Techno-Orientalism: Asian American Sci-Fi & Futures (MW 10:00-11:20am).

Course Description:

Why are Asian Americans so often ridiculed as robots or machines, and why are the high-tech cityscapes of sci-fi films, video games, and fiction so often coded as Asian, even if there are no Asian characters living in them? The term techno-Orientalism describes cultural depictions that associate Asianness with the future in harmful and reductive ways. Our course will consider this racist history of inscribing Asianness as alien and robotic in dehumanizing ways, but we will also investigate how Asian Americans imagine our own futures. To do so, we will read, watch, and study AAPI futures through Asian American speculative fiction, comics, poetry, sci-fi films, and critical theory. Together we will ask: What areAsian American futures, and how do we live, resist, and imagine differently? Some weekly topics will include: Asian American cyberfeminisms, robots and posthumanism, Palestinian futurisms, and speculative utopias.

Please contact Dr. Abigail Jinju Lee at ajinju@uoregon.edu to discuss any questions you may have.