Shelley Streeby received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 1994, joined the faculty of the Literature Department at the University of California at the University of California, San Diego, and in 2010 began a joint appointment with her main teaching home in Ethnic Studies. Her first book, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture, received the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero First Book Prize. Her most recent book, Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism (UC Press, 2018) is part of the emerging interdisciplinary field of Speculative Futures Studies. She is a 2021 recipient of an American Council of Learned Society Faculty Fellowship and in 2019 received the Ursula K. Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship at the University of Oregon. Streeby has served as Vice-Chair and Director of Graduate Studies for the Ethnic Studies Department and since 2010, has directed the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop. Streeby has received numerous awards for her teaching, including the Chancellor’s Associates Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. She is also a founding member of the Speculative Futures Collective, a University of California Multi-Campus Research Group of faculty, students, and staff who since 2018 have generated new interdisciplinary research on imagining the future of ecologies, climate change, education, labor, technology, artificial intelligence, and transnational inequalities and connections.
Practitioners of the emergent field of Speculative Futures Studies use speculative forms – including, but not limited to, art, literature, and theory- to confront the legacies of imperialism, colonialism, and racism in order to imagine and enact more sustainable and just futures.
Science explains it, but
art may be the key to finding it.
The Speculative Futures Collective seeks to cultivate research with faculty, graduate students, and community members using speculative cultural forms and theories to collaborate on the future of education, ecology, gender, sexuality, and race.
Practitioners of the emergent field of Speculative Futures Studies use speculative forms – including, but not limited to, art, literature, and theory- to confront the legacies of imperialism, colonialism, and racism in order to imagine and enact more sustainable and just futures.
Science explains it, but
art may be the key to finding it.
The Speculative Futures Collective seeks to cultivate research with faculty, graduate students, and community members using speculative cultural forms and theories to collaborate on the future of education, ecology, gender, sexuality, and race.
Unlike intelligence, memory, and creativity, there is an alarming lack of coherent theory and a thin empirical literature on imagination. Why alarming? Imagination may be one of the most important keys to human flourishing and human progress, with spiritual and evolutionary adaptive benefit.
The science of imagination needs a guide for the future.
The Atlas of Imagination is the guide, focusing coherent theoretical models of imagination to drive further investigation and the tools needed for the empirical study of the neurodiversity of imagination.
Unlike intelligence, memory, and creativity, there is an alarming lack of coherent theory and a thin empirical literature on imagination. Why alarming? Imagination may be one of the most important keys to human flourishing and human progress, with spiritual and evolutionary adaptive benefit.
The science of imagination needs
a guide for the future.
The Atlas of Imagination is the guide, focusing coherent theoretical models of imagination to drive further investigation and the tools needed for the empirical study of the neurodiversity of imagination.
The Clarke Center is a research-and-practice hub, where the best insights from the neuroscience of imagination are connected with the latest in technology and put to use to unlock the transformative power of imagination across age groups, and communities to tackle the most pressing issues facing the planet.
Imagination discovers
new possibilities within the impossible.
Imagination is at the root of empathy and compassion. Imagination gives rise to hope. We aim to unleash the power of imagination to tackle the most pressing issues facing life on Earth – to envision and build a more equitable an sustainable world.
