Faculty At Home Seminar: Science Fiction and Law, Cornell University

What is the law's relationship to biotechnology and bioengineering? How have advances in science impacted legal definitions of "personhood," "property," "rights," and other core attributes of human-ness, and how has the law responded to these developments, especially in the midst of global climate change? This seminar will examine a series of science fiction texts in order to wrestle with such questions. Our materials will include novels (Octavia Butler's Dawn, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go) and films and television serials (Bladerunner, Orphan Black), which we'll analyze alongside excerpts from specific legal decisions (Roe v Wade, Moore v UCLA). This information has been collected for the Post-Discipline Online Syllabus Database. The database explores the use of literature by schools of professional education in North America. It forms part of a larger project titled Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities, led by Dr Merve Emre with the assistance of Dr Hayley G. Toth. You can find more information about the project at https://postdiscipline.english.ox.ac.uk/. Data was collected and accurate in 2021/22.