As a kid in primary, I found my dad’s old Saturn Rocket V model rocket that he had as a kid in an old box that he never got around to setting up. I spent days glueing all of the intricate parts together even down to the small legs on the lunar module. It was sick. (that’s a technical term) Once I got older I fell in love with futuristic space films that took my imagination to endless places. Having an element of realism was super important to keep me interested though as I like the realistic possibilities that we have before us. But then I realised I don’t actually know what the future looks like for space travel. Movies have been shaping my understanding since I was young. Some of my favourite movies include Interstellar, The Martian, Ender’s Game, Walle and Passengers to name a few!  However, not…

Apart from Professor Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s book, The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, and Chris Moore’s lecture, I’ll also be using any research I can find via the Future Cultures blog, UOW students, and feedback loops from people I test my ideas on.

Below is a conversation I had with two folks, Chloe and Amelia, that I’ve met recently, outside of UOW. I was up late, trying to think of how I could focus the broadness of cyberpunk down into a topic I can research and explain relatively succinctly.

Here’s the conversation:

To summarise, their thoughts were that cyberpunk of the 80s and 90s will probably fade into being an archaic cultural aesthetic and that, if it did end up informing our future, it would most likely be accurate to a negative degree, becoming a dystopian society.

Whilst Children of Men may not be strictly relevant to cyberpunk…

This digital artefact will function as a way to speculate and provide information on where the future of care work is headed in the next 10 or so years. I have actually undertaken research on care work in a past International Studies capstone subject where I produced a major research paper on the subject of the commodification of care work. This is why I have chosen care work as the focus of my DA.

The future of care work is something that I believe needs to be talked about and discussed more as in some form or another we are all going to be affected by the many issues affecting this industry within our lifetime – be it having to put a parent or grandparent into a nursing home, a child into daycare or having to make a sacrifice and deciding to undertake the role of care provider yourself.

My DA…

For this semester’s DA I will be creating a fictional podcast mini-series in conjunction with. It will be of the speculative fiction genre, focusing (broadly) on potential future apocalypses (grim, I know!).

The narrative of this podcast will focus on two hermits (or otherwise social recluses) who discover that they have missed the end of the world. One is from Australia (me) and the other is from South Africa (Allison), they begin to communicate via HAM radio, and as the series progresses they try to discover how the world ended and if there are any other people still alive.

Obviously, this concept is born, at least somewhat, out of the current coronavirus crisis. It spurred an interest in discovering possible ways that the world could end. While the series will focus on this idea, it’s equally going to be about human survival, there are AT LEAST two living humans after…