CEP / Applied African SF Policy Seminar (Online and In-Person)

Co-hosted by

This event will be held at Imperial College, Room 122, in the SAF building. All are welcome to attend in person. The Teams link to the event will be sent via reminder emails.

Abstract

This session explores my speculative fiction short story that features in . “Bat Monkey” is about a Black British Nigerian scholar who grows increasingly uncomfortable with the ethics of a research project of which he is part. The project seeks to discover a new species, the bat monkey, in an unnamed low-income sub-Saharan African country.

In the session, I will bring the story together with literature on the politics of international research and the inherent power dynamics at play when scholars with generous research grants travel to countries with high levels of deprivation to conduct their research. Drawing on extracts from the story, I will consider how the politics of research funding affect the dynamics of international research projects. In keeping with this, I will use the story to examine how local and international researchers/scholars can have conflicting research agendas. I will consider issues to do with leadership, who gets to lead particular projects and the hierarchies established within particular projects. Issues related to research ethics will be explored throughout.

Biography

Aisha Phoenix is a Lecturer in Social Justice at King’s College London, UK, and a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow researching ‘Understanding Colourism Among Young People in the UK’. Dr Phoenix’s research interests focus primarily on racialised identities and belonging and issues related to social justice, including colourism and anti-Muslim racism. She is a co-author of Islam on Campus: contested identities and the cultures of higher education in Britain. She is also a speculative fiction writer who has published a number of stories.

This event is the second in a series of seminars that are part of the

Host or Publisher Centre for Environmental Policy