R "Baker" Baker
Graduate Student
R Baker (he/they) is an English PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is broadly interested in cultural constructions of scientific discourses – including science fiction – with a focus on space travel/colonization, speculative world building, climate justice, and alienation/alterity. His work is situated at the intersections of Feminist Science and Technology Studies, Environmental Humanities, and climate justice, with an emphasis on decolonial politics, marginal voices, and the biological/technological turn in our cultural understanding of the human. He is especially interested in critical hope, and the unique forms of resistance enacted by queer, neurodivergent, racialized, and working-class subjects that–first by circumstance, then by seizing agency–purposely and purposefully build lifeworlds that diverge from an oppressive status quo.
Baker’s work is currently centered on popular and science fictional representations of space travel, colonization, and exploration spanning from 20-21st century speculative science fiction, and how narratives of care, repair, and critical hope “from below” come to utilize these same worldbuilding narrative tools in the service of envisioning justice-oriented, anticolonial futures.
Research Areas
- American Literature
- Environment and Ecocriticism
Research Center Affiliations