Prof. Dr. Kerry Bystrom speaks about African science fiction and human rights

“What might African science fiction bring to human rights work?” Prof. Dr. Kerry Bystrom, Associate Professor of English and Human Rights, and Associate Dean at Bard College Berlin, addressed this question in her keynote lecture at the Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law. Held at Universität Osnabrück, Bystrom’s keynote was titled, “African Science Fiction and the Right to Higher Education: Tracking Precarity and Agency in Kenyan Refugee Camps.”

Drawing from her work of over five years with encamped refugee students in the Kakuma and Dadaab camps in Kenya, and juxtaposing UNHCR’s “durable solutions” framework with the journey undertaken by the title character of Nnedi Okorafor’s science fiction novella Binti (2015), Bystrom worked to “tease out if and how engagement with the genre of African science fiction might clear space for new personal visions of the future or alternative social imaginaries where the right to education is more realizable.”

Bystrom’s research brings expertise on African and Latin American literature and cultural studies to bear on the role of storytelling and the arts more widely in processes of democratic transitions and transitional justice, human rights movements, and humanitarian campaigns. Publications include the monograph Democracy at Home in South Africa (2016) and special journal issues and edited volumes including Humanitarianism and Responsibility (2013), The Global South Atlantic (2018), South and North: Contemporary Urban Orientations (2018), and The Cultural Cold War and the Global South (2021). She is currently working on research projects on the right to higher education; inter-African migration narratives; and stolen children and the right to identity. 

Post Date: 07-15-2024