Charlie Atkinson
PhD Student
Gender Studies
Supervisors: Vanessa Thompson and Juliane Okot Bitek
Research interests: abolition, Black Feminist Thought, the Black Radical Tradition, anti-colonial and decolonial thought, STS, science fiction studies, media criticism, surveillance studies, liberatory pedagogy, sound studies, popular culture, mutual aid, and counter-memory
Charlie's research considers how people imagine abolition (of prison, police, borders, nation states, etc.) in the light of our increasingly automated realities. Focusing on the role of science fiction in actualizing sociotechnical imaginaries and the technologies that make them work like drones, androids, and artificial intelligence, he aims to analyze how people reorient science fiction to imagine alternative uses for technologies currently used to police and surveil. Is it possible to retool these technologies for abolitionist desires?