Sciences and Writing Practices

Looking at writing practices in the sciences – life, earth, human, social, and health sciences – means focusing on the academic productions of researchers and thus confronting the expression of an epistemological theory with a long legacy: the sciences have a resolutely codified, “neutral” and “formless” practice of writing that aims to guarantee them a certain critical distance and objectivity regarding the facts and conclusions to which they aspire.

While today there are researchers questioning this form of academic writing in the sciences, to the point of asserting a “freer, more original, more judicious, more reflexive way (of writing), not to relax the scientific nature of the research but, on the contrary, to reinforce it”,^⁴ it is still common to hear that the latter are “vulgarising” through their new approaches to scientific writing, their research, and sometimes even that they are no longer scientists but essayists.

Writing practices in the sciences are constructed within a radical distanciation with literature, preaching a degree of aridity of form, while other writings cultivate specifically aesthetic and rhetorical strategies, now assimilated with fiction, now with style or tropes.

These rifts within scientific fields deserve to be put back on the loom, with a view to deploying a research-creation in the “arts & sciences”. Writing practices in the sciences and literature rub shoulders with cooperation and the transmission of knowledges, in their encounter with political ecology, understood as a body of thought and commitments that aim to transform modes of inhabiting and relating to the Earth. Swept up in the hot topics of terrestrial upheavals at the heart of our contemporary societies, the sciences fuel contemporary fictions^⁵, which, in turn, due to their position of ontological plurality and betterment,^⁶ cultivate other possible worlds whose possibilities have yet to be imagined and constructed.

Science and Fiction

Science fiction is a literary genre that cultivates – and creates – out of this interstice of exchange and hybridization between facts, sciences, and fictions. Often described as a form of extrapolation, or even prediction, science fiction works by isolating a tendency or a phenomena of the present time to project it into the future.^⁷ Ursula Le Guin compares this procedure to laboratory experiments in toxicology: you administer an isolated molecule to an animal to try to predict how the human body will react over the long term. While everything in science fiction stems from the exploration of realities, it also very often draws on tools of scientific rationality to present surprising but strangely recognisable worlds to us. This is notably the case for so-called “hard” science fiction whose authors (such as David Brin) seek to inscribe their story within a milieu that does not contradict the state of today’s scientific knowledge. Moreover, science fiction cannot be reduced to what could be perceived as the extension of a modernist movement in which, in a future world, the progress in physics and engineering would be deployed through the showcasing of technological innovations (spaceships, lightsabres, teleportation, etc.). To the question How do we imagine our future? science fiction offers a mode of imagination founded specifically on the mobilisation of multiple present times.

“Active past and possible futures in a thick present”^⁷: this is one definition of science fiction. The dense present is opaque and, above all, it can only be told as one single story valid for all. With that comes the question How should we tell it? Thinking from the basis of a dense and multiple present means assuming a position: telling a story from a point of view that you must be able to account for.^⁹ In other words, “with the blood of whom, of what, have my eyes been shaped?”^¹⁰: we are concerned and so are other entities along with us. Positioning ourselves amounts to being capable of actively practising an “ecology of story”^¹¹, an ecopoetics^¹² firmly rooted in the places and connections of recognition and interdependency. There are science-fiction stories that, by relying on the human and social sciences, relate and describe experiences of intertwinement and cohabitation with alterities. For instance the mutations of sensorialities in interspecies intersections in Octavia E. Butler; the languages of octopi and birds, to which the books of Vinciane Despret initiate us; or the terrestrial and extra-terrestrial love and friendships of Becky Chambers.

These other possible worlds^¹³ and ways of interpreting our multiple present that science fiction cultivates resonates powerfully with the themes and frameworks of research in political ecology. By focusing on the effects that these experiences of displacement can give rise to, science fiction finds allies among those researchers working actively to transform societies to better respond to planetary limits. Science fiction also offers political ecology an alternative to the narratives offered by today’s media landscape, whether these are utopian, for instance describing a world in which alliances between renewable energies and nuclear energy would be an enviable alternative to fossil energies^¹³, or dystopian, with a world falling into civil war due to the scarcity of natural resources. It specifically enables new thought experiments to be shared that activate different questions and different relationships with our multiple present. These thought experiments consist of bringing tendencies into tension with the way in which technologies and sciences might be reappropriated or subverted, and the degree of velocity with which we want to enter this future is defined by the imagination. Science fiction invites us to imagine our futures via possibilities, to weave new bonds with the sciences and its texts, involving rewritings and new translations. Intervening through stories and fiction to devise the pressure points for transformation means learning to re-anchor ourselves to places, from which to posit their collective reparation by writing profusely. It is a way of broaching the multiple present as potential magnetic force fields, whose possibilities have yet to be invented. A recent current in science fiction notably exists – Hope Punk^¹⁵ – which is based on radical social struggles and highlights a dissenting hope.

What can fiction do to science? How can a writing practice inform a research practice? How can science-fiction writing act on the structures of our imaginaries and enable us to outline enviable and breakaway futures? How might the experiments inspired by the visual arts and literature in turn be used to questions the practices of academic writing? What forms and formats can a writer explore with respect to institutional frameworks? These are some of the questions that motivate this writer’s residency held in a public university, at the confluence of science and art research. Because we must also ask ourselves how to put our imaginations to work and that is the subject of this encounter based on our various writing practices.

A Writer’s Residency on Campus

In December 2024, the Centre des Politiques de la Terre, Bétonsalon – centre for art and research – and the Culture Department of the Université Paris Cité are inaugurating a writer’s residency for research-creation, for a seven-month period. The author will be invited to develop a writing project, as well as a programme of workshops and talks, based on intersections between science fiction and political ecology. This residency will take place within the context of Université Paris Cité and will bring students, teachers, and researchers from different disciplines together. After the residency, a public event will be organised so that the author can share their writing project.

For the university, this invitation affords an opportunity to question or even displace the practices of academic writing so that through long-term contact with an author, new forms of knowledge sharing will emerge. In return, the guest author will have access to the research activities – seminars, study days, etc. – of the Centre des Politiques de la Terre or other sectors of the university.

For the art centre, it is a question of offering a framework for research and allowing forms of writing to be explored in contact with other disciplines.

^⁴ Ivan Jablonka, L’histoire est une littérature contemporaine. Manifeste pour les sciences sociales, Éditions du Seuil, La librairie du xxie siècle, 2014.
^⁵ Isabelle Reigner, “La mutation animale régénère l’imaginaire de la fiction ”, Le Monde, lundi 6 octobre 2014.
^⁶ Françoise Lavocat, Fait et fiction. Pour une frontière, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, collection Poétique, 2016.
^⁷ Ursula Le Guin, La Main gauche de la nuit, Paris, Le Livre de Poche, 1969.
^⁸ Kim Hendrickx , “Science Friction [sic] : le présent est-il transportable ?” (2015), in Habiter le trouble avec Donna Haraway, Éditions Dehors, 2020.
^⁹ Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges : The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”, in Feminist Studies, vol. 14, n°3, 1988.
^¹⁰ Ibid, in Manifeste cyborg et autres essais. Sciences, Fictions, Féminismes, Paris, Exils, 2007.
^¹¹ Jean-Christophe Cavalin, Valet Noir. Vers une écologie du récit, éditions Corti, Biophilia, 2022.
^¹² Nathalie Blanc, Denis Chartier, Thomas Pughe, “Littérature & écologie : vers une écopoétique”, Écologie & politique, 36:2, 2008.
^¹³ Isabelle Stengers, “Dépaysements”, Stitch & Split: Selves and Territories in Science Fiction, 2004.
^¹⁴ Jean-Marc Jancovici, Christophe Blain, Le monde sans fin : Miracle énergétique et dérive climatique, Éditions Dargaud, 2021.
^¹⁵ With this in mind, since 2023, author, poet and lecturer Kiyémis has been conducting interviews on Médiapart with artists, researchers and activists approaching their research practices from the prism of “joy”.