Project Details
Projekt
Resources of the Future: Energy Sources and Scientific Elites in Late and Post-Soviet Science Fiction and Popular Scientific Publications
Applicant
Dr. Matthias Schwartz
Subject Area
European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
Term
since 2026
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 543294515
This literary and cultural studies project uses science fiction and popular scientific publications to examine how, in the late Soviet Union from the mid-1960s and in the first two post-Soviet decades, the future development of existing and hitherto unknown energy resources was narrated as a solution to socio-political, ecological and social problems, and what role was ascribed to the scientific-technological intelligentsia, particularly in the energy sector. In order to reconstruct these connections, the project aims to answer three key questions: 1. What short-term and long-term goals regarding the exploration, development and utilisation of energy resources are formulated in popular-scientific publications? 2. What larger imaginary horizons of expectation are being proposed at the same time in science fiction, both in terms of utopian social designs and in terms of threatening or disastrous developments in the exploitation of resources, and what role does science fiction ascribe to scientific elites in initiating or coping with these scenarios? 3. how do popular-scientific and fantastic scenarios relate to each other and how have they changed over time, what convergences and divergences, ruptures and continuities can be identified and how do these relate to real-historical developments of those years? By addressing these questions, the project aims to make a significant contribution to our understanding of the ideological and imaginative expectations that the participants attached to the use of energy and large-scale energy infrastructure projects. It also aims to explore how this belief in progress continued to shape the corresponding discourses and debates on dealing with the closely entangled energy networks even after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
DFG Programme
Research Units
