Experimental Encounters V
Lehmkuhlenbusch 4
27753 Delmenhorst
GERMANY
Organizers:
- Prof. Dr. Anton Kirchhofer
Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg - Dr. Anna Auguscik
Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg - Susan Gaines
University of Bremen - Dr. des. Karsten Levihn-Kutzler
Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg
Information on CHARMED PARTICLES (2015):
Set in a rural Illinois community transformed both by encroaching urban sprawl and by the presence of a particle accelerator lab, Charmed Particlesis centred around two families: Abhijat Mital is an ambitious scientist at the lab, his wife Sarala, recently arrived from India, is eager to fit in with her new small-town surroundings. Their daughter Meena strikes up a friendship with Lily, daughter of Rose Winchester, an enterprising local politician and Randolph, a globe-trotting freelance ‘explorer’. When plans for a new, bigger particle accelerator expose the tensions between scientists at the lab and the community surrounding it, the two families find themselves in the middle of it. Through the emerging conflicts, Kolaya explores questions of science communication, risk perception, expertise and elitism as well notions of home, belonging, and cultural identity. Chrissy Kolaya has described herself as a ‘fiction writer, poet, regular person’. She is currently an FMS writer in Residence at the HWK.
ABOUT FICTION MEETS SCIENCE AND THE WORKSHOP SERIES:
This event is part of an ongoing series of workshops, focusing on one literary author at a time, which aims to bring the scholarly projects in Fiction Meets Science(FMS) into a dialogue with the FMS writers as well as with scientists potentially concerned or interested in the writers’ projects. Its goal is to promote or intensify exchange across the different groups, disciplines and projects in FMS, and to allow new angles to emerge from these experimental encounters between the diverse perspectives of writers, scholars and scientists.FMS is a research and writers’ fellowship program that brings together so-ciologists, literary scholars, novelists, and scientists to examine the literary and social ramifications of a recent trend: an overall increase in the quantity of mainstream and literary fiction about science, and a shift in the ways that science is addressed in fiction.FMS is about to embark on its second three-year research phase, starting in 2018.
Chrissy Kolaya