Ripley "Baker" Baker
PhD Candidate
R Baker (he/him) is an English PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is broadly interested in cultural constructions of scientific discourses – including science fiction – with a focus on space travel/colonization, speculative world building, climate justice, and alienation/alterity. His work is situated at the intersections of Feminist Science and Technology Studies, Environmental Humanities, and climate justice, with an emphasis on anticolonial poetics, marginalized voices, and the biological/technological turn in our cultural understanding of the human. He is especially interested in critical hope, and the unique forms of resistance enacted by queer, neurodivergent, racialized, and working-class subjects who–ensconced in a world characterized by crisis and ostensibly intractable binary oppositions– choose to do things otherwise.
Baker’s work is currently centered on popular and science fictional representations of space travel, colonization, and exploration spanning from 20-21st century speculative science fiction, and how narratives of care, repair, and critical hope “from below” come to utilize these same narrative tools in the service of narrative worldbuilding that breaks the status quo in favor of justice-oriented, sustainable, and equitable futures on Earth.
Research Areas
- c. 1945-present
- American Literature
- American Race and Ethnic Studies
- Cognitive Studies and/or Psychoanalysis
- Digital Humanities
- Disability Studies
- Environment and Ecocriticism
- Genders and Sexualities
- Marxism, Critical Theory, and/or Historical Materialism
- Science and Technology Studies
Research Center Affiliations