A #PresentingACCUTE interview

With the upcoming 2025 ACCUTE Conference at George Brown College from 30th May- June 2nd, we have been having interviews with some of the presenters in conversation with Gladwell Pamba, ACCUTE’s Coordination and Communications Assistant. Next up on the interview series of #PresentingACCUTE is Jason Haslam, the McCulloch Professor of English at Dalhousie University, where he is also cross-appointed to the Gender and Women’s Studies Program. A past president of ACCUTE, he is the author or editor of several books on science fiction, prison studies, and popular culture, including the forthcoming Broadview Anthology of Science Fiction, scheduled for publication late this coming Fall.

Tell us a little bit about what you’ll be focusing on in your presentation.

I’ll be presenting a paper called “Carceral Futurity”. I am interested in exploring the ways in which science-fiction representations of the future deal with the prison. There’s been quite a bit of work of late, especially by people like Walidah Imarisha, dealing with prison abolition in more radical science fiction. I’m interested, though, in how mainstream science fiction works in some respects to further the carceral project, especially in the US. So, I’ll be looking at Robert Heinlein’s libertarian novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Thomas Disch’s Camp Concentration. They are very different novels from around the same period in the 1960s, and they deal with prison in very different ways. But, one commonality is that they both represent the prison as a governing concept of the future itself, especially for American conceptions of the future.

And where does this work come from?

It’s joining a few different threads of my past work. I started my academic career looking at writings by incarcerated people and thinking through how they challenge the carceral nature of society and, of course, the prisons themselves. I’ve also always had a side interest in science fiction and that became, as time went on, an increasing focus in my teaching and my research; I’m currently editing the Broadview Anthology of Science Fiction. I’m still trying to finish up some long-suffering projects on other topics, but I’m looking forward now to this future project on Carceral Futurities, which I’m imagining will take up a good chunk of the latter stages of my career. I really wanted to join these two seemingly disparate themes—SF and the prison—and the work that educator activists like Imarisha are doing on science fiction and abolition was a starting point for that. But, being the cynical person I am, I’m also interested in how culture can reinforce certain terrible institutions like the prison.

To a less serious question now. Do you have anything you’ve been watching or reading that you would like to recommend to other ACCUTE members?

I’ve been reading a lot of university policy and I wouldn’t recommend that to anybody. Ha! But one thing I’m watching for fun right now (well, “fun” is a strong word here) is the TV series From, which is filmed here in Nova Scotia. It’s a horror show, and it is… literally terrifying. I just finished watching the third season and it’s stellar. It really, really captures the occasional horror of parts of Nova Scotia, where I’m from.

What do you like doing for fun when you’re not writing, researching, or teaching?

I take pictures of birds for reasons that I can’t really explain! I don’t know why this happened to me, but I go for a lot of walks, my partner and I, and I really enjoy taking pictures of birds. I think it’s important for people to have hobbies where they can let their brain do something completely different in its focus.