This class will introduce students to disability arts and culture. Our focus this semester will be on the speculative: forms of thinking forward in difference, in sci-fi and horror texts, designs, films and technologies, and in theoretical texts of imaginative futures. What will humans/animals/others be, how can and will social relations change, how do we reimagine power and life, education and the social contract, precarity and utopia? Our reading will include chapters from Donna Haraway’s interdisciplinary science studies Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Alison Kafer’s Feminist Queer Crip, Mel Chen’s Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Eli Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure and Sunaura Taylor’s animal rights perspectives in Beasts of Burden, and perspectives on Gloria Anzaldúa’s work. We will also engage creative writing (excerpts) including Octavia Butler’s novels, poems by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Samuel Delaney’s Empire Star, Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl, and Emily Foster’s maritime novella The Drowning Eyes, as well as short stories from the Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction collection. We will read some of these texts together, and some will be prepared for the group by collectives. This version of the course will partly work through the arts, not just about them — some practical exercises will be part of the class work.