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Public health is a problem-solving, future-thinking field tasked with anticipating, preventing and responding to various types of crises, and the field engages with “what-if” scenarios and forecasting in many different ways, including epidemiological modeling, policy creation, and community organizing. As such, it is critical that public health professionals have many different tools to exercise what could be referred to as the “public health imagination,” particularly when facing complex, daunting, and novel crises such as many in the field’s recent history. Science fiction literature – including subgenres of speculative fiction, dystopic fiction, climate fiction, afro-futurism, etc. – very often depicts issues that are within the realm of public health, such as climate crisis, government collaboration, infectious disease spread, and transformations of social conditions under which health and disease are embodied. However, similar to other forms of art and media, science fiction is scarcely utilized or appreciated routinely by public health professionals despite its capacity to inspire, warn, educate, communicate, and contribute broadly to imagining different futures.
Science fiction can fertilize public health professionals’ imaginations in support of diverse forms of public health practice.

This course will explore what public health professionals can get out of deeper engagement with science fiction. Students will read science-fiction texts alongside transdisciplinary literature that help inform potential roles for science fiction and offer tools for public health interpretations. Throughout the course, students will contribute to building a collaborative, emergent understanding of the value of science fiction in a public health context.