Professor Alexis Dinno’s Faculty Website
Find here materials related to my recent courses taught at the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health
PHE 510: TOP: Science Fiction & Public Health Fall 2024
Course materials: PHE 510 Archive.7z (12MB)
Lecture slides: PHE 510 Lecture slides.7z (Through Lecture 6)
Problem sets: PHE 510 Assignments.7z (Through PS2)
Science Fiction Mentions in Lecture:
- The Three-Body Problem TV series; The Three-Body Problem novel by Cixin Liu upon which the TV series is based with translation (and narration in the audiobook) by Ken Liu; Baldur’s Gate video game realization of a D&D 5e campaign; Stargate: SG-1 TV series; The Oroville TV series which started as a parody of the Star Trek franchise, but has become a ‘serious’ show in its own right; Snowpiercer TV series (remarked to be a more faithful adaptation of the graphic novel series source material, than the eponymously named film).
- Author V. E. Schwab is a ++good speculative fiction author; the Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells slaps; the film Arrival and the short story “Story of Your Life“ by Ted Chiang upon which it is based both rock (as does everything Chiang has written); Star Trek Franchise; the 1979 Tartarovsky film Stalker; the comic book series Saga by Brian Vaughn and Fiona Staples published by Image Press, Cowboy Bebop is a Bebop/Western/Space Opera anime series by Shinichirō Watanabe, who also produced the Hip Hop/Chambara/Street Fashion/Bildungsroman anime series Samurai Champloo; The City & The City by China Miéville.
- Elizier Yudkowski’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality was mentioned as an example of fan fiction confronting and reinterpreting source material, alongside Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, and The Last Ringbearer by Kirill Y. Eskov; China Miéville’s novel iEmbassytown was mentioned in the context of sci-fi about transformations in the way stories are told, which then transforms society in-universe.
- Daybreakers is a 2009 film by Michael and Peter Spierig about an apocalyptic vampire epidemic. One Million Experiments is a curated directory of carceral and criminal justice abolitionist experiments from around the world.
- Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! (Eizōken ni wa Te o Dasu na!) is a manga with a phenomenal anime adaptation by directed by Masaaki Yuasa, which I compared to Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, in that both works teach literacy within a medium using the medium itself. In Eizouken’s case, the story about students making anime within the anime while discussing and providing examples of the techniques and approaches as they discuss (with within the story, and within the anime within the story) works at a beautifully meta level. There is also a good deal about collaborative creativity and play matching some of our themes this term. I Lost My Body (J’ai perdu mon corps) is a French animation directed by Jérémy Clapin about a severed hand’s quest to reunite with its body. Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, and Ancillary Mercy was mentioned as work (and author) who spend a good deal of time imagining how truly non-human sentiences would encounter and relate to human social facts such as gender, and singular identity. Finally, China Miéville’s “Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read” came up as a superlative resource for science fiction engaging the social imagination.
PHE 522/622: Health & Social Inequalities Fall 2024
Course materials: PHE 522-622 Archive.7z (95.1MB updated through Lecture 7)
Lecture slides: PHE 522-622 Lecture slides.7z (Through Lecture 6)
Problem sets: PHE 522-622 Problem sets.7z (Through PS6)
Assignments: PHE 522-622 Assignments.7z
