Aditri Chatterjee
Aditri Chatterjee completed a Bachelor of Arts Degree with an Honours in English in the spring of 2024, and joined the MA in English program the following fall. After completing her honours thesis, Chatterjee wanted to continue her work looking into morality and science fiction and her views towards AI and its rapid developments that seem like a threat to human survival for many. Aditri is supervised by Dr. Marie Loughlin with committee members Dr. Jon Vickery, Dr. Bryce Traister and Dr. Margaret Reeves.
We asked Aditri to discuss her experience at UBC Okanagan both as an undergraduate and as a master’s student.
Tell us about your time here at UBC Okanagan.
Pursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature, complete with an Honours distinction, my love for stories has transcended from mere fiction to communities at large. From exploring the origins of English in my Old English classes to learning about various literary periods and genres – all here at UBC itself – has already put me on a rewarding road to earning another UBC degree.
Working as a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) has been very rewarding in the first year of my Master’s degree. As a Hobbit fan from a young age and now getting to experience it in a classroom context as a GTA with Dr. Marie Loughlin, I learnt firsthand the demands of a teaching role and how exciting it can be to discuss cool stuff in an academic manner. As a GTA for Dr. Jon Vickery and explore dystopian literature, which ties in close to my thesis. Apart from talking about cool stuff again – like The Matrix and Terminator – I also had the opportunity to take a lecture on ‘robots and AI’, a topic that was not only significant to the course but also one that directly links to my MA thesis. This experience allowed me to greatly realise my thesis’ significance to the general public and rediscover the joy of literature.
As a UBCO student, the motto ‘tuum est’ is an integral part of my education and I hope to uphold that for the rest of my graduate education as well.
Tell us about your thesis.
My English Honours thesis explored Star Wars’ dealings with the Grey Jedi, Force-users who walk between the Light and Dark sides of the Force. At the time, I was thinking about the ways in which the Grey Jedi as a character type represented a figure of the outsider, a figure that disrupts the conservative. Their challenge to a misplaced philosophy about balance with a narrative invested in the Manichaean concept of good vs. evil made me question the perfunctory heroic narratives that are governed by this binary, particularly in societal dogmas, politics, traditional education, communities, and gender norms.
My Master’s thesis focuses on American science fiction author Isaac Asimov’s ‘Robot Novels,’ examining how Asimov deals with sentience and consciousness in Artificial Intelligence (humanoid robots) that allows his robots to develop volition, judgment, and empathy. Since the four ‘Robot Novels’ (The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn, and Robots and Empire) are interconnected through the robot R. Daneel Olivaw, I will focus on the character development of this particular robot, examining how this development informs the current discourse on AI sentience. Ultimately, the significance of this study lies in addressing the current fear and anxiety around the rapidly developing world of AI. By not deferring to the clichéd robot-apocalypse narrative that pertained both in the 1950s and 1960s and dominates much discussion of AI in today’s world, Asimov’s alternate perspectives on robots provide a less polarised way of harnessing technology to help humanity and can assist us in moving towards a future that caters not just to humans but to every being on this planet, organic or otherwise.
You recently published an article in The Republic. Tell us about this publication and what your article is about.
My publication in The Republic started as an assignment for UBCO professor Dr. Sakiru Adebayo’s class, Black Intellectual Traditions. On his initiative and encouragement, I submitted a book review, titled Black Scholarship in Africanfuturism, to The Republic, hoping it would get published and three months later, it is out in the world for everyone to read.
My article is a book review of Nnedi Okorafor’s novel Death of the Author, a novel that crosses genres—metafiction, literary fiction and science fiction (africanfuturism) all wrapped up in one piece of work. It is about a disabled Nigerian-American woman named Zelu who makes a breakthrough in her writing career, through her novel Rusted Robots, while dealing with several problems in her life that do not make her stardom easy to live up to. The novel is significant in imparting agency to its Black readers who want to explore africanfuturism, redefining Black scholarship through science fiction and proving that scientific development does not exclusively lie outside literature or within Western countries. It attempts at resolving the issues between science and race by incorporating the past (colonialism, slavery, migration) as well as the future (technology, post-racism, post-humanism). To that end, Okorafor’s inspirational form is not limited to Black people and its diaspora. I myself am inspired by her works in imagining a science future for my own home country via Indofuturism or indianfuturism, another one of my research interests from a list that seems never ending.