Katherine Buse
at University of ChicagoKatherine Buse is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization at the University of Chicago. She writes and teaches about digital media, technoscience, science fiction, and the environment. Her book in progress, Speculative Planetology: Science, Culture and the Building of Model Worlds, explores how the scientific work of modeling planets is inextricable from the culture and aesthetics of science fictional world building. Katherine is also involved in video game design that engages questions of science, technology and the environment: most recently, she is a founding member of the Degrowth Game Design Project (DeGDP), working to rethink the role of game design in imagining environmental futures. In 2022, as part of UC Davis’ ModLab, Katherine was a narrative and graphic designer for a new, narrative campaign mode for the citizen science game Foldit.