"Beyond genre binaries: Recognizing multiple ways of knowing"

The paper presents three alternatives to the analytical binary of high/low literature, looking to Ewa Mazierska's analysis of popular music in terms of the local and the global in her "Popular Music in Eastern Europe" (2016); John Rieder's emphasis on historical reading of the emergence of the novel and technology in his "Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System" (2017), and my analysis of the importance of play in East German SF Johanna and Günter Braun's "Conviva Ludibundus" (1978). The presentation also outlines the power dynamics and impact on people that practices of "epistemic exclusion" (Isis Settles, et.al. 2021) have, as well as outlining academic structures of science fiction studies in Germany.