Speculative fiction creators regularly interrogate the question of who/what is entitled to human rights. As the created, grown, augmented, and manufactured beings of imagination become more sentient, is it ethical to maintain them as labor-saving devices or will they start to become entitled to, or even demand, rights? Is there a Posthuman Rights Movement in our future or a post “human rights” movement? How will this movement accommodate already-existing arguments for the rights of non-human beings, such as the rights of animals, corporations, and even fetuses, while accounting for humans who are not entitled to human rights? Does one need a human-ish form to deserve rights including around one’s labor? Panelists are invited to propose papers that investigate what the relationships between womb-grown biological humans and human-adjacent characters like Klara from Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, Kathy H. from Never Let Me Go, young Matt in Nancy Farmer’s House of the Scorpion, AVA from the film Ex Machina, or myriad other embodied or virtual characters tell us about the competing impetuses toward power and control versus companionship. If we demand too much and give too little to these sentient products of human ingenuity, will they fight back? How much of this “fight” embodies the existing struggle for recognition? To what extend does speculative fiction also challenge the need for fight itself?

NeMLA 2025 Panel #20993