International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

Disasters, Apocalypses, and Catastrophes: PCA/ACA 2018 3/28-3/31 Indianapolis

deadline for submissions:
October 1, 2017

full name / name of organization:
Pop Culture/American Culture Association

contact email:
disasterculture@yahoo.com

PCA/ACA 2018 Indianapolis, IN

Disasters, Apocalypses, and Catastrophes (Ficociello and Bell)

The PCA/ACA annual conference is March 28 through March 31 in Indianapolis, Indiana

Key Dates:

Jul 1 Database Opens for Submissions

Oct 1 Registration Opens

Oct 1 Deadline for Paper Proposals

Oct 15 All Sessions Entered into the Database by Area Chairs

Nov 15 Early Bird Registration Rate Ends

Dec 1 Preliminary Program Available

Dec 15 “Drop Dead” Date: Participants Not Registered Removed from Program

Jan 1, 2018 Final Program to the Publisher

All Proposals & Abstracts Must Be Submitted Through The PCA Database: http://pcaaca.org/national-conference/

Please submit a proposal to only one area at a time. Exceptions and rules

CALL FOR PAPERS

Disasters, Apocalypses, and Catastrophes

In a hyper-mediated global culture, disaster events reach us with great speed and digital detail, and we begin forming, interpreting, and historicizing catastrophes simultaneously with people worldwide. Are we inside the era of disasters or are we merely inundated by mediated accounts of events categorized as catastrophic? How do these mediated accounts affect policy, poverty, and the public? Of particular interest is the question of what role do academics play in disaster culture and policy?

Disasters, Apocalypses, and Catastrophes offers a forum for these questions and critical approaches surrounding the culture of disasters, catastrophes, accidents, and apocalypses in global art, literature, media, film, and popular culture. Disasters, Apocalypses, and Catastrophes will address broader disciplinary topics and innovative intersections of humanities, musicology, social science, literature, film, visual art, psychology, game studies, material culture, media studies, ecology, and information technology.

General Topics

Eco Criticism, Eco Culture

Trump Administration and Climate Policy

Global Warming, Climate Change

Deniers of climate change

Disaster capitalism

War Ecology

Slow Violence

Hyperobjects

Native Cultures and Eco-policies

TV and Film: The Walking Dead, The Leftovers, Falling Skies, The Dome, etc.

Zombie and Apocalyptic imaginaries

Social Media and disasters

Doomsday preppers

History and disasters
Eco/Culture Events

Disasters in popular culture
Time and temporalities of disasters
Representations and narration of disaster
Disasters and personal narratives
Disaster aesthetics
Cultures of risk and uncertainty
Disaster metaphors, concepts and symbolic forms
Ethics and politics of disasters
Natural disasters in climate rhetoric
Disaster literature and art
Notions of national identity through disaster representation
Portraying suffering in news, digital culture, literature, and TV
Affective responses to disaster in local, national, and global contexts
Celebrity humanitarianism and disaster engagement
Distinctions between man-made and natural disaster
Public, private, and nonprofit responses to disaster
The ideological and financial interests of global capitalism in the recovery process
Epidemics, pandemics, and disease

All Proposals & Abstracts Must Be Submitted Through The PCA Database: http://pcaaca.org/national-conference/
Please submit a proposal to only one area at a time. Exceptions and rules

Questions may be addressed to either:

Robert Ficociello
Holy Family University

Philadelphia, PA

disasterculture@yahoo.com

Robert Bell
Loyola University
New Orleans, LA
504.865.3094

disasterculture@yahoo.com

The New Urban Gothic Edited Collection Call for Chapters

deadline for submissions:
August 30, 2017

full name / name of organization:
Holly-Gale Millette, Southampton University, Ruth Heholt, Falmouth University

contact email:
h.millette@soton.ac.uk

Urban Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic fiction, Gothic crime fiction, and television whose narratives spring from discourse on industrial and post-industrial urban society. Often dystopic, it was pioneered in the mid-19th century in Britain and the United States and developed in serialisations such as R. L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886); into novels such as Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Much has been written on 19th century Anglo-centred Urban Gothic fiction and vampiristic, monstrous Urban Gothic, but less has been written on the 21st century reimagining and re-serialisation of the Urban Gothic in mechanised, altered, disabled, and dystopic states of being. Nor has writing on the Urban Gothic departed from the canonical London location or considered the Urban Gothic as the prime progenitor of the genre of Crime Fiction. The intention, therefore, is for The New Urban Gothic to explore the resurgence in serialised and grotesque narratives of degeneration, ecological and economic ruin, dystopia, mechanised future inequality, and crime narrative as evidenced in literature and new forms of media in an international context. Submissions are welcomed that address the historic specificities of urban difference and Gothic traditions, as well as inter-disciplinary studies and contemporary texts that link urban crime fiction and the Gothic.

Please send a 300-500 word abstract including keywords, along with 50-100 words of biodata to the editors h.millette@soton.ac.uk and ruth.heholt@falmouth.ac.uk by 30 August, 2017.

Deadline for final chapters of no more than 7,500 words (including notes and references): 1 May 2018.

Topics may include (but are not bound by):

Industrialization, Mechanisation and future dystopia in the Urban Gothic

New serializations of the Urban Gothic (Dickens – Netflix, etc.)

Outsiders (Gender, Race, or the Orient) in the New Urban Gothic

Identity and Belonging in the New Urban Gothic

Dark Tourism and the New Urban Gothic

Political Aesthetics (Grotesque) of the New Urban Gothic

LGBTQi and the New Urban Gothic

Disability and Mental Health in the New Urban Gothic

Sci-Fi and the New Urban Gothic in Space.

Gaming and the New Urban Gothic (X-Box, PS 3, Wii, PC, etc.)

Graphic Novels and the New Urban Gothic (Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, etc.)

Regional New Urban Gothic (Sheffield, New Orleans, Ontario, etc.)

Dockside New Urban Gothic (Limehouse, Hong Kong, Gdansk, Liverpool, Vancouver, etc.)

Japanese New Urban Gothic (or Korean, Chinese, Indian, Canadian etc)

Folklore and Popular Culture

deadline for submissions:
October 1, 2017

full name / name of organization:
Popular Culture Association

contact email:
kathryn.edney@regiscollege.edu

POPULAR CULTURE ASSOCIATION & AMERICAN CULTURE ASSOCIATION 2018 JOINT NATIONAL CONFERENCE

Indianapolis, IN
March 28-March 31, 2018

For information on the PCA/ACA, please go to http://www.pcaaca.org
For conference information, please go to http://www.pcaaca.org/national-conference/

DEADLINE: OCTOBER 1, 2017

We are considering proposals for sessions organized around a theme, special panels, and/or individual papers concerning folklore and popular culture. Sessions are scheduled in 1½ hour slots, typically with four papers or speakers per standard session. Presentations should not exceed 15 minutes. As always, proposals addressing any topic concerning folklore studies are welcome; the list below is merely suggestive:

Folklore in Popular Culture/Folklore as Popular Culture

Influence of folklore on other forms of culture (literature, film, music, etc.)

Folklore and Religion

The difference between oral and literary sources of tradition

Women in Folklore

Folklore and children

Uses of folklore

Folklore and the Digital Age

Folklore and Epic

Illustrators/Illustration of folklore

Folklore and memory/memory studies

Symbolism in folklore

The relationship between folklore and literary history

Folklore and music

If there are any questions, please contact the Area Chair:

Dr. Kathryn Edney

Interim Dean, School of Arts and Sciences

Regis College

235 Wellesley Street, Weston MA 02493

kathryn.edney@regiscollege.edu

Please note that ALL submissions must be made through the conference submission site: http://ncp.pcaaca.org . For individual papers, please submit a title, 100-word abstract, and your contact information. For themed paper sessions, each presenter must enter her/his own presentation; the session chair should contact Dr. Edney to ensure the papers are curated as a panel.

Beyond Afrofuturism

Extrapolation guest editors Lisa Yaszek and Isiah Lavender III seek original essays by scholars and artists who are interested in the question of what might co-exist with—or lie beyond—Afrofuturism. Ever since Mark Dery introduced the term in 1993, “Afrofuturism” has been one of the primary ways artists, scholars, and fans alike have discussed contemporary speculative fiction by people of the African diaspora. But as students of genre history know well, every two to three decades there is a sea change as the science fiction community redefines the thematic and stylistic concerns of “good” science fiction, and, in doing so, paves the way for new modes of speculative storytelling. As the term “Afrofuturism” nears its quarter-century of use, it is natural to ask: is Afrofuturism a “colored wave” within science fiction history, much like the New Wave or cyberpunk, or might its multigenre status provide some kind of energy that transcends (and transforms) science fiction history as we know it? What is Afrofuturism today, and is it the only—or the best—way to describe black speculative cultural practices across the globe? What might co-exist with—or lie beyond—Afrofuturism? Topics to explore might include, but are not limited to:

Afro-pessimism vs. Afrofuturism
Whites and Afrofuturism
Afrofuturism 2.0 and beyond
Replacing Afrofuturism; or, the death of Afrofuturism
Afrodiasporic versus African speculative art
Black speculative cultural practices across the globe
Inner city future projections as alternate scientific and social spaces
The promises and perils of trans-identities and/or spaces (national, racial, historical, temporal, cultural, social, physical, sexual, and/or psychological)
Disability studies and racial futures
Black futures in aural media (jazz, electronica, hip hop, and opera)
Black futures in visual media (TV, film, comics, painting, photography, sculpture, and digital art)
Afrofuturism’s impact on other ethnic futurisms like Indigenous Futurism and LatinX Futurism etc.

The editors invite submissions that respond to the focus of the issue and also welcome general inquiries about a particular topic’s suitability. Please submit 250 word abstracts, a working bibliography, and a brief CV electronically as MS Word attachments to Isiah Lavender III at isiahl@lsu.edu and to Lisa Yaszek at lisa.yaszek@lmc.gatech.edu by January 31, 2018.

Accepted articles should be between 5000 and 8500 words in length, including “Works Cited,” and prepared in MLA style, and forwarded as MS Word attachments.

CFP: “When the Astronaut is a Woman: Beyond the Frontier in Film and Television” special issue of Science Fiction Film and Television
Guest Editors: Lorrie Palmer and Lisa Purse

https://gerrycanavan.wordpress.com/2017/07/13/sfftv-special-is…-for-submissions/

With the release of Hidden Figures (Melfi, 2016), public perception of the iconic era of the space race was reconfigured. The central image of the white male astronaut was replaced by one in which women of color dominated mathematics, science, and technology, thereby prompting a new cultural conversation. Indeed, this narrative of science fact signals another significant re-embodiment in our science fictions: the female astronaut.

Spaceflight and the astronauts who embark on mythic journeys of exploration have long been in the shadow of the macho military test pilots of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions. These men evoke nostalgia through their Right Stuff swagger, their personae as space race Cold Warriors, and as a collective Kennedy-esque metaphor for the American frontier. In the postwar decades of space travel, “the body of the astronaut [was] increasingly used as a projection screen for anxieties concerning the stability of gender categories” (Brandt 2006), so it is significant that recent iterations are moving beyond the traditional white male astronaut. We see this in the diversification of representations of space travelers in television and fiction film, particularly along the lines of gender, race and sexuality, as corporations race to Mars with crowd-sourced crews, and entertainment media revise cultural narratives about space exploration.

This special issue of Science Fiction Film and Television, therefore, seeks to integrate this contemporary moment of challenge to the hegemonic imagery of space travel by examining the genre’s aesthetic and representational characteristics and their relation to wider cultural discourses around gender, race, technology and ecology, and to theoretical debates about the body, technoscience and the post-human.

Along these lines, contributors may wish to re-evaluate depictions of female astronauts in films like Contact (1997), Solaris (2002), Event Horizon (1997), or Supernova (2000), or to map more contemporary representational trends in films such as Interstellar (2014), The Martian (2015), the Star Wars or Star Trek reboots, or Ripley’s legacy in the recent installments of the Aliens franchise. Television series like Dark Matter (2015-), Ascension (2014), The Expanse (2015-), or the new Star Trek: Discovery (2017-) would be of particular interest to this special issue. At the heart of these texts are female astronaut-protagonists who must negotiate their relationship to the legacy of existing depictions of space exploration, while also speaking to their contemporary context. Ultimately then, we ask how the reconfiguration of space race history—now made visible in Hidden Figures—broadens the frontier of science fiction scholarship.

Please send proposals by 30 September 2017 to Lorrie Palmer, lpalmer@towson.edu and to Lisa Purse, l.v.purse@reading.ac.uk with an author’s bio and a short (5-7 entries) bibliography.

—

Science Fiction Film and Television also has a year-round open reading period. Preferred length for articles is approximately 7000-9000 words; all topics related to science fiction film, television, and related media will be considered. Typical response time is within three months. Check the journal website at Liverpool University Press for full guidelines for contributors; please direct any individualized queries to the editors, Gerry Canavan (gerry.canavan@marquette.edu) and Dan Hassler-Forest (dhasslerforest@gmail.com).

CALL FOR PAPERS

The George Slusser Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy,
to be held at the University of California, Irvine, on April 26–29, 2018

Coordinators: Jonathan Alexander (University of California, Irvine)
Gregory Benford (University of California, Irvine)
Howard V. Hendrix (California State University, Fresno)
Gary Westfahl (University of La Verne)

Although the late George Slusser (1939–2014) was best known for coordinating academic conferences on science fiction and editing volumes of essays on science fiction, he was also a prolific scholar in his own right, publishing several books about major science fiction writers and numerous articles in scholarly journals and anthologies. His vast body of work touched upon virtually all aspects of science fiction and fantasy. In articles like “The Origins of Science Fiction” (2005), he explored how the conditions necessary for the emergence of science fiction first materialized in France and later in England and elsewhere. Seeking early texts that influenced and illuminate science fiction, he focused not only on major writers like Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells but also on usually overlooked figures like E. T. A. Hoffmann, Benjamin Constant, Thomas De Quincey, Honoré de Balzac, Guy de Maupassant, J.-H. Rosny aîné, and J. D. Bernal. His examinations of twentieth-century science fiction regularly established connections between a wide range of international authors, as suggested by the title of his 1989 essay “Structures of Apprehension: Lem, Heinlein, and the Strugatskys,” and he fruitfully scrutinized both classic novels by writers like Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula K. Le Guin and the formulaic ephemera of the contemporary science fiction marketplace. A few specific topics repeatedly drew his interest, such as the mechanisms of time travel in science fiction and the “Frankenstein barrier” that writers encounter when they face the seemingly impossible task of describing beings that are more advanced than humanity. And he aroused controversies by criticizing other scholars in provocative essays like “Who’s Afraid of Science Fiction?” (1988) and “The Politically Correct Book of Science Fiction” (1994). No single paragraph can possibly summarize the full extent of his remarkably adventurous scholarship.

The George Slusser Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy seeks to pay tribute to his remarkable career by inviting science fiction scholars, commentators, and writers to contribute papers that employ, and build upon, some of his many groundbreaking ideas; we also welcome suggestions for panels that would address Slusser and his legacy. To assist potential participants in locating and studying Slusser’s works, a conference website will include a comprehensive bibliography of his books, essays, reviews, and introductions. This selective conference will follow the format that Slusser preferred, a single track that allows all attendees to listen to every paper and participate in lively discussions about them. It is hoped that the best conference papers can be assembled in one volume and published as a formal or informal festschrift to George Slusser.

Potential contributors are asked to submit by email a 250-word paper abstract and a brief curriculum vitae to any of the four conference coordinators: Jon Alexander (jfalexan@uci.edu), Gregory Benford (xbenford@gmail.com ), Howard V. Hendrix (howardh@csufresno.edu), or Gary Westfahl (Gwwestfahl@yahoo.com ). The deadline for submissions is December 31, 2017, and decisions will be provided by mid-January, 2018. Further information about the conference schedule, fee, location, accommodations, and distinguished guests will be provided at the conference website.

Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction

The Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction is a peer-reviewed, open-access, online journal hosted by the University of California at Riverside, affiliated with the UCR Library’s Eaton Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Graduate student editors run the Eaton Journal, with scholarly review provided by an interdisciplinary executive board made up of SF scholars, research librarians, and archivists.

The Eaton Journal creates a space for science fiction scholars to share their findings and their experiences within the several archives dedicated to science fiction found throughout the world. The Eaton Journal is also the only journal dedicated to providing a place for archival librarians to discuss the challenges of managing significant science fiction collections and to share their best practices for facilitating as well as conducting archival research in SF.

The Eaton Journal seeks articles that fall under one of three categories:

Scholarly Articles with a significant research component: These articles are not simply notes and speculations regarding materials in an archive but rather use archival materials to build critical arguments that go beyond the textual and theoretical claims of conventional literary research. While these articles must still be textually and theoretically sound, we provide a venue for research that makes archival evidence its primary focus.

Methods and Transformations Articles: This is a space for articles that seek to expand the bounds of the SF archive, exploring new mediums, materials, or discourses as sites for speculative fiction scholarship. These articles generally seek to retheorize, redefine, and/or reframe the SF archive. Such articles may look to understudied archives (music, fan work, internet sites, etc.), and underserved communities within science fiction (drawing on gender, race, and sexuality studies), or may focus on SF performances, practices, and participatory events that challenge traditional archival methods.

Articles spotlighting neglected authors, emerging archives, and other research opportunities: The third type of article featured in the journal is that which identifies newly discovered or undeveloped archival resources, or points to authors whose archival traces offer particularly rich opportunities for scholarship. Spotlights can include, but are not limited to, interviews, editorials, transcripts of roundtable discussions and multimedia and creative works.

For Submission Information and Formatting Guidelines, visit our website at http://eatonjournal.ucr.edu/guidelines.html

Articles submitted for publication in the Eaton Journal should be sent to the editors at: eatonjournal@gmail.com.