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International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

CfP: TRANSFORMERS: all that is solid changes into something else, University of Aveiro, Portugal

By In CFP On March 9, 2017


NEW DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: March 30, 2017

UNIVERSITY OF AVEIRO, PORTUGAL

29, 30 June & 1 July 2017

Keynote addresses by:

Roz Kaveney, Author and Activist

Toby Miller, University of California Riverside & Loughborough
University London

The conference will deal with particular practices and topics in
contemporary media and culture. A fuller cfp can be found under the
CFP menu, but basically it will be divided into two sections:

Section 1: Formal and Commercial Issues

The formation of global conglomerates has created the commercial
conditions for ever more lucrative exchanges between different media.
Hardware, software and entertainment generation are now in lock-step,
and they are like this because it makes it easier to function in
global markets, working the magic transformation of your money into
their money. In this regard, Sony-Columbia’s exploitation of its
hoary 1950s product Godzilla is a quaint example of a practice now
brought to considerable refinement. The franchise, the sequel and more
recently the prequel, are now industry norms, lurching fastly and
furiously into online multiplayer gaming after-life.

With these and more issues in mind, papers are invited in the
following general areas:

transmedia synergies and convergences
innovative business practices in media and merchandising
fandom, community and popular culture
crossover forms and digital interactivities
resistances to and rejections of popular cultural forms
Section 2: Thematic Content

Transformation of bodies is now an ever-present theme. Bodies may
develop special abilities through forms of cod-scientific causes, such
as being bitten by a spider developed in a scientific experiment, or
through forms of more plausibly scientific explanation, such as
current research on genetics or prosthetics extended into imagined
future possibilities, or actually present technologies in the
realisation of gender affirming surgery. From superheroes to
cyberbodies to transsexuals may be a forced conjunction of disparate
phenomena. On the other hand, these phenomena may also be different
points on a paradigm in which the stability of bodies has been
overtaken by logics of choice associated with varying possibilities,
real or promised, in a battle of not just warring super and enhanced
figures, but of the models of desire they embody.

Accordingly, the conference invites proposals for papers dealing with
these and related thematic phenomena.

bodies which refuse to die
superbodies and ordinary worlds
rehearsing technologically altered bodies
genetics and special bodies
identical bodies
choosing bodies; control over bodies

Proposals of between 200 and 300 words should be submitted by March
30th 2017 along with a short bionote to both Anthony Barker:
abarker@ua.pt & David Callahan: callahan@ua.pt, specifying which
section you wish to present in. It may appear to be obvious but given
that everything solid changes into something else, including
conference papers, your paper might belong in both.

The conference language will be English.

http://transformers.web.ua.pt/