International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

Climate Change as Reflected in Science Fiction, Film and World Literature

deadline for submissions:
September 30, 2020

full name / name of organization:
Northeast Modern Language Association

contact email:
amagid1763@gmail.com

Climate change is an important issue that has become a frequent topic in twentieth as well as twenty-first century literature and film. From science fiction of the past to the present-day speculative fiction, this roundtable presents an opportunity to provide and study examples both past and present regarding climate change issues in literature and film. Dystopias written by international writers reflect the world-wide concern regarding climate change. For example, novelists such as British-born Maggie Gee’s The Flood or French-born Pierre Boulle’s La Planète des singes[The Planet of the Apes] speculate on the possibility of climate changes causing devastating destruction. What do other writers, sci-fi, and fiction/fantasy predict for the future of our climate and environmental sustainability? How do doomsday writers compare to actual science writers in the present day? In the shadow of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, how do climate issues relate to the environmental and economic health of the world? Many other issues related directly and peripherally to environmental sustainability could be included in the discussion during this roundtable session.

Submit proposals to: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18551

In the shadow of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, how do climate issues relate to the environmental and economic health of the world? Many other issues related directly and peripherally to environmental sustainability could be included in the discussion during this roundtable session.

Please keep in mind that in consideration of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Executive Director and the NeMLA Board are considering options for remote online sessions and/or hybrid sessions [possibly both in the Marriott and through some form of remote online participation].

Professor Annette M. Magid, Ph.D.

State University of New York: Erie Community College

Buffalo, NY

U.S.A.

amagid1763@gmail.com

Call for Proposals: NeMLA 2021 Creative Session

“Speculative Figures and Speculative Futures: Our Uncanny Postapocalypse”

Mary Shelley, in her classic piece of speculative fiction and of speculative visual culture, Frankenstein (1818), sparked life into a body that started an unending conversation around being alive and our own identities as living. And in the intersecting centuries from Shelley to today, Freud has established the uncanny, Kristeva has ignited notions of abjection and of horror, and a plethora of creative agents (writers, artists, musicians, etc.) have continued to stoke these flames. Visual artist David Altmejd, for example, explores themes of science fiction and gothic romanticism to create postapocalyptic visions in his work that embraces decay in balance with regeneration to specifically “provoke that shiver of the uncanny.”[1] And in a research-creation project that she calls “scholarly vidding,” Alexis Lothian merges “[v]idding and multimodal writing [as] a space to explore scholarly ideas in diverse registers” as she positions in her work “utopia as a vision of perfection that is also an end, and dystopia as a negative imaginary that participates in the creation of worlds.”[2] This Creative Session, carrying forth Shelley’s torch, seeks creative contributions of all kinds that participate in and continue to spark, stoke, and ignite these conversations with speculative figures, speculative futures, and uncanny—and even otherworldly—postapocalyptic creativity.

We are specifically interested in artworks and creative contributions that are assessments of posthuman bodies and that embody abject and uncanny ideology through their written, oral, aural, and/or visual aesthetic. Poetry, fiction, nonfiction, sound and video work, digital animation, photography, performance, sculpture, and any and all hybrids in-between. In addition to being a creative showcase, this session also seeks to push the boundaries not only of Cultural Studies, Media Studies, and Interdisciplinary Humanities but of traditional conference panels, too, to include innovative uses of technology and of participation in its dissemination and conversation.

[1] “David Altmejd,” White Cube, accessed March 31, 2020, https://whitecube.com/artists/artist/david_altmejd.

[2] Lothian, Alexis. 2018. Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility. New York: New York University Press. 251; 248; 25.

Abstracts/Proposals (300 words max.) are due online by September 30th, 2020.

Please submit abstracts/proposals online at https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18782.

For inquiries, please do not hesitate to contact either Tommy Mayberry (tommy.mayberry@uwaterloo.ca) or Tommy Bourque (tbourqu2@uwo.ca).

NOTE ON COVID AND NeMLA 2021 CONVENTION:

NeMLA has secured a digital event platform for their 52nd Annual Convention in March 2021 – and this means that prospective presenters will be able to participate virtually! (Not only does this mean the conference should be more physically accessible, but it also means it should be financially more accessible and give creative artists and scholars formal exhibition opportunities that might otherwise be difficult to come by due to institutional closures, physical distancing, and other health and safety protocols that make gallery exhibitions and public opening receptions and live performances near-impossible this year.) If you or anyone you know – including grad students! – are interested, we hope you will put forward an abstract.

The submission deadline for abstract is September 30th, but given both the now-digital nature of the entire convention and the creative showcase angle to our session, the most important thing for prospective presenters on our panel will be to submit an abstract to ensure we get to read about their proposed work. Other details can and will be ironed out later with us throughout the Fall, so abstracts don’t need to be “perfect” right now – we’re all in this wonky situation together!

Thank you so much, and looking forward to reading about your work!

The Tommies

CFP: Living in the End Times: Utopian and Dystopian Representations of Pandemics, Cappadocia University, Thu, Jan 14, 2021 – Fri, Jan 15, 2021

Join us for an interdisciplinary conference examining utopian and dystopian representations of pandemics in fiction, film and culture!

“The abandoned towers in the distance are like the coral of an ancient reef- bleached and colourless, devoid of life. There still is life, however. Birds chirp; sparrows, they must be…Do they notice that quietness, the absence of motors? If so, are they happier?” (Atwood, 2009, pg. 3).

The outbreak of COVID-19 has wrought spatial, socioeconomic and political upheavals of a severity and scale often only imagined in eco-dystopian fiction works such as Margaret Atwood’s increasingly prescient MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2013). The pandemic has laid bare existing structural inequalities within global capitalist systems. While multitudes face the economic hardships of a looming global recession, the planet’s wealthy elite have found refuge in their exclusive ‘utopias’ of private medical and security staff, escape mansions and luxury doomsday bunkers. Moreover, the pandemic serves as an augur of further socio-ecological perturbations to come should global capitalism’s relentless exploitation of species and ecosystems continue unabated. Perhaps most importantly, pandemics bring to light the intricate and inextricable entanglements between humans and myriad Earth others, and the realization that we are far from the only actors with the agency to engender world-shattering transformations.

Such times of widespread upheaval render the perennial utopian (and dystopian) imaginary especially valuable. While utopias offer imaginative projections of better worlds and ways of being, dystopias extrapolate from the deficient ‘present’ and offer projections of potentially nightmarish futures. Yet the critique, imagination and desire for the ‘better’ inherent within both are essential for building beyond the current ‘eco-dystopian’ era of pandemics, extinctions and ecological collapse. Pandemics and the spectre of eco-apocalypse don’t signal the end of all worlds or times but merely of the world as presently constituted; there is always the vital question of what comes after. Thus, we are thrilled to present this interdisciplinary conference for exploring literary, film, cultural and ethico-political representations of ‘living in the end times’. For instance, how do pandemics impact upon hope and utopian imaginaries? How do we co-construct more ethical and liveable worlds after ‘the end’, and what might these worlds look like?

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We invite abstracts of up to 300 words for paper presentations of 15 minutes sharp (+5 minutes Q&A) to be delivered live on the days of the conference. Panel submissions are also welcome. Paper/panel topics might include but need not be limited to:

• Plague, pandemic & epidemic representations in fiction & films

• Apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic/pandemic fiction

• Pandemic politics & praxis

• Capitalism and biopolitics

• Constructions of post-pandemic worlds/environments

• Post-humanism/post-anthropocentrism and multispecies interactions

• Theorizations of apocalypse or ‘end times’ (Ziźek 2011; Latour 2017)

• Anthropocene, capitalocene, chthulucene, plantationocene

• Boundaries- ‘Self/other’, national, geographic

• Utopia and hope during times of crisis

• Eco-utopias & dystopias

• Cli-fi

• Technology and the future

Please send your abstracts (300 words) and a short bio of up to 150 words to pandemicimaginaries@gmail.com

The deadline for submissions is November 6, 2020. Participants will be notified of acceptance or rejection by November 20, 2020.

The selected papers presented at the conference will be considered for publication by a reputable international publisher (TBA).

Submission Deadline: May 14, 2021

Conference Fee

There is no fee to attend the conference. The conference will be conducted virtually via Microsoft Teams, which will be provided by Cappadocia University. The conference language will be English.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/living-in-the-end-times-utopian-and-dystopian-representations-of-pandemics-tickets-117170820077?fbclid=IwAR2dqRcdePi4Bh-BC9PnOHYJjW8IKTmSAjoQMZIR-fq3UyMNwas3D30_o-8

Warm Regards,

Heather Alberro (Nottingham Trent University, UK)

Emrah Atasoy (Cappadocia University, Turkey)

Rhiannon Firth (University of Essex, UK)

Burcu Kayışcı Akkoyun (Boğaziçi University, Turkey)

Pelin Kıvrak (Harvard University, USA)

Conrad Scott (University of Alberta, Canada)

Conference Convening Team

We invite you to submit a scholarly contributed paper to the SCIENCE FICTIONS, POPULAR CULTURES Academic Conference, September 24-27, 2020, broadcasting from the sunny western coast of the Big Island of Hawai’i. This year’s conference will be virtual, so you can participate from nearly anywhere on the planet! Now, in its fourth year, the SCIENCE FICTIONS, POPULAR CULTURES Academic Conference is a highly unique conference held in conjunction with a larger, well-established, highly popular science fiction and fantasy convention known as HawaiiCon.

We are seeking 20-25 minute presentations — to be presented virtually through zoom — and 1500-500 word manuscripts for the peer-reviewed proceedings to be published later this year. You have the choice of presenting “live” via Zoom or you can play a pre-recorded video of yourself at the appointed time of your presentation.

The SFPC Organizing Committee is open to a wide-array of scholarly papers exploring the intersections among science, science fiction, fantasy, technology, and culture. Unique to SFPC, there will be additional opportunities for SFPC scholars to sit on virtual discussion panels with other HawaiiCon guest speakers. Your expertise and enthusiasm is valued!

We kindly invite you to visit our conference website at http://www.caperteam.com/sfpc for detailed registration and proposal submission information. Registration is open and presentation proposals are being considered at this time on a rolling basis from now until August 20. Sent on behalf of the Conference Organizing Committee:

-Dr. Jason T. Eberl, St. Louis University, bioethics scholar and co-editor of ‘Star Trek & Philosophy’
-Dr. Carrie J. Cole, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, science fiction performance theatre scholar
-Dr. Greg Littman, Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville, philosophy and fandom studies scholar
-Dr. Stephanie J. Slater, CAPER Center for Astronomy & Physics Education Research, socio-cultural education scholar

Registration & Submission Website: http://www.caperteam.com/sfpc – due August 20! email: scifipopcon@caperteam.com .